Free Republic

The Washington Post's publisher accused the Biden DOJ of "unprecedented" assault on the media. Fred Ryan described an "escalation" in attacks on the First Amendment since Trump left office. The publisher of The Washington Post accused the US Department of Justice of an "unprecedented assault on American news organizations" under President Joe Biden. Fred Ryan said that government action against media outlets had worsened since President Donald Trump left office, despite Biden officials taking a much less combative approach to the news media in public. Ryan noted in an opinion article that Biden had criticized the Trump administration for using...

Recording events from public land shouldn't be a crime. Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer drove up to her and said, "You cannot videotape my property." Soon the police came and local prosecutors charged her with "agricultural operation interference." They dropped the charges several months later since she was on public land. But what if she'd posed as a farmworker, got a job on the farm and then secretly recorded what she saw? Increasingly, activists do that. More than a hundred such undercover investigations have...

According the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) -- part of the Council of Europe -- the British press is to blame for increasing hate speech and racist violence. On October 4, 2016, the ECRI released a report dedicated only to Britain. The report said: some traditional media, particularly tabloids... are responsible for most of the offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology. The Sun, for instance, published an article in April 2015 entitled "Rescue boats? I'd use gunships to stop migrants", in which the columnist likened migrants to "cockroaches"... The Sun newspaper has also published inflammatory anti-Muslim headlines, such as...

Hundreds of Smith College students gathered Wednesday to voice solidarity with University of Missouri protesters, only journalists were reportedly barred from the event unless sympathetic to the cause. A sit-in from noon to midnight at the Northampton, Massachusetts, campus reportedly drew 300 to 500 students and Black Lives Matter activists who chanted and shared their own experiences with racism and discrimination. Similar to rules enforced at the University of Missouri and other campuses nationwide, media members were not allowed to cover the Smith College sit-in unless they openly supported the movement, MassLive reported.

President Obama plans to discuss differences with Chinese President Xi Jinping “directly and candidly,” he said in a written interview with China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. Obama regularly conducts such written interviews with prominent news organizations in the countries where he travels, but the decision to talk to an organ of the Chinese government could raise eyebrows amid continuing concerns over Beijing’s human rights record. At a press conference with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Monday, Obama said he continued to have “concerns” about China’s actions. “There are certain things that the United States believes. We believe in freedom...

The Federal Communications Commission announced Friday that it was putting on hold a controversial study of American newsrooms, after complaints from Republican lawmakers and media groups that the project was too intrusive. FCC spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said Chairman Tom Wheeler agreed with critics that some of the study's proposed questions for reporters and news directors "overstepped the bounds of what is required."

Republican legislators, stop this Fed takeover of the newsrooms in it's tracks! They already control around 95% of Big Media. We are hedging toward 100% Pravda reporting! STOP BEING WIMPS!!

The FCC is launching a new study, taking upon itself the task of deciding what news the public “needs” to hear, versus the news the public wants to hear. The agency will conduct a “General Population Survey” that will “measure community members’ actual and perceived critical information needs.” Got that? What you think (perceive) you need to know is different from what the government says you need to know. Next, the FCC will send monitors to newsrooms across the country who will ask questions regarding the “philosophy” of the newsroom, inquire about possible conflicts between reporters and their bosses, and...

An Obama administration plan that would get researchers into newsrooms across the country is sparking concern among congressional Republicans and conservative groups. The purpose of the proposed Federal Communications Commission study is to “identify and understand the critical information needs of the American public, with special emphasis on vulnerable-disadvantaged populations,” according to the agency. However, one agency commissioner, Ajit Pai, said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece Wednesday that the May 2013 proposal would allow researchers to “grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” He also said he feared the study might...

Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Air Marshal Service. Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6. The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times...

A brutal report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) blasted the Obama administration, calling the White House’s efforts to control information the harshest since the Nixon administration. The report is something of a first for CPJ, which typically focuses on oppressed journalists in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Written by Leonard Downie Jr., the former editor of The Washington Post, the report contradicts the Obama administration’s insistence that it is “the most transparent administration in history.” “The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” he...

Citing what he called more than a decade of declining commitment to New Jersey, a congressman who is running for U.S. Senate called Monday for the state’s only commercial television station to have its license revoked because it abruptly canceled its nightly newscast last week. “Now WWOR has pulled the plug on the only newscast the station had left,” Rep. Frank Pallone said in a letter Monday to Mignon Clyburn, the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. “This action deserves immediate enforcement by your agency.” Pallone, a Monmouth County Democrat, is vying in a special primary for the nomination...

Totalitarianism is brewing in the heartland. An Indiana inmate is now serving two years for voicing his online opinions against a judge who took away his child-custody rights during a divorce case. I know the custody case pretty well having written about it in 2009. But I'm convinced that the free speech case that is brewing in its aftermath heaps an even greater injustice upon an existing one. And I'm convinced it is showing the darker side of a dangerous man who needs to be stopped. Dan Brewington is justifiably angry because James Humphrey took his kids away from...

While teaching on Aristotle in my ethics class last week, I noted that he was a “teleologist.” A teleologist is simply one who thinks that everything in the world has an essential purpose that makes it the kind of thing that it is. This is what most people held up until the advent of modern science. An astute student then attempted to tie Aristotle’s analysis into the current debate over the Second Amendment. He observed that those who favor ever more oppressive restrictions on the Second Amendment—the proponents of “gun control”—sound very much like teleologists when it comes to guns....

-excerpt- "I do not think it is necessary or in Turkey's interests to be cracking down," Clinton said, adding that Turkey's institutions could withstand the scrutiny and debate that a free press brings. "It seems to me inconsistent with all the other advances Turkey has made."

Iran and Cuba together have forced more journalists into exile over the past year than all other countries combined, a survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday. "Nearly 70 journalists were forced into exile over the past 12 months, with more than half coming from Iran and Cuba, two of the world's most repressive nations," the report said. "Iran, which has waged a massive, two-year-long crackdown on the independent press, and Cuba, which freed journalists from prison only to force them to leave their homeland, each sent 18 journalists into exile," it said. The survey said most --...

Last year at this time, President Obama and his top White House advisers were about to launch a disastrous campaign against Fox News. I say disastrous because the acting communications director, Anita Dunn, who sounded the call to arms on Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" show would resign within weeks, and the president and his innermost circle after going on every major non-Fox news show to attack the highest-rated cable news channel as "not really being a news channel," were in full retreat.

Dinesh D'Souza has drawn a torrent of criticism with a Forbes cover story that accuses President Obama of adopting "the cause of anti-colonialism" from his Kenyan father. But while most detractors focus on the author--and Newt Gingrich, who embraced the critique--the White House is aiming its ammunition at the business magazine. "It's a stunning thing, to see a publication you would see in a dentist's office, so lacking in truth and fact," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs says in an interview. "I think it represents a new low."

Barack Obama's remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago's Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley's bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health care "reform" and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary...

MEXICO CITY — Attackers fired more than 100 bullets and threw at least three grenades at a television station in Mexico's western state of Nayarit before dawn Monday, causing damage but no injuries, a company spokesman said. Enrique Berumen, a spokesman for Mexican broadcasting giant Televisa, said the raid on its XHKG channel in Nayarit was the eighth attack on one of the company's facilities in recent years. Investigators found 102 spent cartridges from high-powered rifles as well as pieces of an exploded grenade and two grenades that didn't go off. In January 2009, a Televisa station in the northern...