Free Republic

Of all the desperate and futile attempts at revisionist history, few are as careless as the attempt to destroy the reputation of one of the finest Supreme Court justices this country has ever produced. Now comes another volley. New York magazine has assembled "The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas." The author is longtime anti-Thomas journalist Jill Abramson. For more than 4,000 words, Abramson labors to relitigate Thomas accuser Anita Hill's dramatic loss in the court of public opinion. According to one poll at the time, 58 percent believed Thomas; only 24 percent believed Hill. Again the argument falls on its...

As with so much about President Trump, his Phoenix rally on Tuesday night was two contradictory things: both shocking and completely predictable. Shocking because it was the most sustained attack any president has made on the news media. And predictable because this is exactly what Trump does when he’s in trouble. He finds an enemy and punches as hard as he can. Make no mistake, he is in trouble. With a special prosecutor breathing down his neck and even once-loyal Breitbart News turning on him, Trump is, according to one new poll, at the lowest point of his presidency. Never...

A heartfelt apology can be a beautiful step toward healing. Alex Jones’s “Pizzagate” apology doesn’t come close. For one thing, the motivation seems to spring from his wallet, not the depths of his heart. Its timing strongly suggests that he wanted to minimize legal consequences for spreading, on his Infowars website, the bizarre and dangerous lie that a child-sex-trafficking ring was being run out of a Washington pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong. What’s more, his words — even if you believe them — don’t fix the damage.

CBS White House correspondent Major Garrett wrote an op-ed for Sunday’s Washington Post imploring journalists not to skip the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The headline was "Skipping 'nerd prom' now would prove Trump right" -- that journalists hate him too strongly to sit through a dinner with him. Garrett also pushed back against the Post’s own Margaret Sullivan, who argued that it would be appropriate to cancel the event altogether because the press should not be Mr. Trump’s “prom date.” "But no self-respecting White House reporter has ever been a president’s prom date, and the dinner isn’t a date at...

Following the recent reporting from major news sources about Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults against numerous women, he has railed against the media for colluding with Hillary Clinton campaign. In spite of Media Research Center data which shows how lopsided recent coverage of the candidates had been, CNN’s Brian Stelter denied any such effort by the media to sway the election on Reliable Sources Sunday. “This is not just false, it's ludicrous and it's damaging,” he complained. “In Trump's world, journalists are really just Clinton campaign workers in disguise collaborating with her in an attempt to rig the election,” he...

It has been announced that the New York Times public editor aka ombudsman Margaret Sullivan will be moving over to the Washington Post. So does that mean the Post is now lifting its three year old decree against continuing the post of ombudsman? Nope. Sullivan is going to become a media columnist which makes one wonder if she will be supplanting Erik Wemple who in the same role is confined mainly to the digital edition. However, rather than speculate on Wemple's fate, let us take a Newsbusters trip down Margaret Sullivan memory lane in her role as the Times public...

Kudos to New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan for asking why the Times couldn’t provide much coverage of Wednesday’s March for Life. Hundreds, if not thousands of New Yorkers were there, so “Was this local participation, or the event itself, worthy of a news story in the paper of record? Apparently not.” “The Times, in print, published only a stand-alone photograph of the event on Page A17 with a two-line caption on Thursday.” …

Who’s a Journalist? A Question With Many Facets and One Sure Answer Behind almost every correction in The Times, there is a story. In the case of the correction about Alexa O’Brien, the story is a particularly interesting one. The correction, which was in Wednesday’s paper, read: An article on Tuesday about the role of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the case of Edward J. Snowden, the former computer contractor who leaked details of National Security Agency surveillance, referred incompletely to Alexa O’Brien, who has closely followed the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of providing military and...