Free Republic

Last week the venerable St. Louis-Post-Dispatch, a once great American newspaper, proved that she is but a shell of her former self. The PD has a long and generally distinguished history including launching the career of Joseph Pulitzer in the 1880s, and in scooping all of the major papers on the disastrous sinking of the RMS Titanic in April of 1912. Today, the PD is the sole daily newspaper in a major metropolitan area, and, as such has no competition to push her to improve and to stay at the top of her game. This column does not however, deal...

Alaska Dispatch Publishing LLC, the parent company of the online newspaper the Alaska Dispatch, will purchase the Anchorage Daily News from The McClatchy Co. for $34 million. The sale is expected to close in May. ... Billionaire Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns 31 small- and medium-sized daily newspapers. It has bought most of those newspapers since 2011 at bargain prices. Including weekly papers and other publications, Berkshire owns 70 newspapers.

Michael Isikoff, the left-wing journalist most famous for getting scooped on The Story of the Decade by Matt Drudge, is exiting NBC News ... It was during his time with Newsweek that Isikoff became yet-another icon of a mainstream media more interested in protecting power than holding power accountable. In 1998, Isikoff had uncovered the affair between then-President Bill Clinton and a young intern named Monica Lewinski. Newsweek, however, refused to publish the story. So Drudge did -- not the story but the news that Newsweek was refusing to explode its own bombshell... -- and an era in New Media...

Democratic members of Congress and the Obama administration have extensive ties to Comcast and Time-Warner, the two cable giants currently awaiting approval from the Federal Communications Commission on a $45 billion merger. One that has gone mostly overlooked: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D., Nev.) chief of staff, David Krone, is Comcast’s former senior vice president for corporate affairs. Krone moved from Comcast to Reid’s office in 2011 under ethically questionable circumstances,

Comcast, which employs more than 100 lobbyists, spent almost $19 million last year on lobbying activities. Its president and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a golf buddy of President Obama’s, and a Democratic donor who has contributed thousands of dollars not only to the president’s campaigns, but also to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, and to Steny Hoyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bob Casey. Roberts’ executive vice president, David Cohen, is a former aide to Democratic bigwig Ed Rendell. Cohen skirts lobbying regulations through loopholes, has raised more than $2 million for...

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

The real mystery behind the FCC's now abandoned "study" to police American newsrooms is why the mainstream media refused to raise holy hell over it. While Obama's lapdogs refused to bark, it was conservative media who fought for newsroom independence and got the FCC to finally back down. Other than the media's natural obedience to Obama, the fact that the fingerprints of left-wing billionaire George Soros have been found on the FCC study might also help to explain the media's silence. ... The media's hands-off policy with Soros is nothing new ... The mainstream media not only shares Soros' hard-left...

The U.S. plummeted 13 slots to 46th overall “amid increased efforts to track down whistle-blowers and the sources of leaks,” Reporters Without Borders warned in an annual report. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest,” the organization said.

“Everyone talks about the weather,” Mark Twain (apocryphally) observed, “but nobody does anything about it.” To some extent, the same is true about editorial bias. People have complained about bias in news coverage for decades, but only recently have the barriers to market entry been so low as to allow critics to build their own platforms to do anything about it. That frustration with editorial bias led in large part to the explosion of the blogosphere, which forced news outlets to deal substantively with the criticisms they created with their editorial biases.That is the free-market approach. Should there be a...

Earlier today, Garry Kasparov accused NBC Sports of pushing Putin propaganda. This latest downplay of decades of communism probably won’t make Kasparov change his mind about the network that’s airing the Sochi Olympics. Many viewers of the opening ceremony couldn’t believe their ears when the narrator referred to decades of Soviet-era communism as a “pivotal experiment”:

Wasn't there a time when the country had great newspapers with great editorials that regularly thundered and whispered, sighed and screamed, were outraged or outraged others? Where did they all go? Newspapers had character in those days of yore, whether good or bad. The reader could depend on it. And the editorials were a window into their soul. Those editorials might be loved or loathed, admired or despised, but they were read. Like the newspapers themselves. No day could start properly without at least a glance at the editorial page. Sensational or thoughtful, brief or discursive, each editorial might have...

Sanaz Nezami was a beautiful, intelligent young woman with a bright future ahead of her. She was 27-years-old and newly married to Nima Nassiri, an Islamic man from Los Angeles. This tragic story broke on January 1st. The AP whitewashed the story. USA Today’s story read “Woman’s Tragic Death Leads Nurses To Bond With Her Family Overseas.” The title is correct, but the truth about what happened to the brilliant young woman, who could speak three languages, is much darker. She died at the hands of her Islamic husband, in what was most obviously an honor killing. Why does the...

It was only his fourth day on the job and already he’s breaking the law. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio was filmed shoveling his sidewalk this week. The media loved it. He was shoveling his walk and throwing the snow in the street. He also was breaking the law. It is illegal to throw your snow in the street in New York City.

(CNSNews.com) – The New York Times Company says it’s not for sale, but a high-profile Chinese businessman and philanthropist eager to buy what he views as the world’s most influential newspaper plans to fly to New York City this week to push ahead with his bid. Chen Guangbiao on Wednesday told the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated paper, that he has a meeting scheduled Friday with a city firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions, followed by dinner on Sunday with “a middle-level leader” from the Times.

Chinese recycling tycoon Chen Guangbiao said on Tuesday he is set to begin negotiations to buy the New York Times. “If I acquire the Times, the paper will only report the truth and must verify all information,” Chen told Reuters. Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has said the paper is not for sale, and industry insiders doubt the Ochs-Sulzberger family would sell Chen the paper. But Chen told Reuters he believes the company is worth $1 billion and that money can change minds. “There is nothing that can’t be bought for the right price,” Chen told Reuters. Chen says he...

More media tricks… After thinking things over, the Denver Post decided to delete the fact that Arapahoe School shooter Kark Pierson was a committed socialist from their news report. This is from the original article: The gunman’s parents divorced in late 2011, according to court records. The divorce was finalized in August 2012. Thomas Conrad, who had an economics class with the gunman, described him as a very opinionated Socialist. “He was exuberant I guess,” Conrad said. “A lot of people picked on him, but it didn’t seem to bother him.” And, here is the updated article, sans “socialist.” Pierson’s...

Newspapers are losing circulation and advertising revenue. Many old-time publications are going out of business. There’s no question that selling newspapers has gotten more difficult because of the Internet. Fifty years ago people settled down for an hour every day with their newspapers. That pattern is disappearing. Equally, there is no question that newspapers have made their situation worse. They insist on being politically correct, liberal, progressive, or whatever you want to say. What they don’t insist on doing is telling the facts and letting readers think for themselves. Perish that thought The problem across America is that the so-called...

Tribune Co., the parent of the Los Angeles Times, unveiled a restructuring plan that will slash nearly 700 jobs over the next year. [Snip] The cutbacks indicate that the newspaper division is bracing for another drop in advertising in 2014, analysts said. Print ad revenue fell nearly $200 million in the last two years and an additional $62 million in the first nine months of this year.

On Election Day this year, CBS4′s Shaun Boyd had a story detailing the true intentions of the national environmentalist groups pushing fracking bans in four northern Colorado towns. The article contained an admission from local fractivists that national groups seeking a total ban on fracking in Colorado were driving their campaign. But the fractivists were successful in getting their admissions and national connections stricken from the story by lobbying higher ups at CBS. Sources say Shaun Boyd is none too pleased with the edits. The current version of the story lacks a quote from Water Defense, a national environmental group...

When a mom and daughter were kidnapped, forced to withdraw money from an ATM, raped, then shot last week, the Indianapolis Star played it by the book: Do not mention the suspects are black. The “book” in this case is written by the Society of Professional Journalists, headquartered just three miles from the scene of the crime. In last month’s issue of the SPJ magazine, the oldest and largest organization of journalists in America reminded its members how they should report racial violence. Don’t. The SPJ story was just repeating what dozens of chapters around the country tell its members...