Free Republic

Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes today about a trend at the White House—and throughout journalism—that threatens the quality and credibility of news-gathering: Public-relations "minders" are injecting themselves into our interviews with politicians, CEOs, and other policymakers. Minder madness joins the surge of "background briefings" and the decline of access to decision-makers as evidence that the White House—and other big instititutions—are manipulating the press. It's that, but it's also something worse: It's evidence that journalists are ceding control when they should be seizing it, accepting canned news rather than breaking it. Farhi writes, "Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between...

The anti-Semitism of the left leaked out through the liberal media this week.The Washington Post published this cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly punching a Palestinian baby. Via Pamela Geller:

On June 22 Washington Post reporter Robert Barnes argued that the Supreme Court created the individual right to keep and bear arms in 2008, via District of Columbia v. Heller. No attempt to grapple with our Founding Father´s words or intentions was made, but Barnes did make clear his belief that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be key to restricting the right the court allegedly created. Barnes makes this point by citing UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, who notes Kennedy voted with the majority in Heller, thereby "establishing the individual gun ownership right." But Winkler also contends that "it was Kennedy

In the National Journal recently, columnist Ron Fournier put it bluntly: “Everyone’s Lying to You About Benghazi.” He said Americans were faced with a choice of two evils — White House spin and GOP conspiracy theories. Having examined this issue repeatedly since it first burst into the news, The Fact Checker could not agree more. Neither side has covered itself with glory here.With all due respect to Rep. Gowdy, the chairman of the new select House committee on the Benghazi attacks, many of the questions he posed have already been answered — and fact-checked. Meanwhile, the White House has done...

After NBC's "Meet The Press" host David Gregory ran an anti-ObamaCare ad targeting Sen. Mark Pryor from Arkansas featuring a couple with a southern accents questioning the confusing nature of the Affordable Care Act, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker objected to Americans for Prosperity using people with southern accents in political ads running in Arkansas: "I think you could find someone who doesn't have a southern accent who is confused by this act," Parker said. "We always seem to find the character who seems a little countrified, who can't just fathom this. You know there there are plenty of smart...

So far, I have heard nothing in response to my email to Washington Post reporters Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson about their possible coordination with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Congressman Henry Waxman or other Democrats in writing the article about the Keystone pipeline that I critiqued here> and here. I will follow up with them in due course. In the meantime, I have written the following letter to Whitehouse and Waxman: Dear Senator Whitehouse and Congressman Waxman: On March 26, you wrote a letter to David Robertson, President of Koch Industries, about Koch’s ostensible relationship to the Keystone Pipeline. I found

A major development occurred today in the scandal surrounding the Washington Post’s attempt to advance Democratic Party talking points by falsely linking Koch Industries to the Keystone Pipeline. In the unlikely event that you are not already familiar with the story, you should begin by reading this post and this one, as well as the one from last October where I dismantled the International Forum on Globalization report that was the basis for the Washington Post’s story of March 20. The facts, very briefly, are these: Koch Industries has no interest in the Keystone Pipeline; it has not lobbied in...

The Left’s obsession with the Koch Brothers is so out of control that the Washington Post, once a respected newspaper, now nothing but a shill for left wing causes, has made itself a laughing stock with its latest article entitled, “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” [snip] The main point of the Post story, which relied uncritically on a two-page report by the far-left International Forum on Globalization (“IFG”), is dead wrong. The Post story itself acknowledges that the tar sands encompass 35 million acres, so Koch’s 1.1 million...

snip Why would the Washington Post embarrass itself by republishing a thoroughly discredited attempt to link the Koch brothers to the Keystone Pipeline? Because that is a Democratic Party talking point, and the Post is a Democratic Party newspaper. But the truth is a little worse than that. Who is Post reporter Juliet Eilperin? Among other things, she is married to Andrew Light, who writes on climate policy for the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is an Obama administration front group headed by John Podesta, who is a “special advisor” to the Obama administration. CAP’s web...

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.