Free Republic

The Board of Directors of The Washington Post Company (WPO) today announced ... an accelerated cash dividend ... This accelerated dividend is intended by the Board to be in lieu of regular quarterly dividends that the Company otherwise would have declared and paid in calendar year 2013

By tomorrow night we’ll likely know the name of the next president. But we already know the loser in this election cycle: political reporters. They’ve disgraced themselves. Conservatives have long complained about liberal bias in the media, and with some justification. But it has finally reached the tipping point. Not in our lifetimes have so many in the press dropped the pretense of objectivity in order to help a political candidate. The media are rooting for Barack Obama. They’re not hiding it. Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president...

The White House on Wednesday shot down rumors that President Obama nixed an operation to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack in Benghazi after former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made the claim on national television. “Neither the President nor anyone in the White House denied any requests for assistance in Benghazi during the attack,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told The Hill via email.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails. But Fox News has raised some questions about the attack that deserve a clearer answer from the Obama administration. Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reported Friday that CIA officers in Benghazi had been told to “stand down” when they wanted to deploy from their base at the annex to repel the attack on the consulate, about a mile away. Fox also reported that the CIA officers requested military support when the annex came under fire later that...

Last week’s Democratic National Convention helped President Obama improve his standing against Republican Mitt Romney, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, but did little to reduce voter concern about his handling of the economy. The survey shows that the race remains close among likely voters, with Obama at 49 percent and Romney at 48 percent, virtually unchanged from a poll taken just before the conventions. But among a wider sample of all registered voters, Obama holds an apparent edge, topping Romney at 50 percent to 44 percent, and has clear advantages on important issues in the campaign when...

“YOU ARE ENTITLED to the clearest possible choice because the time for choosing is drawing near,” vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan told the Republican National Convention in Tampa in his hard-hitting acceptance speech Wednesday night. “So here is our pledge: We will not duck the tough issues — we will lead.” Those are fine words; we have heard the sentiment before, including from the incumbent president. But if Mr. Ryan and Mitt Romney want credit for not ducking, and if they truly believe that voters are entitled to the clearest possible choice, it would behoove the candidates to offer...

Glenn Kessler is The Washington Post's laughably biased fact checker, and when you think of Kessler, remember this -- remember the "fact" checker who called Romney a liar for saying a president who didn’t go to Israel didn't go to Israel. This guy is utterly shameless, and this morning he's having a full-blown tantrum. Back in July, Kessler did everything in his power to protect Obama from his unbelievably revealing "you didn't build that" moment. At the time, Kessler awarded Romney three of his childish Pinocchios for the unpardonable sin of, you know, holding the president accountable for his words....

Thirty-two years ago, Ronald Reagan asked voters a simple question that devastated Jimmy Carter's chances for a second term, and that presidential candidates have had to answer ever since: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? In 1980, voters overwhelmingly said no and gave Carter the heave-ho. When times are good, incumbents ask that question, and when times are bad, challengers ask it. It's a personal question, one that has a different answer for each voter.Overall, though, the Washington Post reports that the answer isn't just no, but hell no. Household incomes have dropped 4.8% during...

"Since when does serving up junk food give someone a license to preach?" carped Petula Dvorak as she opened her August 14 piece, "Now featuring filet o' fracas."* Gee, I dunno, Petula, maybe 1791, when the First Amendment -- you know, that pesky little document that guarantees freedom of speech and religion among other things -- was ratified. "We've got the Papa John's pizza guys weighing in on the health-care debate, while the burger slingers out West at In-N-Out can't serve up a cheeseburger without a Bible verse," Dvorak carped. Later in her Metro section column, she essentially compared the...

What do you think about Oreo’s Facebook posting of a rainbow creme-filled cookie, which has ignited an Internet-wide conversation? Take the poll. (Poll middle of the page)

It has been a Junius Horribilis for President Obama. Job growth has stalled, the Democrats have been humiliated in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a “cascade” of national-security leaks from his administration, and he is now on record as saying that the “private sector is doing fine.” Could it get any worse? Early Monday morning, Obama learned that it could. His aides delivered the news to him that his commerce secretary had been...

The ombudsman is being bombarded by input from readers, via e-mail and phone calls, about the story that Post reporter Jason Horowitz wrote on Mitt Romney’s teenage years at the prestigious Cranbrook School in Michigan. The story leads with an anecdote about Romney and some of his friends in his dormitory tackling and pinning to the ground an unpopular classmate and forcibly cutting off his bleached-blond, longish hair. The boy, John Lauber, was frightened and in tears, Horowitz explained, and the boy turned out to be gay. The rest of the deeply reported story provides extensive context to Romney’s years...

The Washington Post was already skating on thin ice with its fantastically convenient hit piece on Mitt Romney, published in perfect synchronization with President Obama’s embrace of gay marriage. Designed to paint Romney as a mean-spirited homophobic bully during his prep school days – which, let us remember, occurred over seventeen thousand days ago – the ridiculously bloated and overly-dramatic 5000-word Post “expose” related the story of how Romney allegedly led a gang of high-school hooligans and forcibly cut the hair of a “presumably gay” fellow student named John Lauber. The piece does a great deal of mind-reading to insinuate...

The Washington Post Company‘s dismal quarterly earnings release last week was received with something of a shrug—more of the same. But the report is worse than the reaction suggests and raises fundamental questions about the Post’s strategy, not just for the newspaper, but for the whole company. If you hadn’t heard, the Washington Post Company is basically a for-profit college/SAT-prep firm that sidelines as a cable-TV provider and newspaper publisher. The august Washington Post (I’ll italicize Post here when referring to the newspaper and won’t when referring to its parent) contributed just 15 percent to its namesake company’s revenue in...

It is customary when a newspaper makes an after-publication correction or change to an article for it to notify readers that an alteration has taken place. Some time after the Washington Post published a 5000-word hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, a key edit was made to the article without such a notification.

In a WaPo article by Rachel Weiner regarding WV inmate Richard Judd embarrassing Obama in the Dem primary, can anyone guess what she gave as one of the main reasons for this occurrence? Now, this is really difficult, and will surprise you.(sarc)

Grim News in WaPoVille Washington Post, it sucks to be you: The Washington Post Co. reported its first-quarter earnings on Friday, and the news coming out of the newspaper division was mostly grim. The unit lost $22.6 million in the quarter, with revenue down 8% and revenue from print advertising specifically falling 17%. Meanwhile, the Post just reported one of the biggest circulation drops of any major newspaper with the lucrative Sunday edition selling 5.2% fewer copies and the daily edition skidding almost 10%. Oh, and newsroom leaders are so distressed about the way the business decline is affecting them,...

Late last week the hallowed Washington Post announced a first-quarter operating loss of $22.6 million as print ads sank 17 percent year-over-year and online revenue dipped 7 percent, too. Weekday circulation is now under 500,000, falling almost 10 percent, while the company's onetime moneymaker, the education unit Kaplan, lost some millions as well. Journalists at the paper are well aware of the problems and last month had a dark-sounding "secret meeting" to talk things out. Adweek reports that ten of the paper's top staffers met with president and general manager Steve Hills over sandwiches to chat "about the challenges that...

Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist slammed for radicalizing Washington Washington is more dysfunctional than it has been in 40 years, and while Democrats have deserved their share of the blame over the years, today "the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party," write Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. What makes their column particularly interesting is that Ornstein is not liberal, but a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Together, they call the GOP an "insurgent outlier in American politics" because of the...

We need to start taking student loan debt seriously, both as a troubling moral issue and as a ticking economic time bomb. By some reports, student loan debt will exceed 1 trillion dollars this year, more than the credit card debt of all Americans. A whole generation of young Americans is at risk in this excessive borrowing. They fall further and further behind in “servicing their debt” because they have no way to keep up with the payments as many of them are unemployed or underemployed. They will delay starting marriage and families; they dare not take the risk of...