Free Republic

There was a bit of good news about the future of public discourse this week. The United States Supreme Court, even though stacked with right-wingers, sounded like it was ready to give the Biden administration the go-ahead to try to persuade social-media platforms not to put out content promoting nonsense about the presidential election, conspiracy theories about the pandemic and other assorted bilge and crackpottery... When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio, and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along, regulatory bodies like Canada’s CRTC backed off. It...

VIDEOSPOILER ALERT: I still have my $10.Remember the bygone era of the "Big Three" anchors in which almost everybody could easily rattle off the names of the major network anchors? Dan Rather of CBS, Tom Brokaw of NBC, and Peter Jennings of ABC? Well, as you can see in this video, those glory years for the network news are long over. To illustrate this, on April 29, 2023 I offered $10 to people I met at the Ft. Lauderdale Swap Shop to name for me all three anchors of those same networks.

Democrat Charlie Crist has picked up his third endorsement by a major Florida newspaper — this time, from the Tampa Bay Times, under the headline: “A decent man or a bully?” Previously, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post recommended voting for Crist, who served as governor as a Republican between 2007 and 2011 before becoming a Democrat and winning election to the U.S. House. “I’m incredibly grateful to earn the support of my hometown paper, the Tampa Bay Times, as we work to defeat Ron DeSantis’s divisive games and bring decency back to the Sunshine State,” Crist said...

Kellyanne Conway said Friday the establishment media was “miserable” covering Donald Trump’s presidency, making her job easier... The senior counselor to the president said she was happy to go on television and explain the president’s policies and explained why she was able to continue doing it. “I’m quite comfortable explaining all of the good going on,” she said. “I think it took me a little bit of a while to understand that, with the White House behind you, you’re speaking on behalf of America and to America, and I don’t return the snark and bark in kind...” Conway said she...

It's been a tough year for the liberal cable news outlets. Data released Tuesday show CNN shedding 48 percent of total viewers since last November and MSNBC dropping 45 percent. The numbers were even worse in the all important demographic of people aged 25 to 54 as CNN's ratings dropped 59 percent and MSNBC's 52 percent. In an off-election year, and with last November's numbers skewed higher as a result of the presidential election, it should be expected for ratings to decline. However, Fox News didn't see close to these losses. In total day, FNC is only down 18...

Plenty of people rightly mocked the news a few years ago that the Associated Press was working on a plan to "DRM the news." The idea was to put some sort of licensing mechanism together to get news aggregators to pay to promote their news. This seemed incredibly dumb for a whole host of reasons. It added no value. Its only purpose was to limit the value for everyone in the system by putting a tollbooth where none needed to exist. When it finally launched last year to great fanfare in the newspaper world, under the name "NewsRight," we pointed...

The Washington Post Co. on Friday reported bad news for its newspaper division, with revenue totaling $127.3 million for the first quarter of this year — down four percent from 2012 — and an operating loss of $34.5 million. Overall, the company posted a profit of just $4.7 million, an 85 percent drop in earnings from the net income of $31 million for the first quarter of last year.

OS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Michelle Obama made a surprise and unprecedented appearance on Sunday's Oscars telecast when she presented the award for Best Picture, the first time a president or first lady has ever presented an Academy Award. Appearing live on screen from the White House in Washington, almost 3,000 miles from the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood, Obama praised the work of the movie industry before announcing the Iran hostage drama "Argo" the Best Picture winner. Wearing a silver evening dress, Obama said this year's nominated films had "made us laugh, made us weep and grip our...

The New York Times Company, owners of the Boston Globe newspaper, is once again trying to find someone to take the struggling Massachusetts newspaper off its hands. The Times previously tried to sell the Globe in 2009 but canceled the sale process after it received concessions from is unions (love the irony there). More from Reuters: The sale is expected to come at a big loss. Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell Research, estimated that the Globe could fetch about $150 million. The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the newspaper in 1993. The New York Times is putting...

The New York Times Co reported worse-than-expected results on Thursday as advertisers cut spending on both print and digital outlets, sending shares down 12 percent. The newspaper company said that revenue was up almost 1 percent to $449 million. Still, the result missed the analysts' consensus estimate of $479.23 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. Adjusting for severance costs and other special items, the company reported a quarterly loss of 1 cent per share, well below expectations of earnings of 8 cents per share. The slight uptick in revenue was due to a 7.4 percent rise in circulation revenue helped...

At Big Journalism, William Bigelow writes, “According to a new Gallup poll measuring Americans’ confidence in television news, the level is the lowest since the poll was begun in 1993:” 21% of adults expressed a great deal of confidence in television news reporting. No wonder CNN’s ratings are in the toilet. Gallup tested 16 institutions, including newspapers, and TV news ranked 11th. Newspapers were ranked 10th. There was an interesting divide among those on the left; Democrats were the most confident in television news of all the groups surveyed (now there’s a shock) but postgraduates, who are more generally Democrats,...

Coming off its least-watched month in primetime in 20 years in May, CNN has taken another big ratings blow: The cable news network has its lowest-rated quarter in primetime since 1991. For this year’s second quarter, CNN hit a low among total viewers and the key adults 25-54 demographic, with all primetime programs posting steep declines. The network averaged 446,000 total viewers and 129,000 in the 25-54 demo in primetime. Compared to last year’s second quarter, that’s down 35% and 41%, respectively. Rival Fox New Channel, meanwhile, with 1.79 million primetime total viewers on average, was down 1% from its...

Cincinnati Enquirer parent Gannett Co. Inc. has signed a letter of intent under which the Columbus Dispatch will print a much smaller version of the newspaper. The move, if finalized, will result in the closure of the company's local printing operations by the fourth quarter of 2012. In a statement, the company said the new format would be 10 1/2 inches by 14 1/2 inches. The paper is now 11 inches by 22 1/2 inches. "We are committed to serving the greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky communities – and providing consumers with the best news and information anywhere, anytime. We...

It's been a huge source of Hollywood profit but the silvery, lucrative DVD could be consigned to the pages of a history book if plunging US sales continue for the rest of the year. Sales of new titles tumbled by nearly one fifth in the first three months of this year, a decline fuelled partly by a lack of hits and the timing of Easter – but also by the start of what appears to be an irreversible change in consumer habits. The sale of DVDs has been falling since 2007, but the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) reported that physical...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Washington Post Co. said Friday that revenue was flat in its newspaper publishing division in the first quarter but net profit fell by two-thirds on lower enrollment in its education business. The Post Co., which owns the Kaplan chain of schools and television outlets in addition to its flagship newspaper The Washington Post, said net profit was down 67 percent in the quarter at $15.2 million. Revenue was down seven percent in the quarter that ended on April 3 to $1.06 billion while earnings per share fell to $1.87 from $4.91 per share a year ago....

For Katie Couric, the offer in 2006 to become the anchor of “CBS Evening News” came with another incentive, one she prized almost as highly, according to two of her friends: the chance to report for “60 Minutes,” the newsmagazine that for Ms. Couric stood for the kind of serious journalism she had always aspired to. Regular appearances on “60 Minutes” were written into her $15 million-a-year contract with CBS, but once she arrived at the network, she found a chilly reception from some of the staff members at the venerable program. Some of Ms. Couric’s associates said that the...

> READ < Apparently, megalomaniacs need schedulers. Just ask George Soros. The left-wing billionaire is helping fund two major conferences that start on the same day, in two different locations just a three hours apart by car. Two liberal events packed into one long weekend. God created the world in six days. Apparently, Soros, who sees himself as “some kind of god,”needs just a long weekend to start remaking today's world in his image. The emphasis of both conferences is a familiar one to American voters – change. Soros wants to begin changing the global economy in one event. In...

Is the White House playing favorites again with media outlets? There has been a back-and-forth between Fox News and the White House ever since President Barack Obama took his oath in 2009. And the latest episode appears to have occurred on Sunday after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made the rounds on the Sunday morning talk show circuit to discuss Libya, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and CBS’s “Face the Nation,” but not “Fox News Sunday.” That drew a response from Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, following his interview...

New York Times Co. Chief Executive Janet Robinson said Tuesday that the company expects fourth-quarter advertising revenues to show improvement over third-quarter results, though "visibility remains limited." Robinson, speaking to investors at the UBS Media Conference, said the company expects ad sales to decline by 4% in the fourth quarter compared with the same period a year ago.

Television is losing ground in one of its most lucrative strongholds: Thursday nights. Fewer people in the U.S. are watching Thursday prime-time TV so far this fall, as changing viewing habits, weaker shows and more varied competition take a toll on a night that for decades has showcased some of TV's most high-profile programs, and priciest commercials. Over the first four Thursday nights of the TV season, an average of 48.5 million people between the ages of 18 and 49 years old were watching prime-time on any channel, broadcast or cable, recorded or live, according to Nielsen Co. estimates. That...