Free Republic

The Internet giant AOL libeled Free Republic as "hosting child pornography" in an article published Wednesday, September 22, 2010, at their Daily Finance news site. The site's masthead reads: Daily Finance An AOL Money & Finance Site.Authored by Daily Finance media columnist Jeff Bercovici, the article entitled Muzzled Reporter Says 'Maw of Yahoo' No Place for Journalism tells the story about John Cook's reasons for leaving Yahoo News and returning to his previous gig with Gawker. According to the article, Cook was the senior national affairs reporter for Yahoo's The Upshot news blog. Bercovici notes that he and Cook are...

The AOL-owned site Daily Finance this morning retracted a passage in an article that falsely stated Free Republic hosted child pornography.The article was about reporter John Cook leaving Yahoo News to return to Gawker. Included in Cook's reasons for leaving, according to Daily Finance reporter Jeff Bercovici, was that Yahoo would not allow him to write about Free Republic "hosting child pornography." The Salon.com article that was linked to support that claim actually stated that Free Republic did not host child pornography.The offending Daily Finance passage now reads:"... On similar grounds, he was prohibited from writing about the conservative website...

Exclusive: Meghan McCain Writes that Palin Brought 'Drama, Stress... Panic' to Campaign Sen. John McCain's Daughter: Sarah Palin's Rise Was 'Too Fast,' 'Too Easy' Aug. 31, 2010— For the first time since the end of her father's 2008 presidential bid, Sen. John McCain's daughter Meghan McCain spoke out about Sarah Palin, writing in a new book that Palin brought "drama, stress, complications, panic and loads of uncertainty" to the losing campaign. Though she writes that during the campaign she wondered if the loss "was Sarah Palin's fault," McCain told "Good Morning America" today in an exclusive interview that Palin was...

For many, the name Chappaquiddick conjures images of a drunken Sen. Edward Kennedy hitting on Mary Jo Kopechne in his Oldsmobile, losing control, and plunging into the water of Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island, adjacent to Martha's Vineyard where President Obama was vacationing. Kopechne, a family friend, drowned; and Teddy fumbled for excuses about what happened. Now, a year after Kennedy died, his lifelong biographer Burton Hersh, armed with fresh interviews with Kennedy's mistress at the time, tells Whispers that the whole July 1969 episode should have been handled as a simple crash, leaving the senator's legacy untainted. "It was...

A freelance audio operator covering a protest at the site of a proposed mosque and community center near Ground Zero has been reprimanded for his behavior. Andrea Lafferty, who was a speaker at the mosque opposition rally, first noticed the audio operator questioning a man in the crowd who was holding a sign which read, "No Sharia Here." On Andrew Brietbart's Big Journalism, Lafferty writes: He was very aggressive, disrespectful and condescending; apparently, he did not like the man's answers about Shariah and pushed the point: "Why do you feel threatened? What are you afraid of? Why can't you answer...

  The transformation of Reverend Al Sharpton from street provocateur to civil rights eminence ranks as one of the more remarkable image makeovers in American public life. And mainstream journalism has played a central role. Anyone doubting as much should read the recent (August 2) cover story of Newsweek magazine, "The Reinvention of the Reverend." [1] Written by Allison Samuels and Jerry Adler, the article is a fawning and misleading portrait of the Harlem-based preacher/politician. The piece doesn't quite beatify Sharpton. But it does make a highly selective use of information, some of it factually wrong, in stating the...

White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors. But the identities of the lunch's attendees won't remain secret forever: Their names will eventually appear on the White House's periodically updated public database of visitor logs. The White House posts them with a three-month lag, so records of August visits won't be available until late November. (Although, since many of those invited already work in the White House every day, their lunch visit may...

Democrat Bill White's campaign is encouraging Texas' arts crowd to focus on Republican Gov. Rick Perry. A supporter of the former Houston mayor is organizing independent filmmakers to show the short films they are making on behalf of his campaign, White spokesman Katy Bacon said Thursday. The films will premiere at an as-yet unscheduled White campaign event in Austin. The initiative came into the spotlight after Perry's campaign noted that a filmmaker advertised on an actors' website for a look-alike for Perry, the state's longest-serving governor who is known for his thick mane of hair. The impersonator would be cast...

Conservatives have long claimed that the media is biased against them and tries hard to shape stories in ways that help Democrats and hurt Republicans. This has sometimes been dismissed as paranoia - as in my former MSNBC co-blogger Eric Alterman's book, "What Liberal Media?" - but it turns out to be truer than they imagined. If this were a Hollywood movie, there would have been clandestine meetings in basements or bars or parking garages. But since it was real life, it was just an e-mail list, called "JournoList," set up by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein. It had over...

JournoList was an email group of approximately 400 journalists, bloggers and academics, who reportedly worked to influence news reporting in favor of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party during and after the 2008 Presidential elections. The latest list of alleged "Journolistas" has turned up a very interesting name - Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect. This man is no basement blogger or CNN hack, he is the author of two books on the President and is connected to some of Obama's most influential enablers. Robert Kuttner's March 2008 "Obama's Challenge:American's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency" is...

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign. The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public –...

The leftist group Think Progress has taken down and edited a video smearing the Tea Party movement as racist after being caught using three year old footage. The group kept in footage and images of leftist provacateurs who were caught infiltrating Tea Party rallies with racist messages.Think Progress originally released a 53 second YouTube video yesterday entitled "Tea Party Racism". That video is now blocked and was replaced this morning with an edited version that runs 50 seconds.Taken out was two short clips of a white man yelling, "Go home wetbacks." That footage turned out to have been posted to...

The mainstream media isn’t biased. The mainstream media isn’t out of touch. The mainstream media isn’t living in some Manhattan/cocktail party bubble. The mainstream media is corrupt. Corrupt to its very core. Willingly, happily, consciously and giddily corrupt. From the day these left-wing propagandists exit whatever J-school taught them how to think, they are on a mission to support, defend, and uphold the Left. And as we’re seeing today, the whole sorry, wicked lot of them have just jumped in bed with the White House and the NAACP to get their lying, left-wing freak on. Let’s use a little Matrix...

There are glimmers of hope for Democrats battling to retain control of Congress in this fall's elections, with the party holding a slender edge in public trust for shepherding the economy and small gains in those saying their finances are healthy, according to a new poll. The reeling economy remains the American public's top concern, according to an Associated Press-GfK Poll conducted earlier this month, making public attitudes about it crucial for both parties' hopes in November. The good news for Democrats: By a slim margin (47% to 42%), people trust them more than Republicans to guide the economy. And...

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll includes questions about the tea parties that have the nascent movement's popularity slipping badly. Overall, since the last poll, the percentage of Americans who hold an unfavorable view of the movement has jumped from 39 percent to 50 percent. The leading edge of that has been a collapse in support from 18-29-year-olds. In March, they had a positive, 43-38 view of the tea parties. They've swung hard to a negative view, 27-60. One result that surprises me: a seeming tumble in tea party support from white Southerners. In March, only 30 percent had an...

It may seem like a small thing, considering the state of the union and international issues of the day, but let me share some facts surrounding a most recent illustration of the untrustworthiness of America’s mainstream media. Yesterday, Todd and I spent our Memorial Day evening exchanging emails with NBC in regards to the interview they conducted this morning with our new neighbor. As you’ll recall, the “journalist” Joe McGinniss moved all the way from Massachusetts to Wasilla – literally right next door to our home – after tracking us down in various forums this past year, so that he...

On the day after his historic primary win, National Public Radio rabidly went after Rand Paul, newly minted GOP nominee for Kentucky Senator, trying to make him out to be a KKK sympathizer or perhaps a racist that would have agreed to keep Jim Crow alive and well in 1964. This rabid, left-wing attack is uncalled for and, further, is meant only to stir anti-Republican hatred and not to help voters discover anything relevant about nominee Rand Paul. Nearly at the top of the interview the host of NPR's All Things Considered tried to paint Mr. Paul as some sort...

Farewell to the Tea Party. It was fun while it lasted. It certainly got a lot of undue media attention. But it died a premature, yet welcome, death. Ironically, what killed the Tea Party was not opposition from either the Republican or Democratic Party. The Tea Party committed suicide, rendered irrelevant by a succession of current events. The central premise of Tea Party loyalists, after all, was that they were anti-government. You know the drill: All government is bad. Taxes are bad. Government bureaucrats are bad. Then, unfortunately for them, just as they were gaining traction, tea baggers ran into...

Not long ago, Faisal Shahzad had a pretty enviable life: He became an American citizen after emigrating from Pakistan, where he came from a wealthy family. He earned an MBA. He had a well-educated wife and two kids and owned a house in a middle-class Connecticut suburb. In the past couple of years, though, his life seemed to unravel: He left a job at a global marketing firm he'd held for three years, lost his home to foreclosure and moved into an apartment in an impoverished neighborhood in Bridgeport. And last weekend, authorities say, he drove an SUV loaded with...

Santa Barbara is about as far from Greenville, S.C., as you can get in the continental United States, but Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) cares more about principle than geography. He is leading a conservative insurgency across America. Speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center's annual retreat here late last month, DeMint told the faithful that if they want to return to the principles of limited government, they need to elect people who believe in limited government: "I came into the Senate with 55 Republicans, George W. Bush in the White House and large majorities of Republicans in the House, and...