Free Republic

Billionaire Warren Buffet’s iconic company Berkshire Hathaway will trade 1.6 million shares of Graham Holdings stock in exchange for WPLG, according to a report from Deadline It’s been known for a while that Buffett wants to exit Graham Holdings, formerly known as the Washington Post Co., who are left with only their TV stations and a business in the education sector. Buffett will allegedly get WPLG plus an unspecified amount of cash. The Washington Post company bought WPLG in 1969 and changed its call letters to WPLG in memory of Phillip L. Graham, the husband of Washington Post publisher Katherine...

Five-Thirty-Eight's Nate Silver mocked New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a "hedgehog" who "only knows one thing." When asked to describe what a hedgehog is, Silver pointed to Friedman specifically and the op-ed columnists at the Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal: ... They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions based on them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week. If you know the subject that Thomas Friedman or whatever is writing about, you don’t have to read the column. You can...

Shrewd reporting about the Ukraine crisis comes from The Onion, which declared that American reaction is evenly divided — between the “wholly indifferent” and the “grossly misinformed.” In the latter category, it seems, belong the chest-thumpers who blame the Crimea catastrophe on President Obama. “We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression,” scolded Senator Lindsey Graham (revealing his own weakness: grammar). “President Obama needs to do something!” Likewise, Senator John McCain complains that Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless,” so that “nobody believes in America’s strength anymore.” Representative Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, worries that...

The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Peruta v. San Diego, released minutes ago, affirms the right of law-abiding citizens to carry handguns for lawful protection in public. California law has a process for applying for a permit to carry a handgun for protection in public, with requirements for safety training, a background check, and so on. These requirements were not challenged. The statute also requires that the applicant have “good cause,” which was interpreted by San Diego County to mean that the applicant is faced with current specific threats. (Not all California counties have this narrow interpretation.) The Ninth Circuit, in...

Yesterday, I confronted outgoing General Motors CEO Dan Akerson, the speaker at a National Press Club luncheon. At a press conference beforehand, and through the first question at the conclusion of his remarks, I requested that GM repay taxpayers the $10 billion in direct GM bailout costs. Akerson's refusal dominated much of the media coverage of the event. This was clearly not the story line that Akerson intended. In short, we happily stepped all over his message that the bailout is a success and that GM is back. The USA Today/Detroit Free Press story is headlined. "GM's CEO rejects repaying...

Is the deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program good for the United States? Yes No

<p>The longtime headquarters building of The Washington Post is being sold to a real estate development company for $159 million.</p> <p>Graham Holdings Co. is the former parent of The Washington Post newspaper. The company announced a deal Wednesday to sell the downtown Washington building to Carr Properties. The sale is expected to close at the end of March 2014.</p>

It’s telling that a new report on the Obama administration’s dealings with journalists comes from the Committee to Protect Journalists — an organization that normally focuses on press freedoms abroad. President Obama’s White House has been so extraordinarily unfriendly toward investigative journalism — not just unfriendly, but an outright enemy — that CPJ had to look inward this time, examining the loss of freedoms of the press in our own country rather than pointing out problems in some Third World backwater. And the report, by Leonard Downie Jr., a former executive editor of The Washington Post, found that the administration...

On the pages of The Washington Post, columnist Kathleen Parker (who poses as a Republican) compared the Republican Party to a fictional mafia crime family and refers to Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz as "Ted bin Laden," an obvious reference to the Osama bin Laden, the Islamist terrorist responsible for the murder of thousands of Americans: In trying to understand the Republican Party’s internal battles, it helps to think of Michael and Sonny. Corleone, that is. … That would be Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who grabbed headlines by speaking for 21 hours against Obamacare. Cruz is neither Michael nor...

The Washington Post is being sued for age and race discrimination by a longtime black advertisement department employee who was abruptly fired and replaced with a younger white man in what the lawsuit suggests was part of a larger effort by the paper to push out older black workers. Sounds sinister, but in the federal lawsuit, which has not been reported anywhere else, David DeJesus, 59, does not actually allege any overtly discriminatory behavior by his boss, such as racial slurs or derogatory comments based on his age. But thanks to the expansive interpretation of civil rights laws that the...

Websites belonging to the Washington Post, CNN, and Time have been attacked by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Some links on the sites were redirecting readers to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The breaches have been blamed on a third-party link recommendation service that all three sites used. The SEA has hit several media companies in recent months, mostly via social media. In this attack, the group was able to manipulate links served by content recommendation service Outbrain, which has now been taken offline.

The Washington Post’s Web site was disrupted Thursday morning by a hacker group sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that apparently launched a coordinated wave of attacks on American news outlets. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army briefly infiltrated The Post’s Web site and redirected readers of some stories to the SEA’s site. The organization supports Assad, who has led a long, bloody campaign to crush a rebellion in Syria. The intrusion lasted for about 30 minutes and affected a number of foreign-news stories. “We’ve taken defensive measures, and at this time there are no other issues affecting...

The Washington Post is a legend in the minds of the Washington elite, so its financial decline has caused quiet panic. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik put it, "You think of stories like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, these are all stories where The Washington Post led the nation's understanding, the world's understanding of some major issues." Outside the liberal media, you wonder how long Post fans can wallow in their Nixon-crumbling polyester "glory days" in the early 1970s. But nostalgia ruled as the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com. "Now he is...

Transformationally speaking, technological innovation is easy. Culture change is not. Jeff Bezos knows this. If he wants to kindle his newly-acquired Washington Post into Amazon Prime, he's free to do so. Technically enhancing the Post will be a digital snap. Getting his paper — pun intended — to adopt, adapt to or embrace an authentically customer-centric Bezosian vision, however, will prove very, very hard. The reasons for that resistance will have little to do with money but almost everything to do with the Post's proud, defiantly elitist and self-righteously professional self-image (a self-image equally ensconced in papers like The New...

I don’t like to plug, honestly, but my anthology Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade includes an essay written twelve years ago, upon the death of Washington Post proprietor Kay Graham. Excerpt: The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of risibility: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”… No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking...

  “Benghazi coverup? What Benghazi coverup!?? We no longer cover phony scandals” In hindsight that trip to the Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga to talk about (small case) jobs, jobs jobs makes more sense. Now that we can officially announce that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, you see the perfect symmetry, right? Coming soon: all the news that’s fit to read Even some of our most loyal supporters wondered why Big Guy would pick Amazon - king of the crappy, minimum wage job that makes Walmart look like a worker’s paradise - to discuss his  "better bargain for the...

While conservatives and liberals consider the political leanings of Washington Post buyer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in an attempt to divine how his politics will affect those of the historic institution, the truth appears to be far simpler: the Post is now Bezos’ latest political tool in a crony capitalist effort to work with the Obama administration. How else to explain President Obama puzzling decision last week to roll out his corporate tax plan at an Amazon.com fulfillment center? Bezos spent $250 million of his own money to purchase the Post, which is bleeding money at an incredible rate

The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a surprise deal that has shocked the industry.

Journalists responded with shock, awe and a predictable amount of snark to the news that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post. The news was announced Monday afternoon. Bezos himself, rather than his company, bought the Washington newspaper for roughly $250 million. The sale includes just the Post and not other publications owned by The Washington Post Company. Esquire's Chris Jones joked about Bezos's decision not to buy the contrarian Slate.com, which The Washington Post Company owned for the last few years.....

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...