Winning Quotes in the MRC’s Best of NQ Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting
The winning quotes in the MRC’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013: The Twenty-Sixth Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting.” As announced in a December 18 CyberAlert Special, the awards issue was posted, with videos, that day, and a category a day has been posted on our NewsBusters blog each day since.
Today and tomorrow the MRC.org’s BiasAlert and corresponding CyberAlert e-mail newsletter will run the winning quotes followed by the top runners-up in 15 categories.
The page linked above also has links for the text of the entire issue in MS Word or WordPerfect formats. You will also soon be able to download a colorful and easily read-able PDF version.
To determine this year’s winners, a panel of 42 radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and expert media observers each selected their choices for the first, second and third best quote from a slate of five to seven quotes in each category. First place selections were awarded three points, second place choices two points, with one point for the third place selections. Point totals are listed alongside each quote. Each judge was also asked to choose a “Quote of the Year” denoting the most outrageous quote of 2013.
The MRC's Cassandre Durocher distributed the ballots and tabulated the results. Senior news analyst Scott Whitlock helped produce the numerous audio and video clips included in the Web-posted version. Rich Noyes and Brent Baker assembled this issue and Brad Ash posted the entire package to the MRC's Web site.
The list of the judges, who were generous with their time, is posted online and listed below after the winning quotes.
> Now, the winning quotes in the 15 award categories, plus Quote of the Year (see the “Best Notable Quotables of 2013” pages for video and audio clips for the quotes):
The Ku Klux Con Job Award
for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges
✔ “What does your study tell you about the nature of the racial piece here of the Tea Party?...Is it sort of a resumption of the Old South, of the way things were before the Civil War, for example? Is it like that old dreamy nostalgia you get in the old movies, Gone With the Wind? Is it that kind of America they want to bring back or what? When there were no gays, where blacks were slaves, Mexicans were in Mexico? I mean, is this what they want?”
— Chris Matthews to author Christopher Parker on MSNBC’s Hardball, March 20. [74 points]
Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award
for Obsequious Obama Interviews
✔ “Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you [hugging] that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?”
— Barbara Walters to the Obamas in an interview excerpt shown on ABC’s World News and Nightline, December 26, 2012. [76 points]
The Move Along, Nothing to See Here Award
for Denying Obama’s Scandals
✔ Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus: “This has been really — and I know people are going to call about Benghazi and other things, but this has been really a very — and the IRS — this has been a really relatively scandal-free administration, first term and second term.”...
CNN’s David Gergen: “I particularly agree that — with Ruth that this has been a scandal-free administration by and large, and we should appreciate that.”
— During a discussion on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show, November 4. [55 points]
MSNBC = Mean-Spirited, Nasty, Belligerent Chris Award
✔ “They are political terrorists, and like all terrorists, including those who use bombs, their number one goal — their only goal — is to blow things up. [Senators Ted] Cruz, [Rand] Paul and Mike Lee are on a mission to destroy, shut down the American government, destroy ObamaCare, drive the country into default, destroy the U.S. credit rating. Terrorists with one purpose: To bring down, not just this administration but, let’s face it, the American government.”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, July 31. [89 points]
The Gunning for the Second Amendment Award
✔ Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt: “I honestly don’t understand why you would rather have people be victims of a crime than be able to defend themselves. It’s incomprehensible.”
CNN host Piers Morgan: “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?...You have absolutely no coherent argument whatsoever....You don’t give a damn, do you, about the gun murder rate in America?...I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It’s down to idiots like you. Mr. Pratt.... You are a dangerous man espousing dangerous nonsense. And you shame your country.”
— From the imported British host’s anti-gun tirade on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, December 18, 2012. [90 points]
The Obamagasm Award
✔ “The Second Coming. America Expects. Can He Deliver?”
— Headline for Newsweek’s “Inauguration 2013" cover, January 18. [51 points]
Damn Those Conservatives Award
✔ “One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘a slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners’ savagery and inhumanity....When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir on November 15, reacting to Sarah Palin’s comparison of excessive debt to slavery. Bashir apologized the following Monday, but MSNBC permitted him to stay on the air that entire week. After an extended Thanksgiving “vacation,” he quit on December 4. [76 points]
The Tea Party Terrorists Award
✔ “We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too....We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade....We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.”
— Ex-Boston Globe Magazine writer Charles Pierce in a post on Esquire.com’s “The Politics Blog,” October 1. [62 points]
The Pantsuit Patrol Award
for Boosting Hillary Clinton
✔ “The idea of losing Hillary has seemed especially unbearable at this political moment. It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state. She stands for maturity, tenacity, and self-discipline at a time when everyone else in Washington seems to be, in more senses than one, going off a cliff — a parade of bickering, blustering, small-balled hacks bollixing up the nation’s business. She’s a caring executive too, and that takes its own emotional toll. What a disgrace that John Bolton and his goaty Republican ilk accused Her Magnificence of inventing a concussion to get out of testifying at the Benghazi hearings. Bolton is not fit to wipe her floor with his mustache.”
— Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown in a January 2 Web article. [68 points]
The Kamikaze Award
for Disparaging Conservatives During the Shutdown
✔ “Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America.”
— Politico’s chief political columnist Roger Simon in an October 14 column. [48 points]
Let Them Eat Dog Food Award
for Freaking Out Over the Sequester’s Puny Cuts
✔ “Now you’ve got a budget of three and a half trillion dollars in this fiscal year. This will take $85 billion out of it. That’s damn near a third....You can’t take 30, you can’t take 30 percent of operational money out and expect to have the same product. You can’t do it! It’s impossible!”
— Radio host and MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz on his February 25 radio show. In fact, $85 billion is a puny 2 percent of the $3.5 trillion annual federal budget, not 30 percent. [64]
The Obama’s Orderlies Award
for Championing ObamaCare
✔ “This is the Web site folks, HealthCare.gov. If you go to this Web site, you will find out how easy it is to read, how easy it is to navigate all the information, all the basic questions, and all the direction you need to take to get involved, to get health care. This is a great guide, if I may say, for any of you out there who feel so confused by all of these right-wing commercials that are just permeating through your television screen.”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, September 30. [60 points]
The Twisted Tweets Award
✔ “Go to dictionary,& look up he ‘C’Word,....next 2 the definition...you’ll see a Pic of Sarah PALIN ! NO...WAIT ...SHES UNDER DUMB C WORD”
— Singer/actress Cher in a November 15 posting to Twitter. [71 points]
The Audacity of Dopes Award
for the Wackiest Analysis of the Year
✔ “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children....We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children....We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
— MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry in an early April “Lean Forward” spot. [53 points]
The Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award
for Celebrity Vapidity
✔ “What is Reagan’s real legacy?...He deregulated industries, eroded environmental standards, defiantly ripping down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put on the White House roof, weakened the middle class, busted unions, heightened the racial divides, widened the gap between rich and poor....As far as Reagan’s much-vaunted role in winning the Cold War, the lion’s share of credit goes to Mikhail Gorbachev - a true visionary and, it turns out, the real democrat.”
— Oliver Stone narrating the December 31, 2012 installment of Showtime’s ten-part Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States. [45 points]
Quote of the Year
✔ “One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘a slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners’ savagery and inhumanity....When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir on November 15, reacting to Sarah Palin’s comparison of excessive debt to slavery. Bashir apologized the following Monday, but MSNBC permitted him to stay on the air that entire week. After an extended Thanksgiving “vacation,” he quit on December 4.
> The 42 judges, check the online listing for links to Web pages for each of them:
# Brent H. Baker, MRC's Vice President for Research & Publications; Editor of CyberAlert and MRC's NewsBusters blog
# Mark Belling, radio talk show host, WISN-AM in Milwaukee
# Robert Bluey, Editor of the Heritage Foundation's The Foundry blog
# Neal Boortz, retired nationally syndicated radio talk show host
# L. Brent Bozell III, Founder and President of the Media Research Center
# Monica Crowley, news analyst for the Fox News Channel and nationally syndicated talk radio host
# Mark Davis, talk host on KSKY (660 AM The Answer) in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Salem Radio Network; Dallas Morning News columnist
# Midge Decter, author; Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees
# Bob Dutko, nationally syndicated radio talk show host, WMUZ in Detroit
# Jim Eason, retired radio talk show host
# Eric Fettmann, Associate Editorial Page Editor, New York Post
# Lucianne Goldberg, publisher of Lucianne.com news forum
# Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis, Media Research Center; Senior Editor of the MRC's NewsBusters blog
# Stephen Hayes, Senior Writer for The Weekly Standard; Fox News contributor
# Quin Hillyer, contributing editor to National Review
# Mark Hyman, host, Behind the Headlines for the Sinclair Broadcast Group
# Cliff Kincaid, Director, Accuracy in Media's Center for Investigative Journalism
# Lars Larson, nationally syndicated talk radio host, Compass Media Networks
# Mark Larson, radio talk show host, KCBQ-AM 1170 and KUSI-TV in San Diego
# Mark Levin, nationally syndicated radio talk show host; President, Landmark Legal Foundation
# Matt Lewis, senior contributor to The Daily Caller
# Jeffrey Lord, contributing editor to The American Spectator
# Steve Malzberg, host of The Steve Malzberg Show on NewsmaxTV
# Patrick McGuigan, Editor of CapitolBeatOK.com and Oklahoma Bureau Chief for Watchdog.org
# Colin McNickle, Editorial Page Editor for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
# Jan Mickelson, radio talk show host, WHO in Des Moines
# Emily Miller, Senior Editor of opinion at the Washington Times; author of Emily Gets Her Gun...But Obama Wants to Take Yours
# Rich Noyes, Director of Research, Media Research Center; Senior Editor of the MRC's NewsBusters blog
# Kate O'Beirne, former Washington Editor of National Review
# Marvin Olasky, Editor-in-Chief of World News Group; professor at Patrick Henry College
# James Pinkerton, Fox News contributor
# Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Editorial Director, The American Spectator
# Dan Rea, host of Nightside, on WBZ Radio in Boston
# Chris Reed, editorial writer, San Diego Union-Tribune
# Mike Rosen, radio host at KOA; columnist for the Denver Post
# Tron Simpson, host of Tron in the Morning on I-25 talk radio in Colorado Springs
# James Taranto, editorial board member, The Wall Street Journal and Editor of “Best of the Web Today”
# Cal Thomas, syndicated and USA Today columnist and Fox News contributor
# David Webb, SiriusXM radio talk host; Fox News contributor
# Walter E. Williams, Professor of economics, George Mason University
# Thomas S. Winter, Editor-in-Chief emeritus of Human Events
# Martha Zoller, Editor-in-Chief of zpolitics and co-host of Georgia's Morning News
Again, for this list of judges online with links to their sites.
Tomorrow (Tuesday): The first runners-up.
— Brent Baker is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Follow Brent Baker on Twitter.
