Free Republic

With just a few quick strokes of the pen, President Donald Trump on Friday banned -- temporarily, for now -- more than 134 million people from entering the United States.

If there’s one thing we can say about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s unlike any other world leader we’ve seen to date. The problem, however, is that his differences fail to set him apart in a positive manner. Almost daily, Trump tweets about the “biased media,” “fake news,” or a world leader who has suddenly done something so terrible that he must take to Twitter to publicly berate them. Notice, however, that it’s always someone else with the problem. It’s never him. However, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School seems to think...

First Lady Melania Trump prevailed Friday in the first round of a $150 million libel suit she filed against a Maryland blogger over a report he published last summer about claims that Trump worked as a "high-end escort." Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Sharon Burrell rejected arguments from lawyers for blogger Webster Tarpley to dismiss Trump's suit for failing to meet the "actual malice" standard for public figures. The judge also turned down Tarpley's effort to dismiss the suit under a Maryland law aimed at quickly shutting down bad-faith lawsuits intended to intimidate people speaking out on issues of public...

At the moment, media outlets want nothing to do with BuzzFeed, the “news” website that published unverified, “fake” allegations against Donald Trump. The allegations are so flimsy that even Trump’s political opponents never used them. What few know is that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti has a history of knowingly spreading false information. He has used fraudulent websites and email accounts to pretend to be people he wished to defame. I was one of his victims.

The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism, but it needs to change even more quickly, according to an internal report that recommends the company expand training for reporters and editors, hire journalists with more varied skills and deepen engagement with readers as a way to build loyalty and attract the subscriptions necessary to survive. The report, released to The Times newsroom on Tuesday, is the culmination of a year of work by a group of seven journalists who were asked by Dean Baquet, the executive editor, to conduct a review of the newsroom and...

If there was any doubt, the uproar this week over BuzzFeed’s publication of unverified allegations about President-elect Donald J. Trump made clear that the gatekeeper role once played by major news media organizations has vanished in the digital age.This poses a deep danger for legitimate, aggressive journalism, especially from the president-elect, who has been consistent in his heavy-handed demonization of any and all media whenever he dislikes critical but accurate stories about him.BuzzFeed’s irresponsible decision to publish a seamy and wholly unsubstantiated research dossier about Mr. Trump by a former British spy gave him the opportunity to attack not only...

So now we know: This is how it's going to be after Inauguration Day, too. When coverage falls afoul of Donald Trump, the soon-to-be-president will feed the media itself into the news grinder. As Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon, the new administration is going on permanent offense; Trump will invert the usual equation to subject individual journalists and their employers to scrutiny and slashing attacks of the kind usually reserved for public officials. Trump started Wednesday's cyclone of a press conference with a warning sheathed in seeming compliments: Thanks for the restraint in holding off on all...

Trump’s attacks on the mainstream media were a cornerstone of his campaign and last week he called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” but forcing reporters to undergo random drug tests would provoke a media meltdown.

The Army general who heads the D.C. National Guard and has an integral part in overseeing the inauguration said Friday that he will be removed from command effective at 12:01 p.m. Jan. 20, just as Donald Trump is sworn in as president.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press," Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) said he does not believe Donald Trump is a "legitimate president," citing Russian interference in last year's election. Asked whether he would try to forge a relationship with the president-elect, Lewis said that he believes in forgiveness, but added, "it's going to be very difficult. I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president." When pressed to explain why, he cited allegations of Russian hacks during the campaign that lead to the release of internal documents from the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton's campaign co-chairman,...

01/13/17   Why CNN's report was even worse than BuzzFeed's unsubstantiated report Aaron Rossiter | 1/13/17 | 11:50PM/ESTCNN reported that a two-page summary of a political opposition research file compiled by Trump's political opponents was included in a presidential level classified briefing. In the CNN report, they indicated that the intelligence chiefs considered the political operative who compiled the file credible and his sources credible. WATCH JAKE TAPPER'S REVIEW OF THE REPORTBecause it cited the intelligence chiefs as likely believing the political operative, the CNN report left a strong impression that the file probably contained true information. The BuzzFeed...

Jeb Bush DENIES BBC claim that he ordered the dirty dossier - so if it wasn't him, who paid the shadowy research firm which started filth file two years ago? Washington-based opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, was hired in 2015 One of Trump’s Republican detractors is said to have paid the company Initially FusionGPS was asked to look into Trump's business dealings But the research angle changed after DNC hacking emerged in June 2016 FusionGPS then contracted ex-MI6 officer Chris Steele's Orbis company Steele had gold-plated contacts in Moscow from years of spying on Russia Democrats took over funding the...

New England is likely to experience significantly greater warming over the next decade, and beyond, than the rest of the planet, according to new findings by climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The region’s temperatures are projected to rise by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels by 2025, according to the study, published this week in PLOS One, a journal published by the Public Library of Science... “I tell my students that they’re going to be able to tell their children, ‘I remember when it used to snow in Boston,’ ” said Ray Bradley, an...

See also: Ben Smith and the Memory Hole. Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith has had a rough week. As the man who decided to publish the “secret dossier” about Donald Trump’s alleged hijinks in Moscow, he has suffered the ultimate indignity of having even MSNBC call him out for publishing fake news. Earlier he sent a note to Buzzfeed staff explaining his decision. “Our presumption is to be transparent in our journalism and to share what we have with our readers,” he wrote. “We have always erred on the side of publishing.” If true, Ben Smith has come a long way...

Christopher Steele, who wrote reports on compromising material Russian operatives allegedly had collected on U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, is a former officer in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, according to people familiar with his career. Former British intelligence officials said Steele spent years under diplomatic cover working for the agency, also known as MI6, in Russia and Paris and at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. After he left the spy service, Steele supplied the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with information on corruption at FIFA, international soccer's governing body....

An incensed President-Elect Donald Trump has asked the First Amendment gurus on his legal team if it is permissible to expel or restrict CNN and BuzzFeed News personnel from White House press corps, a transition insider told True Pundit. At a raucous press conference Wednesday Trump warned BuzzFeed and CNN “would suffer the consequences” for publishing “fake news” about him, though he did not elaborate.

The media has given up even pretending to report facts about Donald Trump anymore, openly admitting that their latest report about Donald Trump and Russian prostitutes is not backed up by any evidence.  Have you ever before seen the New York Times or Washington Post publish a piece they admit is unsubstantiated?  If it is unsubstantiated, then why publish it? Anyway, the meat of the unsubstantiated allegations is that the Russians have blackmail material on Donald Trump.  The claim is that when he went to a hotel in Russia, he ordered the presidential suite where he knew Obama and...

Outside the Oval Office is a small rectangular room with two side-by-side, nondescript wooden desks. In one sits President Obama’s personal secretary. In the other is Brian Mosteller, the man who sweats the small stuff so that the president doesn’t have to. Few have even heard of Mosteller, but if you look closely at photographs taken inside the White House, you can often glimpse him at the edge of the frame, omnipresent. From his chair, he is the only person in the White House with a direct view of the president at his desk. No one gets in the Oval...

The latest example of “fake news” is the wild misrepresentation of a message from the Republican National Committee that caused a Christmas day frenzy as the establishment media and bitter online leftists pushed the theory that a reference to a “new King” in a paragraph talking about Jesus was an allusion to Donald Trump. {..snip..}

Inaccuracies, melodrama, bias, outrage: Journalists showcased plenty during election night news coverage which proved to be intense — and endless. The phenomenon has taken a toll. The weary nation appears to be peeved at the press, and that includes Democrats and Republicans alike who are literally turning away.