Free Republic

I wrote a brief amazon.com review of Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat," one of the most vile, bigoted tracts published by a major publisher this year. Apparently the lefties have been voting against my review in droves! Please stop by and vote for it. Muchos Gracias!

My E-Mail to Dave Berkman of Wisconsin Public Radio: During your 3:00 show this afternoon, I heard you claim 98% of Iraqiis don't view the US as liberating Iraq per some poll. It didn't ring very true to me. So I looked up recent polls on the internet, here's what I found so far.Here's a more recent article:I don't see your 98% figure. Steve Case Dave Berkman's Response: I read this yesterday as I wrote something about it for my column. I read 4 papers a day, the JS, USA Today the Chi Trib & the NYTimes. It was in...

Feeling sad and having just heard the news that President Ronald Reagan had just passed this past Saturday June 5, 2004 at 5:00 PM I switched my car radio from my local news radio to my local NPR, PRI affiliate to get my fill of the left by listening to A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. I can normally make it through the live shows but this last show I had to turn off. The show began with ridicule and cheers from the audience when the Host (Mr. Garrison Keillor) announced that the former President had past away within...

IF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF BLACKSMITHS AND BUGGYWHIP MANUFACTURERS had held a convention in 1910, in those last sullen moments before the Horseless Carriage put them all out of business, then this is what it must have felt like--the same forced cheerfulness laid over the same defeated air, the same stiff upper lip at the prospect of the inescapable end. Outside the Hilton Clearwater Beach Resort, on the Florida coast near Tampa Bay, the beach was streaked with wind and black thunderheads stacked up along the horizon. Inside the hotel, members of the Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio...

When National Public Radio was launched in 1971, it promised to be an alternative to commercial media that would “promote personal growth rather than corporate gain” and “speak with many voices, many dialects.” In 1993, when FAIR published a study of NPR’s guestlist that challenged the network’s alternative credentials (Extra!, 5/93), incoming NPR president Delano Lewis was still boasting about being a place where the unheard get heard (The Humanist, 9/93): “Our job is to be a public radio station. So therefore the alternative points of view, the various viewpoints, should be aired.” Today, current NPR president Kevin Klose insists...

After the 1994 Republican revolution, Congress did some talking about the end of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. After all was said and done, public television and radio stuck around. Both NPR and PBS are organs of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). CPB was formed by Congress in 1967 to encourage "the growth and development of non-commercial... programming that will be responsive to the interests of the people." Like most other socialist programs that emerged from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the CPB acted in the "interest" of the people only after it robbed them from acting...

<p>A group headed by a former adviser to the Democratic National Committee has taken over the effort to create a liberal-radio network to compete with conservative-talk radio.</p> <p>Mark Walsh, who is also a former America Online executive, said his investors' group bought the proposed network from the venture capitalists who started AnShell Media LLC in February. The purchase price was not announced.</p>

Gross vs. O'Reilly: Culture Clash on NPR By Jeffrey A. Dvorkin Ombudsman National Public Radio On October 9, Terry Gross, longtime host of NPR's Fresh Air aired her interview with populist political talk show host Bill O'Reilly. The e-mails and phone calls of outrage are still arriving. The interview was taped the day before on October 8. The ostensible reason was to talk about O'Reilly's latest book, Who's Looking Out For You? The book is about, among other things, the claim that America is in the midst of what O'Reilly calls a "cultural war between left and right." And he...

Click on audio link at the above site.

In June, Pacifica Radio's Los Angeles station, KPFK-FM, hosted a thirty-hour marathon of Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn's anti-Semitic "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend."  It was the first time this once-annual program appeared for almost a decade. It had been banned by station management in 1993, after a long, hard-fought pressure campaign to remove it.  Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend typically includes claims that the Jews disproportionately participated in the slave trade and persecuted blacks; in the past, he responded to criticism by calling the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League a "psychotic, idiotic, European Jew."   He has regularly played tapes by Nation of...

Interview Sensation Tavis Smiley Comes to PBS With New Weeknight Talkshow Produced by KCET/Hollywood     News/Entertainment Editors     HOLLYWOOD--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 18, 2003--KCET/Hollywood teams with veteran interviewer Tavis Smiley for a new national late-night talk show on PBS. The half-hour series will premiere on Monday, January 5, 2004, and air weeknights in the PBS line-up that also includes "The Charlie Rose Show." The "Tavis Smiley" show, taped at KCET studios, will be the first West Coast talk show for PBS.    The first African American to have his own signature talk show in the history of NPR, Tavis Smiley was selected by Time as...

Media Life'sBest of the BestWhereupon we honor the publishers, editors, magazines and newspapers, producers, shows and web sites that we think have made a differenceBy Gene Ely        Media Life recently celebrated its fourth birthday, making us genuinely old folks on the internet, and as the anniversary approached, we had cause to ponder how much we have learned, and more important, by whom we have been most inspired.   Magazines, Media Life included, may pretend to follow their own star -- it would be heresy to admit otherwise -- but the truth is that each day we see things that...

So...which cars are the ultimate gay or lesbian cars of all time? Well, now we can tell you. Our lackeys have culled through thousands of nominations... nominations from gays, from lesbians, from boring heterosexuals like us... and from those of you who fall into the "other" category. Or "all of the above." Not that there's anything wrong with that. Yours sincerely in driving an appropriately-oriented vehicle, Tom and Ray ================================= ==========================================

If it's allowed to stand, an FCC ruling will feed media merger mania BY BILL CLINTON "It's your money," says President Bush when he promotes tax cuts. I disagree with his tax policy but admire his spin. The same argument applies with greater force to whether big media conglomerates should be allowed to control more television and radio stations: "It's your airwaves." The American people own the bandwidth that broadcast media companies use to deliver programs to our TV and radio sets. Because the space on that bandwidth is limited, the Federal Communications Commission regulates who has access to our...

"Media ombudsman." Now there's a job with real growth potential. With mainstream news organizations all getting tarred by the New York Times' ethical lapses, and commercial talk radio flagellating actual journalists as often as they hype their sponsors, there's no end of readers, viewers and listeners venting opinions on media inaccuracy, sloth and, of course, bias. Jeffrey Dworkin, ombudsman for National Public Radio, says he got 45,000 listener e-mails in 2002, "and that's not counting e-mails for Viagra, pornography and toner cartridges." Dworkin was a guest on Minnesota Public Radio recently, explaining NPR's standards for reporting and fairness. He amplified...

Right-wing crazies rule talk radio in America. So can a $10m plan to put liberal shock jocks on air ever work? Andrew Gumbel reports from Los Angeles Wanted: a mould-breaking, iconoclastic American talk-radio host who, unlike just about every other mould-breaking, iconoclastic talk-radio host on the US airwaves, also happens to be left-wing. This host should have the charisma and audience-pulling power to be as popular as the Rush Limbaughs, the Howard Sterns and the other tub-thumping right-wing crazies. Oh, and a sense of humour wouldn't do any harm, either. That's the challenge an increasingly despairing American left is setting...

DON'T ASK ME HOW I GOT THIS SCRIPT, BUT IT IS A GENUINE TRANSCRIPT FROM THE ALL-LEFT-ALL-THE-TIME RADIO NETWORK... [The plucked notes of a banjo are heard and the unmistakable crooning of a deep-south, rural African-American man are heard singing a traditional ballad…] [Over the fading music the host intones:] HOST: "It's as hot and steamy as a Mississippi crawdad boil. The heavy insect hum is as thick and constant as the color of night in this remote corner of the bayou. From the porch of a floating trailer, 127 year old Hound-dog Harold sings back into the night the...

<p>He's baaaaaaack. Thayrone, aka Terry Hughes, the uninhibited host of the "Bone Conduction Music Show" who was fired April 2 by WEMU-FM (89.1 FM) in Ypsilanti, has been picked up by Kool 107 (WQKL-FM, 107.1) in Ann Arbor, a Clear Channel station.</p>

Alex Safian, Associate Director of Camera reports that on March 4th and 5th, NPR news reported two seemingly similar stories, one after the other, about Islamic extremists that blew themselves up amongst crowds of civilians, killing scores of people. In consecutive news segments on the March 5th broadcast of NPR´s Morning Edition, the first attack was described as a ´terrorist bombing,´ with ´Muslim insurgents´ the likely perpetrators. The report offered no explanation [or possible] justification [for the attack]. The second attack was reported without using any form of the word terror, and included nothing about who the likely perpetrators might...

Oh dear, when will this awful war coverage stop - it's simply too much to bear for all those elitist snobs who depend on National Public Radio (NPR) to protect them from having to listen to ...gasp ... commercial radio broadcasts as the common people do. They want "thoughtful intelligence, that allows [NPR] listeners to live our lives from a reasonably aware perspective," as one unhappy listener wrote the public broadcasting network which is thoughtfully provided by U.S. taxpayers for those who need to be fed a diet of news slanted to satisfy its liberal and oh-so-superior audience. "We seem...