HBO's Bill Maher "Wins" MRC's DisHonors Awards Quote of the Year
ALEXANDRIA, VA - The Media Research Center (MRC) today proudly announces that HBO's Bill Maher is the "Winner" of Quote of the Year for tastelessly suggesting that Sarah Palin's teenage daughter Bristol was the actual birth mother of her infant son, Trig. Maher was selected by the more than 800 attendees of the MRC's annual DisHonors Awards Gala, held last night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Maher- winner of the Half-Baked Alaska Award for Pummeling Palin - beat out MSNBC's Chris Matthews (the Media Messiah Award), CNN founder Ted Turner (the Dan Rather Memorial Award for the Stupidest Analysis) and ABC's Bill Weir (the Obamagasm Award).
The competition at the DisHonors Awards Gala is always fierce; this year it was even more so. But the panel of distinguished judges - including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Larry Kudlow, Tony Blankley and the MRC's own President Brent Bozell - combed through thousands of lowlights to select the four DisHonorees.
After the DisHonors, there were the Honors. Fox News' Brit Hume was presented the third annual "William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence." With grace and good humor Hume accepted, stating "I guess I have two things to be thankful for tonight. One is the receipt of this award and the second is that I'm not Tim Geithner."
Below is a full list of the 2009 awards, winners, and the quotes that earned them their respective DisHonors.
Visit www.MRC.org/Gala to access audio and video clips of the evening,
along with Quote of the year and all other award winning quotes.
2009 DisHonors Awards Quotes
The Winner
Half-Baked Alaska Award for Pummeling Palin
"I'm not that
convinced that that's her baby....The daughter - who we know is
fertile because she's knocked up again, or maybe for the first
time...she did like take a five-month leave from high school because
she had [uses fingers to indicate quote marks] 'mononucleosis' right
around the time the baby was being born. And the mother, the
so-called, you know, okay, maybe it is the mother, but, you know,
she was back to work three days later. You don't smell
something?...It's not like they're not willing to lie about
everything else."
- HBO's Bill Maher on Real Time, September 5, 2008 promoting
the left-wing conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin's infant son is
actually her daughter Bristol's baby.
The Runners-Up
The Media Messiah Award
Co-anchor
Chris Matthews: "I have to tell you, you know, it's part of
reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when
they hear Barack Obama's speech. My - I felt this thrill going up
my
leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."
Co-anchor Keith Olbermann: "Steady."
Matthews:
"No, seriously. It's a dramatic event. He speaks about America in a
way that has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with the
feeling we have about our country. And that is an objective
assessment."
- Exchange during MSNBC's coverage of the Virginia, Maryland and
Washington D.C. primaries, February 12, 2008.
Dan Rather Memorial Award for the Stupidest Analysis
"Not doing it [fighting global warming] will be catastrophic. We'll
be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but in 30 or 40 years, and
basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will
have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization
will have broken down."
|- CNN founder Ted Turner on PBS's Charlie Rose, April 1,
2008.
The Obamagasm Award
"We know that wind
can make a cold day feel colder, but can national pride make a
freezing day feel warmer? It seems to be the case because regardless
of the final crowd number estimates, never have so many people
shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls
must have been awed by the blanket of humanity."
- ABC's Bill Weir on World News, January 20, 2009.
To schedule an interview with MRC President Brent Bozell or another MRC spokesperson, please contact Tim Scheiderer (x. 126) or Colleen O'Boyle (x. 122) at (703) 683-5004.
