Free Republic

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - A sportswriter who left his job at The New York Times to become a sports columnist for The Indianapolis Star admitted he falsified his resume and resigned his new post Friday. Star Editor and Vice President Dennis R. Ryerson announced he had accepted Mike Freeman's resignation in an item headlined "note to readers" that was posted on the newspaper's Web site. In a statement included in the Star's note, Freeman said he knowingly stated on his resume and in an interview for the job that he was a graduate of the University of Delaware. Freeman's statement said...

DIEBOLD-FACED LIES    When someone says "this isn't about money," you can be sure it's all about money. And when Paul Krugman says " there's nothing paranoid about suggesting" something, you can be sure that what he's suggesting is a crackpot conspiracy theory, built on lies and innuendo, that only a true paranoid could believe. What "there's nothing paranoid about suggesting" in Krugman's New York Times column yesterday is that touch-screen voting machines are part of a Republican plot to hijack elections. He sanctimoniously warns, "let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake." The proof? Krugman...

New York Times Seen In Lackluster Ad Trend Forbes Staff , 11.24.03, 12:03 PM ET NEW YORK - New York Times (nyse: NYT - news - people ) stock softened after a Banc of America Securities research note said the media company and rival Knight Ridder (nyse: KRI - news - people ) finished October on a lackluster note, posting respective ad sales growth gains of just 1.2% and 0.4%. Bank of America Securities said the color ad page count at the flagship newspaper of Dow Jones (nyse: DJ - news - people ), The Wall Street Journal, is averaging...

November 30, 2003TELEVISION REVIEWHatchet Job? Reagan Movie Is Run of the MillBy ALESSANDRA STANLEY here is no reason Showtime's version of "The Reagans" could not have been broadcast on CBS earlier this month. Tonight's made-for-television movie incited conservatives to threaten a boycott, which led the network to cancel it. Consigned to Showtime, a premium cable channel owned by CBS's parent company, Viacom, "The Reagans" turns out to be neither a liberal screed on Reaganomics nor a character attack on former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. It is a movie. More precisely, it is a made-for-television movie that squeezes...

COVERING UP FOR THAT COVER   A rare Paul Krugman correction in the New York Times? Not quite. Today's corrections section states, "An article last Sunday about the differing covers on the American and British editions of a book by Paul Krugman, the economist and Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, Page, referred incorrectly to a caricature on the British version. According to groups that distribute the image, the drawing of Vice President Dick Cheney, with the words 'Got Oil' on his forehead and a dark mustache, was intended to evoke the 'Got Milk' advertising campaign, not to suggest a...

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN IRAQ -- by the New York Times? That's the report on Healing Iraq, which posts a letter from an Iraqi property owner to Arthur Sulzberger about harassment and property seizure at the hands of guards employed by the Times in Baghdad: My family has a property in the green zone in down town Baghdad on Abi-Nuas street. The New York Times rents the adjacent property. For several weeks now my brother Ali Al Ali has been denied automobile access to our property by security guards. Until two days ago we thought this was a coalition security...

Receive FREE updates by email: | Before Jayson Blair: AIM and The New York Times By William AlfordNovember 12, 2003 Subsequent to the fallout over Jayson Blair's numerous instances of fraud, inaccuracy and plagiarism, senior staff at The N.Y. Times surely hoped that credibility doubts would end by throwing the 27-year-old journalist over the side in May. Questions nonetheless persisted over such practices as the widespread misuse of unnamed sources, attributing freelancers' work to staff reporters, and insufficient research and 'advocacy' journalism. On an early June "day that breaks my heart," publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced the 'resignations' of...

Associated Press Story - Former New York Times executive Gerald Boyd, who resigned last June in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, is writing his memoirs. Currently untitled, the book will be published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins that specializes in publications by black authors. "The Jayson Blair scandal will be covered, but it will be just a small part of the story," Boyd's representative, Robert Barnett, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, said Wednesday. Financial terms were not disclosed. Blair resigned from the Times last spring after editors learned he had embellished and plagiarized parts...

Top editors at the NEW YORK TIMES panicked and ordered a story killed after London-based reporter Sarah Lyall filed a dispatch alleging rumors of Prince Charles and a sexual affair with one of his closest advisers! The story appeared on the TIMES's internet website for 20 minutes -- before top editors ordered it immediately removed, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

So did Mississippi voters support the Republicans, even though they get very little direct benefit from Bush-style tax cuts, because they — unlike New Jersey's voters — understand the magic of supply-side economics? If you believe that, I've got an overpass on the Garden State Parkway you may be interested in buying. Now maybe New Jersey voted Democratic because of irrational Bush hatred. But I think it's a lot more likely that white Mississippi voters, unlike their counterparts up north, are still responding to Republican flag-waving — and it's not just the American flag that's being waved.

November 04, 2003 NY Times Full Disclosure? Today's NY Times includes an op/ed written by Mark Medish, "a lawyer, [who] was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury from 1997 to 2000." In it, Mr. Medish argues that the Iraq debts accumulated by Saddam over the course of his reign must not be cancelled. As he sees it, "A country like Iraq, with the world's second-largest proven oil reserves, should be expected to be able to pay its obligations. Furthermore, the moral charge that the debts are odious is simply too sweeping. Acting on it would be bad for Iraq and...

Schadenfreude — that's that word for taking pleasure in the other guy's failure. But what's the word for that feeling you get when you've been hoping for the other guy to fail, but he ends up succeeding . . . spectacularly? A schadenfreudian slip? How about Krugmanfreude? The latter was the suggestion of ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member John Davidson. It's the perfect word for what America's most dangerous liberal pundit, Paul Krugman — and the whole Democratic party, for that matter — must be feeling right now as they face the reality of last Thursday's announcement that gross...

Circulation of the Nation's 20 Biggest Newspapers The Associated Press Published: Nov 3, 2003 Average weekday circulation of the nation's 20 biggest newspapers for the six months ended Sept. 30, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period. 1. USA Today, 2,246,996, up 0.7 percent 2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,091,062, up 16.1 percent (a) 3. The New York Times, 1,118,565, up 0.5 percent 4. Los Angeles Times, 955,211, down 1.1 percent (b) 5. The Washington Post, 732,872, down 1.9 percent 6. New York Daily News, 729,124, up 2.1 percent...

<p>ED Koch says New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman is "lamebrained." The former mayor is irked by Krugman's Oct. 21 column explaining why Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad attacked Jews before a Muslim leadership conference, when he said, "The Jews rule the world by proxy: They get others to fight and die for them." Krugman wrote, "So what's with the anti-Semitism? Almost surely it's part of Mr. Mahathir's domestic balancing act." Koch told us: "There is a French expression, 'To understand everything is to forgive everything.' Using Krugman's logic, we should understand Hitler's needs and forgive him as well. He needed to blame Germany's defeat in World War I on the Jews. Krugman's defenses are lame and his column is lame-brained."</p>

Paul Krugman's Malaysia connections are frightening “Anti-Semitism with a purpose." Sounds like a sick play on a Madison Avenue advertising slogan. But it's no joke. It was a subhead attached to Paul Krugman's Tuesday column for the New York Times. In it he rationalized the violently anti-Semitic remarks by Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as being symptoms of the failure of the Bush administration's foreign policy. The column has already generated a storm of protest on the letters page of the Times, on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, and on the websites of Krugman Truth Squad members, new and...

As we’ve said before, Paul Krugman is the country’s most embarrassing columnist. His hatred for President Bush has so blinded him that he is no longer a rational person. Today’s column in the New York Times is one of his most over-the-top. Krugman takes up the subject of Mahathir Mohamad’s “Jews rule the world” speech at the Islamic summit meeting last week. He begins, of course, with a denunciation of Mahathir’s anti-Semitism—“Indeed, those remarks were inexcusable”—and continues, inevitably, with a fatal “But.” The point of Krugman’s column is that Mahathir’s anti-Semitism is President Bush’s fault: “[T]o understand why he made...

October 21, 2003 A Face Lift for The Times, Typographically, That IsBy THE NEW YORK TIMES tarting today, the front page and main news sections of The New York Times are receiving a gentle typographical face-lift. In place of a miscellany of headline typefaces that have accumulated in its columns over the last century, the newspaper is settling on a single family, Cheltenham, in roman and italic versions and various light and bold weights. A narrow variation will be used for The Times's signature one-column headline, which often appears at the top right of Page A1 on the main article...

It's beginning to look as if the New York Times can't help being naughty – it's somehow become part of its nature to commit outrageous offenses against fairness, decency and balance. This time it's a shameful conflict of interest caught by the New York Post: A book review trashing Nigel Hamilton's "Bill Clinton, An American Journey; Great Expectations" written by one Todd S. Purdom, whom the Times doesn't bother to tell its readers is the husband of Bill Clinton's onetime adoring press secretary Dee Dee Myers. The Post's must-read Page Six quotes one observer as noting: "It is the equivalent...

My teacher, Joel Feinberg, once wrote that, "Every philosophical paper must begin with an unproved assumption." Argument, in other words, must start somewhere, preferably with a proposition that is widely accepted. The unproved assumption of this column is that hatred is bad. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) defines "hatred" as "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another, the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation, enmity, ill-will, malevolence." To hate is "To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to. The opposite of to love." Each of us knows firsthand whether,...

<p>We'd have said no, but then we read - today's column.</p> <p>Krugman weighs in on last week's anti-Jewish tirade by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and the results boggle the mind.</p> <p>Most of it is criticism directed at other Muslims, clerics in particular. Mr. Mahathir castigates "interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology." Thanks to these interpreters, "the study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress." A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of "What Went Wrong," the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.</p>

Premier New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman attacked the Fox News Channel on Thursday, comparing the top-rated cable news network to the pro-terrorist Al Jazeera broadcasting company. Using a recent speech by Vice President Dick Cheney to argue that the Bush administration is too narrow-minded in its handling of postwar Iraq, Friedman complained, "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al Jazeera, and Mr. Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox." "Out of fairness, my newspaper feels obligated [to cover the Cheney speech]," the top Times columnist wrote. "But I wish we would have...

<p>I could only laugh last April when I first heard about a study claiming that a smoking ban in Helena, Mont., cut the city’s heart attack rate by 58 percent in six months.</p> <p>A prominent op-ed in this week’s Oct. 15 New York Times hailed the Miracle of Helena (search) and urged readers to give it more credit than it deserves.</p>

Remember Jayson Blair? Now, another name will go down in infamy at the New York Times. Lynette Holloway, another affirmative- action promotion at the New York Times, has resigned in the wake of the paper running its second-longest correction in history. That 2,175-word correction ran back on July 14. Holloway’s by-line has not appeared since. Now she’s gone. The Times didn’t want to draw any more attention to this scandal, and her resignation was disclosed by a competitor, Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post. He reported that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said they had reached "an amicable settlement."

AN IMMINENT THREAT (TO DEMOCRATS, THAT IS)A threat to the nation is vastly exaggerated. It is claimed that the President must take draconian countermeasures against the deadly enemy immediately -- an enemy that a powerful ideological faction has had in its crosshairs for years. To build public support for action, intelligence reports are "sexed-up" to make the enemy seem stronger. Yes, there are seeming disclaimers that the threat is not "imminent" -- yet the message is crystal clear: the republic is in grave danger, and we must act before it becomes too late to act. Am I talking about Paul...

Paul Krugman, an economist who teaches at Princeton University, is a crank. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be particularly significant: Academia, notably at the elite institutions, is littered with Mr. Krugman’s ilk. Isolated from the real world and worshipped by impressionable young men and women, professors collectively form a base of the Democratic Party that’s as potent, in rhetoric if not fundraising, as the country’s unions, trial lawyers, and the vast majority of Hollywood celebrities. But Mr. Krugman is one of the most influential left-wing critics of the Bush administration. Thanks to Howell Raines, he has a twice-weekly op-ed column in the...

(CNSNews.com) - A portion of funding intended to revitalize the part of New York City struck by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, might be used to construct new corporate headquarters miles away from "Ground Zero." In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress passed an economic stimulus package to rebuild and revitalize the area that became known as Ground Zero. That revitalization effort included the creation of New York Liberty Bonds, an $8 billion initiative to provide low-cost, tax-exempt financing for major projects to revitalize lower Manhattan and ensure the city's long-term economic health. According to a press release...

The big Congressional stories this year have been big-ticket legislation, like Medicare prescription drugs and the pork-layered energy bill. But barely under the political radar, a long-sought, hard-right G.O.P. agenda has been quietly progressing. Proposals dear to the Republican leadership that would undermine gun controls, women's reproductive freedom, a citizen's right to seek court redress, and a vital array of other constitutional bulwarks are moving slowly toward what in some cases seems like almost certain passage. In past years of split-party control of the Capitol, such a wish list represented the dark side of political grandstanding, scraps of meat for...

<p>LOOKS like the Gray Lady is up to her old tricks again - distorting the picture in Iraq by burying good news and playing up bad.</p> <p>Just take a look at yesterday's New York Times.</p> <p>Some of the most important news to come out of Iraq in weeks - a story the Times had a day before anyone else - reported the findings of a Gallup poll of Baghdad residents.</p>

NEW YORK, Sep 17, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times Co. reported lower advertising revenues for August and said Wednesday that its third-quarter earnings would be well below Wall Street expectations. The Times said it expected to earn between 30 and 32 cents per share in the third quarter, compared with 38 cents in the same period last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had been expecting the company to earn 39 cents per share. Advertising revenues in the company's newspaper group fell 1.4 percent in August compared with the same month last year. "The...

conservative columnist says the liberal bias of The New York Times extends far beyond the environs of New York and should be a matter of concern to every American. As a native New Yorker, Bob Kohn grew up reading the Times. But now the columnist for WorldNetDaily has written a book about the newspaper called Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why it Can No Longer Be Trusted (WND Books, 2003). Kohn says every other liberal news agency follows the Times, even broadcast news organizations. "The old joke applies -- Peter Jennings is not a...

The ombudsman is here because the doctrine against it collapsed. But pride says the Times cannot copy the Post. What's Bill Keller to do?The argument for why an ombudsman would never be needed at the New York Times went like this. Every editor should represent the interests of the reader. That’s what good editors do. No ombudsman. Before you start poking at the logic, appreciate how long it stood and how well it served the authority of the Times. First ombudsman is 1967, Louisville Courier Journal. Thirty six years later, the New York Times agrees: maybe it’s a good...

NEW YORK, Sep 10, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times has appointed assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal as its first standards editor, the newspaper reported. Siegal, who will retain his current title, will oversee the creation of new guidelines for the use of anonymous sources, bylines and datelines, according to a story in Wednesday's edition of the Times. In an e-mail to staff announcing the appointment Tuesday, Executive Editor Bill Keller said Siegal would be "the main internal sounding board for staff members who have doubts or complaints about the paper's content, whether already published...

The New York Times is trying to beef up its television-news profile in time to become a network player in the 2004 Presidential election campaign. Last spring, the paper of record first announced a partnership to co-own and run the Discovery Civilization Channel; by December 2002, The Times had renamed it the Discovery Times channel and refitted the station with a very 43rd Street logo.Now, sources tell The Observer, The Times is in negotiations with ABC News to coordinate coverage of the Presidential race with its cable-channel property.Sources familiar with the negotiations said that the proposal is still in its...

Should The New York Times have to pay damages to readers who were duped by its decision to publish the fraudulent work of Jayson Blair? So say Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards, two lawyers who teach in the College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University, in an article that will appear in the fall 2003 edition of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal. The article introduces the novel legal theory of "journalistic malpractice" whereby, in the Times' case, "the continued publication of Blair's stories, despite the serious doubt about his work entertained and expressed by his...

Leftists never learn not to tangle with Fox News star Bill O'Reilly. When his Irish temper is aroused he can be tough, something the New York Times got a taste of last night. The Times, which cozies up with the likes of O'Reilly foe Al Franken, recently exposed as having lied to Attorney General John Ashcroft, carried a column by Judith Maslin that says the alleged satirist "makes a bull's-eye out of Mr. O'Reilly" for having told whoppers. In his Talking Points memo last night, O'Reilly fired back at the newspaper, which "is leading the charge to turn America...

CNN's prime time anchors, Paula Zahn and Anderson Cooper, will officially launch their new shows Sept. 8. Zahn's show, a straight news program, will be called "Paula Zahn Now" and Cooper's show, which will have a faster-paced style, will be called "Anderson Cooper 360." A cast of contributors for Zahn's show will be announced later this week. Cooper's show, which targets younger viewers, will feature several regular segments devoted to media, including "Inside the Box," which will analyze TV news coverage, "Fresh Print," a look at the hot topics in current magazines, and "Weekender," which will preview upcoming movies and...

<p>In a front-page story Tuesday on the President and his compassionate conservative agenda, the New York Times said that, "some religious supporters of Mr. Bush say they feel betrayed by promises he made as a candidate and now, they maintain, he has broken as president." The story relies heavily on quotes from one Reverend Jim Wallis, whom the Times describes as an, "early supporter" of the President. Wallis tells the Times Mr. Bush has, "failed the test." He is the only person in the whole story identified as a Bush supporter. But Wallis is, in fact, an ardent Democrat, who did not vote for Mr. Bush, and who edits a liberal religious magazine called Sojourners, which has consistently criticized the President and his administration. None of this is mentioned in the Times story.</p>

August 23, 2003 3 - Run HR xhl(Aaron Guiel's Thre Off Joe Mays in Fifth IftsBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:51 p.m. ETGutered the game wo hits in his last 18 at-bats, went 2-fos City atayed withif theicago Whx in the AL Central race.Luis Rivas homered for Minnesota, which fell 2 1/2 games back.After Jeremy Affelclosed Friday's win withect innity's bullpen again refused to budge.D.J. Carrco (5attered three hits over four innings after starter Jose Lima was removedke MacDougached thetting Rivas to ground into a double play for his 26th save in 33 chances.The Royals improved to 11-7...

Small b DetonatesandBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:17 a.m. ETNo gility for t inside Newry's main bus depot. Irish Republican Army dissidents continue to mount ocbombings in opposition to the 1998 peace accord for Northern Ireland, a Brititory.Authorities were alerted caught fire, suggesting that the homemade device inside had malfunctioned. Bughters didnurce was a small bthey were dousing the blaze. Shnel hs bhe firef po

<p>The biggest job facing Bill Keller, newly appointed New York Times executive editor, is how to restore a missing, indefinable, intangible attribute that once shone like a halo above the paper's masthead.</p> <p>That attribute was the Times' mystique, something beyond newsprint, stories, editorials, headlines and circulation figures. It was not that one believed everything the Times reported or that one even agreed with its editorials.</p>

On July 14, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger named a new executive editor, Bill Keller; made a point of insulting Keller’s predecessor, Howell Raines, whom Sulzberger had rewarded for his loyal service, by pushing out the door; and found himself mired in yet another affirmative action scandal. Don’t it just break your heart?! In introducing Times veteran Keller in his new capacity, Sulzberger went out of his way to take a potshot at Raines, who had been on the Charlie Rose Show only three days earlier, where he’d spoken of the Times suffering from a “lethargic culture of complacency.”...

On Thursday, August 7 at the end of a column of miscellaneous corrections, the New York Times published this small bombshell: Editors' Note An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases...

Dick Morris The Political Life Bias-mongers on rocks as viewers taste straight newsI am sure we were all surprised to learn in the Aug. 11 issue of The New York Times that people are " burned out on serious news." How else could the bastion of establishment journalism account for the falloff in network news viewership and, unnoted in the article, the newspaper's own decreasing circulation?Yet the evidence is all there. People don't care anymore. That must be why The Times' circulation has fallen 5 percent and 1.1 million fewer households are watching network television news compared to last...

Pfc. Jessica Lynch's capture and rescue was certainly a dramatic affair -- particularly in The Post. This newspaper told its readers that she had been shot and stabbed, that she had fought off her Iraqi attackers -- her gun blazing -- until she went down and was taken prisoner, hospitalized and then rescued eight days later. Trouble is, much of that may be false. Lynch apparently was not shot. Lynch was not stabbed. Lynch may not have put up much of a fight, maybe none at all. The lights may have gone out for her the moment her unit was...