Free Republic

The media vs. Howard DeanDemocrats haven't voted yet, but reporters have got the story: The former Vermont governor is angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable. How do they know? Republicans, and anonymous Democrats, told them so. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Eric BoehlertJan. 13, 2004  |  When the Washington Post introduced readers to Howard Dean in a long Page 1 feature July 6, part of a series of "meet the Democrats" candidate profiles, the paper went for the jugular, literally, with a cartoonish, unflattering description to open the article: "Howard Dean was angry. Ropy...

Here is the link: The ReagansYou will need Adobe and a good connection but may be worth it. Report here any "gems" you find.

The Battalion - Opinion Issue: 11/05/03 Biased media coverage causes misconception of Iraq warBy Collins Ezeanyim Last spring, a Battalion columnist argued the then-nascent war in Iraq was theologically unsound. In the column, it was stated there was no reliable evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The column resulted in e-mails from Aggies who disagreed with this fact, despite President George W. Bush telling reporters on Sept. 17, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11," according to The Associated Press.Yet due to biased media coverage of the war, a frustrating number of Americans...

Biased media coverage causes misconception of Iraq war By Collins Ezeanyim Last spring, a Battalion columnist argued the then-nascent war in Iraq was theologically unsound. In the column, it was stated there was no reliable evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The column resulted in e-mails from Aggies who disagreed with this fact, despite President George W. Bush telling reporters on Sept. 17, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11," according to The Associated Press. Yet due to biased media coverage of the war, a frustrating number of Americans continue to believe Iraq...

Craven Broadcasting SystemTV big shots and politicians blast CBS for its cowardly decision to yank the Ronald Reagan miniseries. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Rebecca TraisterNov. 5, 2003  |  Anyone looking for signs of a return of 1980s-era culture wars probably couldn't dream up a better one. At the center of it -- again -- are the Reagans. Only this time, it's "The Reagans," a fictionalized biographical miniseries that was set to air on Nov. 16 and 18, but was dumped by CBS on Tuesday after heated political pressure from the right....

JON FRIEDMAN'S MEDIA WEBSalon seeks a clean financial slate Commentary: Witty Web site thrives on liberal politicsBy Jon Friedman, CBS.MarketWatch.comLast Update: 7:31 PM ET Oct. 30, 2003SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- If you do a computer search for news stories about Salon.com, the Internet's self-styled "smart tabloid," the headlines reek of gloom and doom."Salon chief calling it quits after 7 years," screamed the San Francisco Chronicle on Oct. 10. Last March, Canada's National Post lamented: "Salon, farewell? The plucky online magazine is facing a death knell -- again." On Feb. 24, the Los Angeles Times declared: "Salon.com's Struggle to Succeed Plays...

The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Struggling online magazine publisher Salon Media Group said its chief executive officer, Michael O'Donnell, is leaving the company after seven years. The San Francisco-based company, which has been battling to survive, gave no reason for O'Donnell's departure in an announcement Thursday. A call to O'Donnell for comment was not immediately returned. O'Donnell will be replaced as CEO by Salon founder David Talbot, who is the company's chairman and editor-in-chief. Elizabeth Hambrecht, Salon's chief financial officer, will inherit O'Donnell's title as president. A former software sales executive, O'Donnell joined Salon as president and publisher...

In March 2001 Premiere Magazine printed a now-notorious article that featured named and un-named sources detailing instances in which the actor groped women's breasts, humilitated assisitants on movie sets, bullied male crew members and cheated on Shriver.Years earlier Connely had revealed in a 1993 US Magazine article that several women who had worked for the famed Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss had auditioned for Schwartzenegger's unsucessful movie 'The Last Action Hero.' Other media outlets published similar stories and Columbia Pictures began investigating whether these women were hired as extras on the over budget movie.Around the same time, a French women's magazine...

Meet Joe Dirt Stuart K. Hayashi In 2001, comedian David Spade came out with a movie titled "The Adventures of Joe Dirt." It now appears that the film was about Joe Conason, the author of "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" and an editorialist for the liberal-biased Salon.com. In the person of Brad Pitt, you've already Met Joe Black. Now Meet the Real Joe Dirt. His book purports to expose how right-wingers harness the corporate media to brainwash society. Instead of demonstrating such, however, Joe is too busy flinging his Dirt around. In two...

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...

July 4, 2003 | "Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'" So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's...

The Republican fall guy in CaliforniaCalifornia Republicans should blame Bush, not Davis, for their state's economic woes. - - - - - - - - - - - -By Robert ScheerJuly 2, 2003  | The other day a woman asked me to sign a petition calling for the recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. Why, I asked. Because he bankrupted the state, she said. When I begged to differ that it was the Bush administration and its buddies at companies like Enron that had put the state into an economic tailspin, she said she was being paid according to the number...

PRESS PASS: Salon Behind on its rentSalon.com disclosed June 30 that it has renegiotionated its headquarters lease after getting sued for falling behind on its rent.The company struck a deal with its landlord late last week that will reduce its monthly rent from $70,000.00 to $12,000.00 according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Salon will also forfeit a $400,000.00 deposit and rent just one floor of the offices instead of the two floors covered by the pervious lease.

How the left lost teen spirit Bill Clinton won the youth vote. Al Gore split it with George Bush. Will Democrats realize they must embrace pop culture, not demonize it, to win back the White House? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Andrew O'Hehir June 17, 2003 | Danny Goldberg might be the demon who haunts Bill O'Reilly and Rupert Murdoch's nightmares, even after the visage of Hillary Rodham Clinton has faded. In his new book, "Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit," the veteran music executive proudly confesses...

Dixie Chicked in the heartlandNew York Times reporter Chris Hedges warns the graduates of Rockford College that a warmongering America is "flirting with its own destruction" -- and gets booed off the stage. - - - - - - - - - - - -May 22, 2003  | Editor's note: When New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, a veteran of conflicts in Central America and the Balkans, delivered the commencement address at Rockford College in Rockford, Ill., on Saturday, he opened another battlefront in the war at home over America's global role. As Hedges delivered his critical remarks on...

The forbidden truth about Jayson BlairIt's the issue nobody at the New York Times wants to discuss: Were a reporter's flagrant journalistic abuses overlooked because he's black? - - - - - - - - - - - -By Eric BoehlertMay 15, 2003  | In 2000 the New York Times published an ambitious 14-part series, titled "How Race Is Lived in America," examining racial attitudes and experiences as told through the lives of ordinary Americans. The project, produced by a team of 34 staffers over 14 months, ran for six weeks and won the Times a Pulitzer Prize for national...

The racist skeletons in Charles Pickering's closetPresident Bush dumped Trent Lott because of his segregationist baggage. So why is he fighting relentlessly for a judge who has refused to come clean about his own bigoted past? - - - - - - - - - - - -By Sean WilentzMay 12, 2003  | When Senate Democrats voted last March to reject Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Majority Leader Trent Lott called the vote "a slap at Mississippi, my state." In fact, the bitter party-line vote on Pickering revolved around the same issues that...

Kenneth Starr's 'illegal' leaks were holding virtually the entire Washington press corps in his thrall.At the top of the independent council's heirarchy of status were his favored reporters and producers: Michael Isikoff at Newsweek, correspondant Jackie Judd and her producer Chris Vlasto at ABC News and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post.Below them, others often scrambled for access. Starr granted it immediately to the networks and newsweeklies, but the big regional papers had to scrape by on the leavings. The New York Times was second best in his eyes to the Post. Cutouts emerged--conservative lawyers close to the investigation--who fed...

Kamiya vs. O'Reilly Salon challenges the bullying Fox host to stop misrepresenting our "Liberation Day" story and debate its author fairly. - - - - - - - - - - - - April 23, 2003 | On April 11, Salon published, as its lead article, a piece by executive editor Gary Kamiya. The headline read: "Liberation Day: Even Those Opposed to the War Should Celebrate a Shining Moment in the History of Freedom -- the Fall of Saddam Hussein." The accompanying photograph showed an Iraqi man kissing an American soldier. Here is the central argument of the article: "To...

The conscience of the left is a wonderful thing to behold. I remember some commentator during the Vietnam war who found his way into the "Current Wisdom" of The American Spectator -- it may have still been The Alternative then -- who blamed Johnson or Nixon or whoever it was who was getting the blame in those days because he had woken up one morning to find that he was "rooting for" the Viet Cong! There he was, rooting (and tooting) against his own country and for its enemies and it was all the government's fault. The bastards! What...