Free Republic

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have a credibility problem with conservatives and Middle America. And it seems to be getting worse. It’s not just that ABC News hired Bill Clinton’s White House spokesman and counselor George Stephanopoulos as a journalist; it’s that the pack mentality at ABC News doesn’t see it as a problem. “The planning meetings [at ABC News] have little political diversity. Everyone is left of center and at ease with their liberal ideals. The other viewpoint is rarely raised and never fully represented,” a current ABC News producer told me last week. ,,,,, But the bias at...

I think late January and February have been the busiest time for Operation Fast & Furious. The media still doesn’t give it proper coverage, especially this news: On February 4th, Mexico arrests a key figure in Fast & Furious. Not only is he a key person in Fast & Furious, but he was also a top lieutenant to El Chapo. I first found out about it on Borderland Beat, a great website keeping us up to date about the drug war in Mexico. The Los Angeles Times reported it on February 7th and my colleague AWR Hawkins published commenrary on...

On today's Meet The Press, "moderator" David Gregory gave a good preview of how the MSM/Obama industrial complex will try to cariacture and demonize Rick Santorum should he become the Republican presidential candidate. Gregory asked Santorum whether, if elected president, he would only permit single women without children to work in his administration. That's right: Gregory was actually wondering whether Santorum would prohibit mothers from serving. Santorum didn't rise to Gregory's absurd bait, giving a smiling and good-natured response to the effect all women would be welcome in a Santorum administration. View the video here.

Mitt Romney's decision to avoid confrontations with the press since his victory in Florida last month -- and since his "very poor" comment on CNN -- has become a source of frustration for national reporters already wary of the campaign's strict scheduling and tight message control. But it is angering local press as well. Especially in Colorado, where one reporter from Denver's local Fox affiliate is suggesting that Romney's decision to spurn reporters could cost him should he return to the state in the general election. "[Y]our brand is now significantly tarnished in a critical swing state, one you seemed...

Ezra Klein has unwittingly offered a telling insight into the liberal mind. On Morning Joe today, the liberal Washington Post blogger actually argued that quintessential big government programs like massive involvement in housing finance and the imposition of a carbon tax aren't "progressive" but simply "good policy." Joe Scarborough pushed back saying Klein's notion of "good policy" was only so for those who share his liberal mindset. View the video here.

Photo ops, as they are called in political jargon, seal an image and a chunk of voters. Hence, basketball, softball, Little League, football, and soccer teams hosted at the White House by what should be an overwhelmed President BarackObama. Lots of sports fans vote. Kissing babies is a big win for the mothers. Lots of baby holding photo ops for Mitt Romney in Florida—and a huge chunk of voting support from married women—helped “thump” Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary. Sometimes, these photo ops prove embarrassing, and cost elections; i.e., Michael Dukakis driving a tank was supposed to shore up...

Newt Gingrich’s post–Nevada caucus speech included about three minutes of inspired moments about issues and ideas in his usual imaginative and intellectually robust style. So why does he not just stay with that — given that he often seems more dynamic and glib than Romney in his attacks on Obama, and not long ago gained ground despite the attacks against him? Instead, he now turns ad nauseam to the tired reasons why he loses — yes, including lots of Mormons in Nevada — and ends up as Richard Nixon not going to get kicked around any more. But whether he...

The U.S. economy produced another solid month of job gains in January, offering a hopeful sign for hiring in the year ahead. Employers added a net 243,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s higher than December, when employers added a net 200,000 jobs, and it marked the seventh straight month in which at least 100,000 jobs were created. That hasn't happened since 2005. The nation’s unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent in January from 8.5 percent in the prior month. The unemployment rate has fallen for the past five months and is now at its lowest level...

A retired U.S. lieutenant general who made comments some consider disparaging to Islam withdrew Monday from speaking at a West Point prayer breakfast after a progressive veterans’ advocacy group — VoteVets.org — along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked the Army chief of staff to rescind the invitation.Last week The Blaze reported VoteVets.org told Gen. Raymond Odierno in a letter that allowing retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin to speak at West Point next week would be anathema to Army values and disrespectful to Muslim cadets. According to the Associate Press, late Monday afternoon, West Point issued a...

Where was the public outcry for justice when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry bled to death at the hands of a drug cartel in cahoots with the U.S. government? It happened in the Peck Canyon corridor northwest of Nogales, Arizona -- nowhere. The general public didn't hear about it... --snip-- Last November, Dennis Wagner of The Arizona Republic wrote a chronological exposé of the Fast and Furious scandal. But he put a fancy spin on his article which illustrates perfectly how a Big Lie can emerge from a kernel of truth told with bad intent. *The once-obscure case in Phoenix...

Whatever happened to the good old days, when the MSM glorified "speaking truth to power"? We all know the answer: that epoch ended on January 20, 2009. Nowadays, opposing power, particularly in the person of the president, far from being something to be praised, is downright illegitimate in some liberal media eyes. Take the latest "Lean Forward" promo by MSNBC, in which Ed Schultz actually claims that those "standing up to the president" are nothing but "bullies." View the video here.

I think the mainstream media and Washington elite think the majority of voters just fell off the turnip truck. But the South Carolina primary and other current voting trends show otherwise. The MSM are working double time to get us to forget about the unprecedented results of the South Carolina primary, but they are a sign of what could be in Florida, Nevada and beyond. They are also proof that American citizens will not be outwitted by the political shenanigans of the powers that be. Let me give you a few examples.

A few weeks ago, we warned against an increasingly prevalent narrative in news: That war Veterans are violent, unstable, and dangerous. I explained why that simply isn’t the case, and how those aspersions can hurt Vets and deepen the divide between us and civilians. Thursday, the national media moved a step closer to establishing this unfortunate characterization as conventional wisdom in the newsroom. USA Today, a national newspaper second to only the Wall Street Journal in distribution, published a story with a headline brimming with violent imagery:

Politico's Jonathan Martin provides expert analysis of the Florida primary for MSNBC this morning and hurls an offensive epithet to describe counties in the panhandle of the state.

NAPLES, Fla. (AP) - Mitt Romney's strength may be growing, but he won't secure the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, even if he scores a convincing victory in Florida's primary. His rivals have vowed to keep fighting well beyond the Jan. 31 election. But win or lose in Florida, the Romney machine is already executing an aggressive multi-state strategy designed to suffocate his opponents' chances as the GOP contest moves forward. And some Republicans say it's time for Romney's rivals to give up.

Conservatives must have thought they died and went to heaven when the Roundtable segment of ABC’s This Week began Sunday. There were syndicated columnist George Will and talk radio’s Laura Ingraham facing off on the state of the Republican presidential race

On FOX News on Saturday, in an interview with Jeanine Pirro, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin seemed to be abruptly cut off as she talked about how voters did not want to obey what the Republican establishment often tries to force on them. Pirro abruptly cut Palin off and said she had to go to a “hard break” but then promoted another segment. After the commercial break, Palin was no longer on the air. Palin’s spent a lot of time in the interview criticizing the Republican establishment and pundits (she even referenced FOX News) who wanted to the end the...

ORLANDO, Fla.--It's total newt-iny on the Gingrich campaign press bus. For each caucus or primary during the 2012 presidential campaign, Gingrich's campaign has organized transportation for the reporters assigned to cover him--as is customary for nearly every presidential candidate. [snip] That working relationship pretty much stopped working this weekend, two days before the Florida primary. The trouble began when Daniel Malloy, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, started to do some simple math, [another snip] Sitting in the back of the bus that day, the penny pinching press got to thinking: [yet another snip] One by one, the reporters...

WASHINGTON (AP) — NBC has asked GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to pull a television ad that's made up almost entirely of a 1997 "Nightly News" report on Newt Gingrich's ethics committee reprimand. ......NBC spokeswoman Lauren Kapp says the network's legal department has asked the campaign to remove all NBC News material from its ads. Brokaw says he's "extremely uncomfortable with the extended use" of his image. Romney spokesman Rick Gorka says the campaign hasn't received formal notification from NBC and had no immediate comment.

CLICKSince Friday morning, the Romney campaign has been beaming an unusual 30-second spot into media markets across the state of Florida. It consists almost exclusively of a vintage video clip from Jan. 21, 1997, the day Newt Gingrich was sanctioned by his House colleagues after an ethics investigation. What makes the ad striking is the content: NBC Nightly News anchor (at the time) Tom Brokaw, is introducing his network's report that evening on Newt's downfall earlier in the day. That's all there is, and the video bite is perfectly sized for a political ad. The Romney researcher who discovered...

The Republican re-embrace of former Speaker Newt Gingrich says a lot about whom he sees as his opponent -- and it isn't just President Barack Obama. It's the media. If not for major media's embrace, Obama would still be sitting in the Senate, perhaps mulling another run for the presidency. A UCLA economist-political scientist recently tried to measure how the liberal media bias influences the way people vote. He concluded that this bias gives the Democrat candidate 8 to 10 percentage points. Republicans understand this. So does Gingrich -- on a very deep level. He knows the media dislike him...

MOUNT DORA, Florida -- After an appearance before several hundred Tea Party supporters at a lakeside resort, Newt Gingrich reacted to the latest wave of criticism directed at him from members of the Washington-based conservative establishment. Members of that establishment, he said, are "sitting around in a frenzy, having coffee, lunch, and cocktail hours talking about how do we stop Gingrich." I asked Gingrich to react to a new column by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of The American Spectator in which Tyrrell called Gingrich "conservatism's Bill Clinton" and hinted that Gingrich might be the subject of new allegations...

<p>When CNN convenes its GOP debate tonight, the moderators should tell the audience to shut up.</p> <p>Newt Gingrich said Tuesday that he wouldn’t “allow” moderators to ask live audiences to remain silent during debates. He won the South Carolina primary on his appeal to two insufferably partisan debate audiences last week, but he stumbled this week in a debate before a silent crowd.</p>

....Romney supporters have launched a last-minute attack on Gingrich seeking to impugn the former House speaker’s close working relationship with President Reagan and his dedication to Reagan conservatism. But efforts to cast Gingrich as anti-Reagan are doomed to fail, political observers say. “There is something truly obscene about the full-blown assault on NewtGingrich’s strong Reagan conservative history from and on behalf of Mitt Romney, who unabashedly ran away from the Reagan legacy and conservative principles in his 1994 Senate campaign and 2002 gubernatorial campaign,” William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at the Cornell Law School, writes on the Legal Insurrection...

While most everyone in the mixed-martial-arts industry believes the UFC's deal with FOX is a positive for the sport as a whole, there is at least one segment of MMA sponsors unhappy with the new arrangement. While the UFC has yet to make an official announcement, MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) has confirmed with multiple sources close to the promotion that as of Jan. 23, "absolutely no firearms, ammo, hunting or knife companies will be permitted as sponsors in any Zuffa-promoted events." Chris Irwin, owner of Las Vegas' "The Gun Store," has long been one of MMA's most visible firearm-related sponsors, and while...

Mitt Romney has been attacking Newt Gingrich for alleged ethics violations during his tenure as speaker of the House. But as Byron York writes, the Gingrich ethics scandal was a product of vindictive partisan politics, it was inflamed by a complicit press corps, and it resulted (with little press coverage) in the Clinton-era IRS’s exoneration of Gingrich. York writes: “Before the Iowa caucuses, Romney and his supporting super PAC did serious damage to Gingrich with an ad attacking Gingrich’s ethics past. Since then, Romney has made other ads and web videos focusing on the ethics matter, and at the Republican...

Vanity: What can we do to neutralize the power of the liberal agenda-promoting mainstream media?

Newt Gingrich insists his fans will not be silenced. Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, on Tuesday morning threatened not participate in any future debates with audiences that have been instructed to be silent. That was the case on Monday, when Brian Williams of NBC News asked the audience of about 500 people who assembled for a debate in Tampa to hold their applause until the commercial breaks. In an interview with the morning show “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Gingrich said NBC’s rules amounted to stifling free speech. In what has become a standard line of attack for his anti-establishment...

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES Editorial: Why we will no longer endorse in elections Updated: January 23, 2012 Seventy-one years ago, Mar­shall Field III founded this newspaper to create a bully pulpit, on the editorial page, for America’s entry into the war in Europe and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic agenda, the New Deal. Somebody in the Midwest, Field believed, had to stand up and counter the isolationist and anti-Roosevelt fulminations of Col. Robert McCormick and his Chicago Tribune. It was an era, even then drawing to a close, when many American newspapers were unabashedly partisan, and not necessarily only on the...

Of all the Morning Joe regulars, I find Harold Ford, Jr. the least interesting. Ever on the lookout for his next opportunity, the fiercely ambitious Ford is firmly of the "my good friend" so-and-so school of politics, constantly hedging his bets and finding a way to praise or agree with virtually everyone. So it was an exception this morning when the former Dem congressman from Tennessee actually said something of note, if only for its sheer silliness. Ford somehow managed to maintain a straight face while claiming the media doesn't strongly favor Barack Obama. View the video here.

Most "reporters" dwell on dirty laundry because they don't understand the serious issues. It has been obvious for some time that the Gingrich strategy for capturing the GOP nomination for President includes running against the "news" media as well as the President, and Saturday's primary results in South Carolina seem to vindicate the shrewdness of that plan. Newt realized early on that much of the voter indignation that has manifested itself in the Tea Party movement is driven by media complicity with Obama in his ongoing effort to ignore the will of the people and transform the U.S. into a...

Gingrich hates the media, right? He unloaded on John King at the Charleston debate for raising this issue of his ex-wife's allegations, blasting the "destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media". In Myrtle Beach, he slapped Juan Williams down for asking a race-based question. And the media despises Newt, right? He's so sarcastic and condescending towards us, brands us as elite liberals and uses us to whip up the Republican base. Actually, wrong and wrong. Gingrich loves the press...

No candidate has won the GOP nomination for President without winning South Carolina since Ronald Reagan in 1980. But every one of those candidates who won had also won either Iowa or New Hampshire. We’re now confronted with a designated front runner, Mitt Romney, who got less votes in Iowa in 2012 than he got in 2008 and who lost South Carolina. His reason for being somehow remains that he is “electable.” If you read a lot of the Republican commentary coming out of Washington even before the polls closed, suddenly South Carolina is irrelevant and the hick rubes of...

South Carolinians are voting today in the GOP primary, which some pundits see as the candidates' last stand for getting the GOP nomination to run in the general election. On weekends on All Things Considered today, host Guy Raz talked with Danielle Vinson, the chair of the political science department at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., about what is often considered "dirty" South Carolina primary politics. "If you don't come of out here with a first or second place, it's hard to keep going," she says. "So by the time they get here everybody takes off the gloves." One of...

To say Newt Gingrich capped an extraordinary comeback with a South Carolina victory doesn't quite capture what happened. It was more like vindication. The former House speaker came from behind to overtake Mitt Romney on Saturday in a state that for decades has chosen the eventual Republican nominee. On the way there, Gingrich triumphed over months of campaign turmoil and at least two political near-death experiences as well as millions of dollars of attack advertisements and potentially damning personal allegations. He did it by finding his voice and rallying conservatives with a populist defiance. "The American people feel that they...

When will Brit Hume make it official and endorse Mitt Romney? Or is he more effective behind the Fox News Network banner being "Fair and Balanced?" Just as Fox News was about to sign off last night, Brit Hume listed the positives and negatives of the 4 candidates [Newt’s negatives are high]. After reporting those "intensity numbers," Brit Hume closed the show by saying [paraphrased] "Every GOP candidate, up and down the ticket, running for election in 2012, will do everything in their power to make sure Newt Gingrich isn’t the nominee." That is how Brit Hume chose to close...

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Resentment lurks near the surface of the conservative political consciousness. Many voters believe (not always without cause) that elite, hipster liberals in academia and the coastal Big Media are sneering at them, their lives, and their beliefs. They see themselves presented as unsophisticated, bigoted, and quite possibly stupid. So Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich was tapping into a powerful psychological current when he attacked the news media Thursday at the start of a CNN debate, responding to an ABC News interview with his ex-wife Marianne, in which she said he had demanded an "open marriage" so he...

Newt Gingrich instantly brought the crowd to its feet last night at the last debate before Saturday's all important primary in South Carolina. What was the multitude cheering? Not his stance on tax policy, or on abortion, but rather his acid assault on the “elite media.” Gingrich expressed outrage that moderator John King of CNN would lead off the evening by asking about potentially damaging charges made by the Speaker’s second wife in an interview with ABC News's "Nightline." The audience howled its approval as Gingrich tore into the “destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media…” As...

The first question at Thursday night's debate in South Carolina went to Newt Gingrich, giving him an opportunity to denounce a "vicious" news media that is "protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans."

John King started the night with a question about Newt’s ex-wife’s interview in which she alleged Newt sought an “open marriage.” Newt answered the question eventually with a denial, but used the oppoturnity to give King a smackdown which will be remembered for a long time. See Link

Everyone of the candidates except Mitt Romney is getting the Drudge Report Treatment.

Gingrich trends up and Romney's people knock him down, now he’s up again and ABC has decided to air an interview with his ex-wife this Friday – one day before the SC primary!  How can anyone see this as anything but an attempt to affect the results of the election?Why not just quote excerpts from the 2010 interview she gave Esquire magazine which was nothing short of scathing.Why? Because ABC is hoping a reminder of his past indiscretions will sway South Carolina Christian Conservatives away from Gingrich to another. Don’t let the main stream media will tell you different, Romney...

This recent item in the New York Times below is in good part what's behind the liberal media's desire to see Mitt Romney get the nomination. Now, I don't see Romney quite this way. But the left does. Religion, wealth, a "retro vision of the country." In short, in Romney they see everything they have been working to destroy for decades. They even want to pretend he isn't flawed, hence the over-looking of his many gaffes and retorts that invite his being slammed. But they don't slam him, ... not for now. Read it. Then realize how badly they will...

You hear that sound? Of course you do. It’s a dog whistle. I’m told that we conservatives (read: racists) use dog whistles all the time to clandestinely run down members of minority groups and others with whom we disagree. It is fascinating, I will concede, that the people we use these coded messages to badmouth—blacks, Latinos, etc.—often seem more adept at hearing the high-frequency whistles than we do. Why, just today, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee became the latest member of the Congressional Black Caucus to call out Newt Gingrich for the “underlying suggestions” in his reference to Barack Obama as...

It seems almost impossible to believe, but the upcoming issue of Newsweek has a cover story entitled "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" If you think we're kidding, the following picture was tweeted by @Newsweek three hours ago: [image of cover] As you can see, the author is the supposedly conservative Andrew Sullivan. Figures, doesn't it? The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway wrote a few hours ago, "If in recent years it seems as if Newsweek has been descending into self-parody, it's still hard to imagine that this is real." Indeed. Is there anything the mainstream media won't do to get...

The Associated Press opened its newest bureau here Monday, becoming the first international news organization with a full-time presence to cover news from North Korea in words, pictures and video. In a ceremony that came less than a month after the death of longtime ruler Kim Jong Il and capped nearly a year of discussions, AP President and CEO Tom Curley and a delegation of top AP editors inaugurated the office, situated inside the headquarters of the state-run Korean Central News Agency in downtown Pyongyang. The bureau expands the AP's presence in North Korea, building on the breakthrough in 2006...

Paul Weston’s latest essay concerns the apparent indifference of the British media and political establishment to racially motivated crime — unless, of course, that crime is committed by white people against non-whites... The mainstream media (MSM) have devoted a great deal of space to the Stephen Lawrence case of late. Many journalists have commented that whilst Britain was a racist country in the recent past, the Britain of today is a much more tolerant place. This may well be the case with regard to white-on-non-white racial crime, but what about the violent crime committed by non-whites on whites, and what...

GREENVILLE, South Carolina – It doesn't take many conversation in this Southern Baptist state to see why members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints complain of widespread discrimination. It's a place where Mitt Romney's religion faces regular questions from voters, a laboratory for the findings of a new Pew survey in which Mormons said they face more discrimination than African-Americans. Romney's rise has elevated along with him some Americans' suspicion of his faith. It has also brought forward Mormons' own historic sense of persecution. Spend some time in an LDS chapel and you’re bound to notice a...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I don't know that you've seen any of this in the Drive-By Media. I don't know on television if you've seen it. Have you seen it, Snerdley? Have you seen any reports on the unemployment news? Well, it's amazing here. "The number of Americans applying for first-time jobless benefits rose last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday, reversing a recent decline and suggesting the labor market remained brittle. ... Initial claims for unemployment benefits rose to 399,000 in the first week of 2012, the highest in six weeks, from an upwardly revised 375,000 a week earlier....

(Fox News)In what's becoming an annual media tradition, Fox News used its holiday card to wish friends and family well this holiday season--and take a swipe at CNN and MSNBC. The front of Fox News' 2011 card--distributed to media journalists including this one--features a cartoon fox leading ABC, NBC and CBS in a sheep-sled race, with the jockeys for MSNBC and CNN watching from the sidelines. (The idea is that Fox News, the top-rated cable news network, is so far ahead, it's now competing against the the Big Three networks.) Representatives for CNN and MSNBC did not immediately respond to...