Free Republic

Get out the defibrillator quick: CNN is dying. What other conclusion can be drawn from the Nielsen ratings from February, which showed the once dominant news network finishing in fifth place for the first time ever- and now trailing CNBC and Headline News as well as its main competitors, FOX and MSNBC? The numbers are, as you can imagine, pretty stark. Wolf Blitzer's show, The Situation Room, was down 44% in total viewers in February. Campbell Brown, Larry King, and Anderson Cooper all posted their lowest ratings ever in February among total viewers, declining 50%, 55%, and 59%, respectively. The...

As part of the deep cuts announced this week at ABC News, the network plans to close all of its physical bureaus around the country except Washington and halve the number of its domestic correspondents. ABC News President David Westin confirmed in an interview Friday that the network's ranks of bureau correspondents, which currently number several dozen, would be cut in half and be replaced with "digital" journalists who would be expected to shoot and edit their own stories. Although the network will keep a minimal staff presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami and Boston, it will shut...

Owner of Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune plans prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Affiliated Media Inc., the holding company for the MediaNews Group family of newspapers that includes The Denver Post, said Friday that it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company said it would file a "prepackaged" plan already approved by lenders, which should allow it to emerge from bankruptcy more quickly. Under the plan, company debt would fall from about $930 million to $165 million. Senior lenders would swap debt for stock. Earlier this week, Morris Publishing Group, owner of 13 daily newspapers including the...

Concerned that “casual” and “irregular” so-called journalists are “confusing” the American people. Senators Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have introduced legislation that attempts to “draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate purveyors of news.” The legislation, Senate Bill 448, would define a legitimate journalist as a person working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, a recognized publisher or broadcaster of news. Those falling outside this definition would be denied the privileges granted to established news media under freedom of the press. “The American people need to be protected from being misled by unauthorized sources,” Feinstein...

Anderson Cooper is fading in the ratings. His 10 p.m. show, "Anderson Cooper 360," has declined 62% in total viewers and 70% in adults 25-54 from November 2008, according to Nielsen figures. Last month, in Cooper's time slot, Fox News' "On the Record" attracted an average viewership of 1.9 million while "360" averaged 672,000... From the start of 2009, he began losing a huge chunk of his nightly audience.

John Allen Muhammad is scheduled to be executed tomorrow for the Beltway-area sniper spree that left 10 innocent people dead in 2002. Several family members of the victims will attend. At the time of the murderous rampage that stretched over three, horror-filled weeks... where Muhammad and his young partner in crime, Lee Malvo, wreaked bloody havoc. I covered two main aspects of the story that were underplayed by the MSM–Lee Malvo’s illegal alien catch-and-release story and Nation of Islam convert Muhammad and Malvo’s Muslim hate-mongering. Snide MSM’ers and the CAIR propagandists attacked those of who called these thugs what they...

The London Telegraph has the bombshell report on Ft. Hood jihadist Nidal Hassan’s ties to the September 11 terrorists. Question: Why is it that we have to read British papers to get the unvarnished truths about the Ft. Hood Muslim mass murderer?

CNN's prime-time programs finished fourth and last among the cable news networks in October. CNN's programs finished behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but also its own sister network HLN.

Get a hit drama in here, stat! Just a couple weeks into the fall television season, the prognosis is not looking good for NBC. To wit:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc will eventually sell the Time Inc magazine unit and could buy holdings in its core entertainment category, Gordon Crawford, managing director of its largest shareholder, said during a presentation this week. "Time Warner just spun off their cable division, they are going to sell their print division, they are going to spin off AOL and they're just going to be Warner Brothers, HBO and the Turner Networks," said Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group.

Today, The Montana Standard launches a new weekly columnist for its editorial page Byron York will serve as a conservative voice every Tuesday... York, a staunch conservative, presents his arguments in a thoughtful, measured fashion, rather than resorting to cheap personal attacks on President Obama and others in the Democratic Party that seem to be the hallmark of the GOP these days, said Standard Editor Gerry O'Brien.

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called on President Barack Obama to form a White House commission to help save the press Tuesday night in an impassioned speech at the Aspen Institute. “I personally encourage the president to establish a White House commission on public media,” the legendary newsman said. Such a commission on media reform, Rather said, ought to make recommendations on saving journalism jobs and creating new business models to keep news organizations alive. “A truly free and independent press is the red beating heart of democracy and freedom,” Rather said in an interview yesterday afternoon. “This is...

I think this is an example of the distraction that the Internet and the New Media have driven the Old Media to, but it seems that the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia was so amazed that someone finally paid attention to its work that it had to write a whole story about itself to brag about how many webpage hits it got on a recent story by staffer Lily Gordon. The L-E was all excited that it got "more than 1,000 comments" and received "712,251 page views" after Gordon's July 14 story headlined, "Soldier balks at deploying; says Obama isn’t president."...

The Denver Post sold an average of 17.4 percent fewer weekday copies in the weeks after the Rocky Mountain News folded than what the Post and News sold together a year earlier, and 12.3 percent fewer Sunday papers, according to the Denver daily's first full circulation report since the News' shutdown. On Sundays, the latest Post report cited average sales of 526,234 -- down 12.3 percent from the Post's Sunday average a year earlier of 600,026. And on Saturdays, the Post said in Friday's report that it sold an average of 435,194 papers, down 11.2 percent from what the News...

Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill leaves committee while ABC, CBS, NBC remain silent. The media love to fret over global warming, but now that a trillion-dollar scheme to address global warming could be just around the corner the networks have been curiously quiet. On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a bill to cap carbon emissions and create an artificial trading market. The network news media didn’t mention it, but critics say the legislation would be a “huge threat to American prosperity and freedom.” The Heritage Foundation estimates that this bill, known as Waxman-Markey, would cost $9.6 trillion in...

Long gone are the days of Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingswood, Douglass Edwards, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith. These men were true “Broadcast Journalists.” They understood all to well the responsibility that rested on their broad shoulders. You didn’t have to tell Murrow or Brinkley, two men of great honor and distinction, that your job is to report the news, “straight down the middle, and leave your editorial comments out of your copy.” As Americans, we didn’t know if these men were Democrats or Republicans. It wasn’t our business: And they did not wear their...

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad. But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against...

The Denver Post announced Thursday that it will stop delivering print copies to the Western Slope, including Grand Junction and farther reaches of Colorado ... Print subscribers will be switched to online subscriptions

The Baltimore Sun has laid off 61 people in its newsroom, about a quarter of its editorial staff, including veteran editors and managers, columnists, photographers and designers. Maryland's largest newspaper laid off managerial employees at the end of the day Tuesday, and notified union-represented employees Wednesday afternoon... Tribune is operating under bankruptcy protection. Real estate mogul Sam Zell took on a $13 billion debt load when he purchased the company in 2007

NBC Universal witnessed revenue and profitability declines in the first quarter. Net profits sank 45%... General Electric itself had a tough time, with earnings down 35%... Research estimates have show NBC is not alone in its bleak earnings. Other major network groups have also seen revenue and profit declines over the last six months.