Free Republic

The national media are outraged this week by an announcement from Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to observe April as Confederate History Month. Several news outlets have jumped on the story, but the most energetic complaints came from the Washington Post, which published more than half a dozen pieces in the same day. At this point it’s safe to say the Post suffers from McDonnell Derangement Syndrome. During last year’s campaign, the Post enthusiastically endorsed his Democrat challenger, went into overdrive to push a faux-scandal that backfired rather epically, and then, upon McDonnell winning, immediately set to work undermining him with...

It's hardly news that black conservatives are reviled among much of the left. There seems to be a sense among much of the liberal media that they have betrayed their own interests through their conservative principles. Few, however, would have the (dare I say it) audacity to lump prominent and accomplished African American political figures in with oppressive genocidal dictators and serial killers. But TheRoot.com, a blog owned by the Washington Post, seems to have no qualms about doing so, as evidenced in its list of 21 "Black Folks We'd Like To Remove From Black History". Among the names are...

The Washington Post had an article by Howard Schneider yesterday about the dispute over property in in Sheikh Jarrah, a small Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem. I have no problem with an article that presents both the Israeli and Palestinian side of a story like this. I have a huge problem with asserting facts which simply are not in evidence and skewing the picture in favor of one side, in this case the Palestinians.The article plays fast and loose with the facts. For example, it states that "Israel asserts its jurisdiction over the entire city -- including Arab areas it...

Three-quarters of Americans say that they support openly gay people serving in the U.S. military, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a finding that could lend momentum to the Obama administration's effort to dismantle the policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." SNIP*** President Obama called for the policy's repeal last month in his State of the Union address, and the military's top civilian and military leadership has also expressed personal support for a repeal. SNIP*** The percentage of Americans who say they support gays openly serving is the same as a Post-ABC News poll found in July...

Sarah Palin, the former Governor of Alaska, Republican mega-star and Fox News contributor, was quick to fire back at Washington Post blog, The Plum Line, for a report that Palin is at war with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin spokesperson Meg Stapleton told Fox, "The Washington Post is trying hard to take the pressure off the White House by creating a side controversy, but it is missing the point: as the Governor has said, it doesn't matter who says the "r" word: it should no longer be part of our lexicon." Limbaugh used the "r" word...

In Sunday’s column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the increase in typos and other copy editing errors stood trial. Apparently, angry letters have started coming more frequently, wondering, for example, “If they don’t care about basics like grammar and spelling, how much do they care about factual accuracy?” Alexander served up the standard Old Media 2010 answer: our staffs have shrunk! But he also had a bizarre new scapegoat, namely, search engine optimization. Huh? “Through buyouts and voluntary departures, the number of full-time copy editors declined from about 75 to 43 between early 2005 and mid-2008,” he explained. “There...

Never one to run from a fist fight, I got into one at high school following the last class on a late Spring day of my sophomore year. My opponent, a short, flabby, mouthy kid, and I walked out to the athletic field. He’d been relentlessly provoking me to fight for several months and I’d finally had enough. So, out we went to do battle, climbing the perimeter chain-link fence so as not to be caught settling our differences on the school grounds. I was pretty confident I could give this kid the beating he’d been asking for. I had...

Former Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, one of the first women to lead a major U.S. newspaper, died in an accident involving an automobile in New Zealand on Saturday, according to her family. She was 68. Howell was traveling in New Zealand on vacation with her husband, C. Peter Magrath, at the time of the accident. Her stepson Nick Coleman said Howell suffered fatal injuries when struck by a vehicle. She lived in Glen Echo.

Less than a year ago, during yet another public discussion about the future of traditional media, I said that it seemed extremely unlikely that, for instance, Newsweek would last another five years, provoking guffaws among blogger types and stout denials from the magazine (i.e. a minor kerfuffle). Newsweek and its parent, the Washington Post Co., announced yesterday a significant cut in its rate base, a further round of buyouts and layoffs, and a plan to make an already anorexic magazine even thinner. The Washington Post Co., for good measure, added its own bad news and bleak outlook. My prediction about...

Los Angeles (AP) - The Washington Post will close its remaining U.S. bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago at the end of the year to save money and will focus news efforts on covering the nation's capital. Six correspondents are being offered jobs in Washington, while three news aides will be let go Dec. 31. In a staff memo Tuesday, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told workers that the paper needed to concentrate its "journalistic firepower" on its central mission of covering Washington, D.C. In the last decade, the paper has closed bureaus in Miami, Denver and Austin, Texas....

According to an informed source, the Washington Post will soon announce that it will close its news bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as part of a cost-saving measure. It's unclear just when the closings will take place; however, the source says that the Post will not be laying off correspondents in those bureaus, but rather will be bringing them back to the mother ship, the better to focus on the Post's core mission of reporting on Washington. More to come. UPDATE, 5:03 P.M.: Memo from management---though correspondents are spared the ax, three news aides will lose their...

The Washington Post is closing its remaining U.S. news bureaus in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but will retain the six reporters from those bureaus and recall them to Washington. The paper's spokesperson, Kris Coratti, confirmed the closures Tuesday. Three news aides, one per each bureau, will be cut. "These changes are part of The Post's long-term strategy to focus our resources on covering Washington as a place to live and its impact on the nation and the world," Coratti wrote in an email to TheWrap. "The Post will continue to cover national news of interest to our core...

Washington Post closing all US bureaus outside DC The Washington Post is closing its last US bureaus outside the nation's capital as the money-losing newspaper retrenches to focus on politics and local news. Published: 12:48AM GMT 25 Nov 2009 "At a time of limited resources and increased competitive pressure, it's necessary to concentrate our journalistic firepower on our central mission of covering Washington and the news, trends and ideas that shape both the region and the country's politics, policies and government," the newspaper's editor, Marcus Brauchli, wrote in a memo to employees that was obtained by Reuters. The Post will...

Yesterday, the White House announced that it was removing Alma Thomas’ plagiaristic piece “Watusi (Hard Edge)” from its walls. The White House announced that the painting was moved “because it didn’t fit the space right.” The Washington Post pointed out that posters at FreeRepublic.com had examined the similarity between “Watusi (Hard Edge)” and Henri Matisse’s “The Snail” (1953), ignoring the fact that Big Hollywood actually broke the story. The Washington Post covered for the White House, explaining, “Stephens’s explanation makes sense because it is inconceivable that the White House’s art experts would imagine Thomas’s painting was fraudulent or a copy...

Bob McDonnell won big tonight in the Virginia gubernatorial race, as did the entire Virginia Republican party. The implications of the race will be sorted out soon enough. But one big loser is the Washington Post which may unwittingly have helped the Republican, despite their best efforts to put his opponent over the top. On the last weekend in August the Post ran the first of dozens of stories about McDonnell's 1989 masters' thesis, in which he wrote, among other things, that working women were detrimental to families and that government should favor traditional marriage over gay unions. While they...

The NYT is calling Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of the Washington Post, a liar. The NYT has reported this morning -- in a brief, buried "postscript" in the corrections column -- that it now has evidence that Brauchli lied last July when he told the NYT that he didn't know the paper's controversial corporate-sponsored dinner parties would be off-the-record. The NYT doesn't state flatly that Brauchli lied. But the juxtaposition of the two Brauchli statements in the postscript make clear the NYT's position that he misrepresented the truth in interviews with the NYT. [UPDATE: In an email to The...

When Hell freezes over five times in succession and rhinoceri write sonnets on Pluto, the Washington Post's Robin Givhan will stop writing love letters to Michelle Obama. Here the Obamas broke precedent and put the prestige of the presidency on the line, as well as ignoring much more pressing problems at home, all for a spectacularly unsuccessful and remarkably narcissistic effort to secure the Olympics for the Chicago Way, and all Givhan can do is gush about how wonderfully Michelle Obama had performed anyway. Givhan wrote that the First Lady "was her team's most valuable player." And, quoting others, ""She...

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are breaking up their news service after 47 years, making it the latest casualty of the media upheaval driven by the array of alternative information and entertainment sources on the Internet.

Veteran Washington Post reporter Daryl Fears, part of a two-person writer team, unmistakably wrote that filmmaker John O'Keefe had “said” he “targeted” ACORN, the advocacy group, for his candid-camera expose, because it registered voters to defeat Republicans. O'Keefe said no such thing. It was a non-quote made out of whole cloth by reporter Fears, and published as fact on Sept. 17. Making the falsehood exponentially worse, the Post story then was retailed worldwide by the Associated Press.

A few weeks ago Washington Post Managing Editor Raju Narisetti rued in this tweet via his Twitter account: “We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not. But we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.” Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander cited the tweet in a Friday night blog post about how the newspaper has issued new guidelines, on the use of social network sites, which state “nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment.” That forced Narisetti to close his Twitter account. Alexander recounted:...