Free Republic

Citing President Bush’s agreeing to a “time horizon” for troop withdrawals from Iraq (second item) and the administration’s having authorized high-level talks with Iran and North Korea, The New York Times notes that McCain – who remains opposed to a timed withdrawal that is not based on conditions on the ground, as well as to diplomatic engagement with “axis of evil” countries – is creating “the perception that he is more conservative than Mr. Bush”: Essentially, as the administration has taken a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, the decision of Mr. McCain to adhere to his more hawkish...

It is often said that the best way to find out how a candidate would act in office if elected, is to see who he/she surrounds himself with. Money is another factor, what people and industries are backing the candidate. These answers should be an indicator of what to expect. Who is behind the man should gauge what kind of man he is. The great Richard Viguerie tells the story of how he and other conservatives had a “seat at the table” of the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan for. His thinking was if Conservatives aren’t at...

If it’s Monday morning, it means I’m talking to one of the Thompson Associates, who offers his thoughts on Jay Cost’s contention that Fred Thompson is running against the mainstream/drive-by media and its expectations as much as his rivals. The Thompson Associate said that he and others close to Thompson had studied the campaign of McCain in 2000, and began to wonder if glowing profiles from the mainstream media, and the traditional definition of ‘good press coverage’ no longer applied in Republican primaries. “What happens if you start from the assumption that the conservative base has no respect at all,...

Every major daily paper in New York took note of President Bush's deci sion to bestow the first Medal of Honor of Operation Enduring Freedom on Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy - a Long Islander who gave his life for his country and his fellow SEALs. Every paper but one, that is.

You’ve heard of institutional memory? Well The New York Times has developed institutional Alzheimer’s.Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus outlines the details of a story that is familiar to anyone who’s picked up a newspaper, watched the news on TV or listened to talk radio over the past few days: [A]n important political figure, arrested for engaging in lewd conduct in a public men's room. Married, with children, he told no one. Instead he pleaded guilty without even hiring a lawyer, hoping the problem would quietly disappear. When, as was inevitable, the press got hold of the story, his erstwhile supporters...

Can the Second Coming be far distant? Given the glimpses of truth beginning to filter through the pages of darkness typically published by the Main Stream Media, one wonders. First, in June, The New York Times surprises all several hundred of its remaining readers with a major news story reporting the developing sense of peace spreading across the battlefield that was Anbar province. Anbar, for nearly three years it was regarded as the most hopeless space and people in all Iraq. It was hopeless. A year after putting into effect the strategies developed by General David Petraeus, Anbar knows evenings,...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Faced with Republican defections, senior US officials are debating whether President George W. Bush should announce soon his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of US troops from Iraqi cities, The New York Times reported on its website late Sunday. Citing unnamed administration officials, the newspaper said Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after September 15, when the top military commander and the US ambassador are scheduled to present a progress report. But some of Bush's aides now believe forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares...

For the second time this year, the New York Times has taken an interest in the vast collection of documents captured in postwar Iraq. The Times first noticed these materials six months ago, when the U.S. government began posting images of them on the Internet. In a dismissive report, the Times noted that intelligence professionals opposed the document release but had gone along under pressure from Republicans engaged in a quixotic attempt to find an ex post facto justification (terror connections, weapons of mass destruction efforts) for the Iraq war. By now, thousands of documents have been posted, and...

Forget Sam Alito's tenuous ties, two decades ago, to the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Where's the outrage about Sen. Edward Kennedy's continuing membership in the Owl Club? Kennedy relentlessly badgered Judge Alito for listing the Princeton group on a job application in 1985, but The Washington Times reported Thursday that the Massachusetts senator remains active with the Owl - one of nine males-only fraternities that in 1984 Harvard "booted from the university for violating federal anti-discrimination laws, authored by Mr. Kennedy." TheNew York Times examined the records of CAP and found no evidence Alito was an active member. Yet the...

HILLARY'S ARMOR: A decades-old story... by Mia T, 01.11.06   Last week, a group called Soldiers for the Truth leaked results of an unpublished Pentagon study that reportedly found that as many as 80 percent of a random sample of Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. On Friday, the New York Times seized on the study. Faster than you can say "quagmire," Hillary landed on ABC's "Good Morning America" to lambaste the Bush administration as "incompetent" and its failure to provide more armor "unforgivable." "We...

Guests: Governor Rick Perry, (R-Texas); Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Director, LSU Hurricane Center; Aaron Broussard, President, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; Tom Friedman, The New York Times; Maureen Dowd, The New York Times; David Brooks, The New York Times Moderator/Panelist: Tim Russert - NBC News

GAIL COLLINS, Editor Gail Collins, the editorial page editor, is responsible for the two opinion pages The Times publishes every day. Her department includes the editorial board, as well as the Op-Ed and Letters departments. The editorial department of the paper is completely separate from the news operations and Ms. Collins answers directly to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. She is assisted by Andrew Rosenthal, deputy editor, David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, and Thomas Feyer, the Letters editor. Under her direction, the 16 members of the board prepare the paper's editorials. The board holds regular meetings to...

The New York Times romanticizes violent felons into impulsive hipsters. “A crush on a pretty photographer, a stunt gone awry and a Lower East Side artist . . . lands in unhip prison green,” the New York Times intoned on the front page of its May 22 “City” section. “Even now, four years later, people who know Simon Curtis still can’t believe the odd series of events that led him to spend the last year in jail.” Readers might find themselves intrigued at this point: Curtis’s tale must be a Kafka-esque one of an innocent man thrown in jail for...

May 9, 2005 Times Panel Proposes Steps to Build Credibility By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE In order to build readers' confidence, an internal committee at The New York Times has recommended taking a variety of steps, including having senior editors write more regularly about the workings of the paper, tracking errors in a systematic way and responding more assertively to the paper's critics. The committee also recommended that the paper "increase our coverage of religion in America" and "cover the country in a fuller way," with more reporting from rural areas and of a broader array of cultural and lifestyle issues....

Two reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about their sources lost another round in the courts today. The reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, now have only one appeal left, to the United States Supreme Court.

THE PUBLIC EDITOR ONE of the more persistent criticisms of The Times comes from those who believe the news pages are the designated disseminator of views passed down from the Olympus that is the editorial page. If there's anyone among the 1,200 newsroom employees of The Times who believes this to be true, I've failed as a reporter: in 16 months, I haven't found a soul here who has ever experienced any pressure, or even endured a suggestion, to conform to the opinions expressed on the editorial page.Hold your hoots. There may be perfectly sensible reasons why some readers believe...

Lawmakers: Writer May Have CIA Leak Info Thursday, February 24, 2005 WASHINGTON — Two lawmakers have sent a letter to the U.S. attorney saying a White House reporter who recently resigned following questions about his identity and background may have information vital to the investigation into who leaked a CIA operative's name to the press. Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., and John Conyers, D-Mich., the ranking Democrats on the House Rules Committee and House Judiciary Committee, respectively, wrote a letter to Patrick Fitzgerald (search), the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, saying the Chicago attorney's office may need to...

When I left a steady newspaper job nine years ago to help launch this online news site, many people called me nuts. Too risky, no credibility and no brand loyalty, the naysayers said. It seemed OK to me: I'd worked at big daily newspapers and a magazine for 15 years, and, as a news hound, welcomed the chance to publish scoops in real time. It's a simple "model," as the MBAs put it: We get a scoop and publish it on the Internet ASAP. No "back shop," no printers, no newspaper delivery people. Readers like it, and the print competitors...

The Polish KoLiber Association's Letter to the Editor of the NYT re. Mr. Craig Smith's Jan 27 article "World Leaders Gather for Auschwitz Ceremony" To the Editor: Dear Sir, I am writing on behalf of myself and the organization I represent to express our utmost outrage as members of the Polish nation, at the depiction of Polish-Jewish relations by Mr. Craig Smith in his article, "World Leaders Gather for Auschwitz Ceremony," published in your January 27th, 2005 edition. We feel deeply offended by the harmful and untrue ideas expressed in the following statement: "for Russia it is a commemoration of...

"RUNAWAY" NYT BOOK REVIEW:REVIEWER BLAMES AUTHOR'S OBSCURITY ON BUSH November 14, 2004 'Runaway': Alice's Wonderland By JONATHAN FRANZEN RUNAWAY By Alice Munro. 335 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25. lice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership. At the risk of sounding like a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer -- and maybe you've learned to recognize and evade these pleas? The same way you've learned not to open bulk mail...

Islamist Web Site Reports Beheading of Second American Published: September 22, 2004 BAGHDAD, Iraq, Wednesday, Sept. 22 - A militant group posted an Internet message on Tuesday night saying it had beheaded the second American hostage in two days. The group, One God and Jihad, led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said in the message that it would release a video of the second killing soon. The group still had not posted the video on the Internet by early Wednesday. The message did not give a name for the victim, but it would presumably be Jack Hensley, 48,...

I'm in a rental car with Al Franken, and we're driving across New Hampshire on the Sunday before the nation's first primary, heading to a John Edwards rally. The Democrats are in a kooky mood following the sudden collapse of Howard Dean in Iowa, and Franken -- comedian, celebrity, scourge -- is spending two days in the state not in any official capacity but as a sort of good-will representative from the party's satiric wing. He is not, as you might think from the outrageous trappings of his comedy, an extreme lefty but rather a devout party man, one who...

<p>REPORTERS in Washington are still laughing over the fact that Sheryl Gay Stolberg, the top congressional reporter for The New York Times, could not recognize one of the most important Republicans in Congress. On Tuesday, Stolberg was overheard nodding toward a lawmaker and asking if he was Rep. Tom Reynolds, an upstate New York GOPer who has raised millions for the party. In fact, the member was Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee. He's a publicity hound and in the paper frequently. How a congressional reporter could not know Reynolds or Davis has got people scratching their heads.</p>

A prominent Canadian researcher is facing claims that data in his widely reported study of a nutritional supplement's effects on thinking and memory in the elderly are so flawed as to have no real value. The scientist, Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, is internationally known for his many contributions to the field of nutrition, and his work has been widely cited in professional and lay publications alike, including The New York Times. Scientific journals and three independent American scientists have raised questions about the validity of Dr. Chandra's findings, saying the study, published in September 2001 in the journal Nutrition, has...

Though dedicated to fairness, the New York Times has relentlessly lashed Mel Gibson (news) and his hit film and denigrated its defenders. The "correction" was buried under the news summary of the April 16 New York Times, and it was somewhat arcane, even by Times standards. Contrary to an earlier report, the correction said, Mel Gibson did not "deploy" TV talkshow hosts like Bill O'Reilly to urge audiences to see "The Passion of the Christ." Gibson discussed his movie with them, but did not "deploy" them. The distinction between discussing and deploying may seem pained, but the Times has found...

Times education columnist tugs the heart, clouds the mind. The New York Times' weekly education column is perhaps the most widely read and influential newspaper space for education policy. The column, which for the last year has been under the pen of ,Michael Winerip, could be used for a rational discussion of the facts about education. Unfortunately, Winerip uses his weekly space in the Grey Lady to muddy our thinking with tear-jerking anecdotes. The column is perhaps the most dangerous newspaper space in the nation for those interested in education reform. Hard evidence has no home in Winerip's column. Each...

A therapy that increases patients' survival rate to 4.7 percent from 1.5 percent may not sound like a breakthrough, but that is how an editorial in a medical journal last week described a new treatment to revive people whose hearts had suddenly stopped. The new advance was an old drug, vasopressin, injected before a shot of the standard therapy, adrenaline. In people who had no pulse or electrical activity in their hearts, a condition called asystole that is almost always fatal, 12 of 257, or 4.7 percent, who got vasopressin survived, in contrast to only 4 of 262, or 1.5...

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."