Free Republic

Some of the most colorful descriptions of the violence facing police officers at Lafayette Square were clumsily spliced out of the middle of Barr's answers to questions. Key details on violent riots near the White House were removed from the broadcast of an interview of Attorney General William Barr on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” Sunday. Anchor Margaret Brennan repeatedly described protests as “peaceful” and the clearing of protesters to set up a stronger perimeter as unnecessarily rushed, contentions Barr strongly denied.Left out of the interview that aired on CBS on Sunday morning was Barr’s detailed accounting of much of...

A former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee has pleaded guilty to charges related to the leaking of classified information to two journalists, the Justice Department (DOJ) said. Henry Kyle Frese, 31, pleaded guilty on Thursday to the willful transmission of top-secret national defense information to journalists. He faces up to 10 years in prison. Frese was arrested when he arrived to work at a DIA facility in Virginia in October last year where he worked as a counterterrorism analyst. The 31-year-old—who held top-secret government security clearance—was accused of helping the journalists research information on a classified United States government computer...

As 2019 wound down, well-known press figures sounded alarms about the “erosion of truth.” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd spoke to our own Peter Wade about the “epidemic” of “disinformation.” Washington Post editor Marty Baron and New York Times editor Dean Baquet joined Todd on Meet The Press to talk about how the Internet and Donald Trump and Russia are all combining to create an era in which “crazy conspiracy theories” and “absolute falsehoods and lies” can proliferate. This isn’t a new idea. Since 2016 especially, a wide array of American politicians and think-tanks have been hammering the idea that the free...

London paper ‘sold its editorial independence,’ Open Democracy claims.The London Evening Standard is facing accusations it sold “favorable news coverage” to six major companies, including Uber and Google, in a £3 million deal. Open Democracy, a political U.K.-based website, accused the paper of offering positive news coverage to the likes of Uber and Google in exchange for corporate partnerships worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, as part of an upcoming campaign called London 2020. According to the report published Wednesday, the Evening Standard told corporate partners they would not just get the usual, clearly labeled “advertorial” content, but also news...

Joseph Farah It must be nice to be Jeff Bezos.How do you become one of the richest men in the world by founding a company that only recently gave a thought to profitability?Amazon has been around a long time. It’s one of the few Internet companies that was doing business 20 years ago, when I launched WorldNetDaily.com, now known as WND.com.But it was less than three years ago that Amazon began to achieve any profits to speak of. And, even today, you’d be shocked to know how high its revenues are and how relatively low its profits are. snip...

Can we trust the judgement of think-tanks who have labeled Twitter users as part of a ‘Russian influence campaign’ as sound when those same entities provide little evidence, and their high-level members include former Clinton supporters?At the beginning of 2017, an initiative was launched by a non-partisan think-tank called the German Marshall Fund US (GMFUS) under the name “The Alliance For Securing Democracy” (ASD).During the Summer, ASD started working on a project they called the “Hamilton 68 Dashboard“, an effort that was presented to the public as a means of monitoring Russian disinformation efforts on Twitter, apparently boosted by...

"The Abedin emails include a mid-August 2009, email exchange in which Band urges Abedin to follow up on a request from Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy to set up a meeting with then-Ambassador to Panama Barbara Stephenson on behalf of lobbyist Amb. Otto Reich, President Reagan’s ambassador to Venezuela who maintained high-level government positions during the tenure of both President George H.W. Bush and President George Bush. In early September, Ruddy then was contacted by State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, Roberta S. Jacobson, at the behest of Band and Abedin, in reference to Ruddy’s...

As the days have ticked past since the U.S. election, its implications, especially for the press, have been interpreted with agonizing slowness. The polls, so inaccurate, yet uniformly revealed public disrespect for the press. Ninety per cent of conventional press was hostile to Donald Trump, and 90 per cent of polling organizations predicted a comfortable Clinton victory. As there was no substantive argument for the re-election of the Democrats, their entire campaign was to slag off Trump. The servile press deluged Trump’s followers with disparagements, and generally signed on to Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of 30 million Trump supporters as a...

Clinton press secretary Nick Merrill talks about having “friendly” reporters who they rely on to regurgitate their talking points. WikiLeaks Clinton Campaign documents show that Hillary’s campaign has paid journalists regurgitating talking points for them.

The mediasphere is boiling after the New York Times ran a piece on Ben Rhodes, Obama's foreign policy guru, a failed writer who openly boasted about manipulating the media. It was full of quotes like this... Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we...

April 1989 archive Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace Agree Reporters First, Americans Second In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops. For the March 7 installment on...

As the final, frenzied push towards the first presidential voting begins, Donald Trump has unveiled a riveting new television ad that perfectly sums up Trumpism in all its xenophobic glory and also perfectly captures the problem Trumpism has created for the Republican Party. The ad, which is set to run extensively in Iowa and New Hampshire, has it all. It reiterates his call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, and links this directly to the need to combat radical Islamic terrorism. It also again vows to stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern...

Just announced on Fox.

If authentic, CNN’s memo explaining why Candy Crowley permitted President Obama to speak four minutes more than Mitt Romney during Tuesday’s presidential debate is devastating to that network: On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We’re going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time. One of Crowley’s main jobs as moderator was...

Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read Back in 1983, approximately 0 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations. These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who...

We are told by careful pollsters that half of the American people believe that American troops should be brought home from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90 percent of the public do not want us out right now. Between January 1 and September 30, 2005, nearly 1,400 stories appeared on the ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news. More than half focused on the costs and problems of the war, four times as many as those that discussed...

It’s 3 p.m. and the phone in the White House press secretary’s office is ringing. It rings and rings and rings. Eventually, a recorded voice asks callers to leave a message—followed by a second voice saying the voicemail box is full. After a full week of such calls, a human being answers. But Ben Labolt immediately bristles when asked to spell his name, refuses to give his job title, and says he is going “off the record” until I stop him to explain that the reporter grants that privilege, not the other way around—a basic journalistic standard that Labolt seems...

The bombshell sex probe of a Washington, D.C., madam that already has caught one Bush administration official with his pants down may soon focus on well-known political pundits who have appeared on TV. "There are several thousand names, tens of thousands of phone numbers, from administration officials to lobbyists to advisers who are well known, people who appear on television," said ABC News' Brian Ross, to whom alleged madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey turned over her little black book. In an interview with CNN, Ross refused to identify any more of the customers of Palfrey's "escort service" and did not indicate...

The mainstream U.S. media outlets have failed to report a major terrorist plot against the U.S. - because it would tend to support President Bush's use of NSA domestic surveillance, according to media watchdog groups. News of a planned attack masterminded by three Algerians operating out of Italy was widely reported outside the U.S., but went virtually unreported in the American media. Italian authorities recently announced that they had used wiretaps to uncover the conspiracy to conduct a series of major attacks inside the U.S. Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the planned attacks would have targeted stadiums, ships and...