Awards For The Year's Worst Reporting

This is a column on awards for the year's worst reporting. You will read what an expert panel determined to be the most outrageous quotes of the mainstream liberal media for 2008.

I think you will find them amusing for openers. But they have significance far beyond their considerable entertainment value. The quotes that follow show you how extreme the biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism of the mainstream media has become. The media monitors that I have confidence in agree that bias during the past presidential campaigns reached new extremes far beyond anything of recent memory. The easiest way to quickly appreciate what the mainstream liberal media is putting out is to let these media outlets convict themselves out of their own pens and mouths. I think you will find these notable quotes convincing beyond measure.

But again, the significance of the quotes goes far beyond that of entertaining and documenting how the mainstream media has gone far beyond any reasonable and rational boundaries. An appreciation of this media output shows exactly how dangerous this reporting and editorializing has become. It goes beyond rational boundaries and truly demonstrates that liberalism is a mental disorder. Read some of these quotations and ask yourself whether a journalist, even a bad one, could say some of these things in his right mind. I submit the answer is no.

Finally, these notable quotables have significance in driving home the need for action to alert the public to the dangerous consequences of relying on the mainstream media. To do so, assures that the public and policymakers will likely be coming up with solutions that don’t make sense as they are tailored to fit a world that exists only in the demented mentality of the reporters and editors that make up the mainstream media. This kind of reporting, if accepted, will lead to a losing war against terror and an economic recovery plan that will make a bad situation worse.

The Media Research Center, one of our best media monitors, came up with this list of outrageous quotations for its 21st Annual Awards for the Year’s (2008) Worst Reporting. A panel of 44 distinguished judges determined the recipients of the awards. Among those judges were Midge Decter, author; Barry Farber, radio talk show host; Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media, another important media monitor; Marvin Olasky, editor of World magazine; Cal Thomas, syndicated columnist, whose work appears in The Bulletin; and Walter E. Williams, economics professor and syndicated columnist, whose work appears in The Bulletin.

We’ll start with the “Quote of the Year” as determined by the panel of judges. It involved an exchange between Chris Matthews, co-anchor on MSNBC, and Keith Olbermann, another MSNBC co-anchor:

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.”

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.”

This is my case for liberalism as a mental disorder. You will note that even the loony liberal Mr. Olbermann, upon hearing the first part of Mr. Matthews comment, told him, “Steady.” Doesn’t that suggest that even his co-anchor Mr. Olbermann thought he was melting down? Mr. Matthews is silly enough himself to feel that thrill go up his leg, but he even assumes most people listening to Mr. Obama have a similar experience. I’d suggest that when Mr. Matthews gets his leg checked to see what is causing that “thrill” to go up his leg, he also get his head checked. What is even more frightening than this guy flying over the cuckoo nest is that he is now considering a run for the U.S. Senate out of Pennsylvania. We can easily handle his raving and ranting on MSNBC, but I shutter to think the kind of damage he could inflict as a U.S. senator.

To show you how keen the competition for the most outrageous quote of the year, consider one of the runner-ups. It is from a headline over a Nov. 6, 2008 Reuters dispatching claiming no liberal tilt in favor of Mr. Obama:

That’s significant as it shows the media is not only biased beyond belief, and doesn’t have the slightest clue pointing to its own failure. A Pew Research poll found that an overwhelming majority of the pubic thought the media was routing for Mr. Obama. And a few of the mainstream media people, one from Time magazine and the other from the Washington Post, admitted the mainstream media was guilty of bias in the first degree.

I’d have my own nomination for quote of the year, because it shows that the far out ideas of the mainstream liberal media are. They are not only silly but also so silly that it causes them to come up with a picture of the world that is totally removed from reality. This is from MSNBC daytime anchor Alex Witt, commenting on the Mumbai massacre:

“There are many who had such an optimistic and hopeful opinion of things, and you certainly can’t expect things to change on a dime overnight, but there are many who suggested that with the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration there would be something of a lull in terrorism attacks. There has been such a global outpouring of affection, respect, hope, with the new kind of administration coming in, that precisely these kinds of attacks, it was thought — at least hoped — would be dampened down. But in this case it looks like Barack Obama is getting a preview of things to come.”

So Ms. Witt actually suggests that all would be sweetness and light because Mr. Obama was elected. This shows a profound lack of understanding of the threat of terrorism. This led Jason Maoz in his “Media Monitor” column in the Jewish Press to name this the most outrageous media quote of the year. He wrote, “But perhaps the most pathetic display of media bias (with not a little naiveté thrown in for good measure) comes from MSNBC daytime anchor Alex Witt, who in discussing the terrorists attacks in Mumbai exposed herself as a nitwit extraordinaire.”

In addition to the “Quote of the Year,” the Media Research Center gave awards in 16 other categories. Here are some of them:

Here it is from Nancy Gibbs writing the cover story for Time magazine on Nov. 17.

“Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope … Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.”

What’s remarkable is not just that a reporter for a major national magazine could write that sickly, saccharin hogwash but that it could get by a group of editors and actually get published. Yes, Time’s Messiah is also a “prince.”

One of the runner-ups isn’t too bad. It’s from David Gergen during live coverage of Mr. Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention:

“In many ways, it was less a speech than a symphony. It moved quickly. It had high tempo, at times inspiring. Then it became more intimate, slower, all along sort of interweaving a main theme about America’s promise, echoes of Lincoln, of King, even of Reagan, and of Kennedy… it was a masterpiece.”

It gets ridiculous as Gergen-types drown us in irrational, unbounded hyperbole over every burp out of Mr. Obama, always calling to mind Lincoln and King when not being passed off as the Prince and Messiah himself. Even Lincoln, one of the great masters of the English language, delivered speeches, not symphonies.

Here’s our friend, Chris Matthews again, sure to be found at the bottom of the journalistic garbage can, on MSNBC’s Hardball:

“The fact of the matter is, the comparison between her [Gov. Sarah Palin] and Hillary Clinton is the comparison between an igloo and the Empire State Building.” I’d describe Mr. Matthews, shifting his language a bit to informal English-English: The comparison between Mr. Matthews and a journalist is the comparison between a loo and the Empire State Building. For those less familiar with English-English, a loo in Britain is another name for a toilet.

If the same standards applied by the mainstream media to Mrs. Palin were applied to Caroline Kennedy and Vice President-elect Biden, both would have been laughed off the stage almost immediately. But the mainstream media transforms two jokers into aces, a remarkable card trick indeed.

I’d like to add this one category to the Media Research Centers catalog of losers. That’s because it involves a degree of idiocy even extreme for the New York Times. One of its columnists, Gail Collins, made this proposal earlier this year: “Thanksgiving is next week, and President Bush could make it a really special holiday by resigning. Seriously … Just to be on the safe side, the vice president ought to turn in his resignation first. (We’re desperate but not crazy.) Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would become president until January 20. Obviously, she’d defer to her party’s incoming chief executive, and Barack Obama would begin governing.”

Ms. Collins says she is desperate but not crazy. I’d submit she is both desperate and crazy, as are her editors at the New York Times.

This mental disease apparently afflicts others at the Times and elsewhere. Some of the others coming up with proposals similar to Ms. Collins include Times columnist Thomas Friedman and former CBS anchor Dan Rather.

Listen to Brian Williams impersonating a journalist doing an interview. Here’s the question he asked Michelle Obama in an interview shown on the Aug. 27 “Nightly News”:

“What of the attacks has busted through to you? What makes you angriest at John McCain, the Republican? What’s being said about your husband that you want to shout from the mountain tops is not true?”

What’s remarkable about that kind of questioning is not just its pathetic soft-ball nature, but that a leading national anchor like Brian Williams would be willing to fritter away his journalistic credibility by this kind of fluffy, cuddly interview. We were on the same news team at WCAU-TV before he went to NBC, and his new journalistic standards must have been picked up at the NBC network.

“Today, the audacity of hope had its rendezvous with destiny. No mere endorsement this, more like a political anointment from the Kennedy’s, merging ideals from two different eras … Obama is now an adopted son of Camelot. His candidacy blessed not just by the Lion of the Senate, patriarch of the clan, but by JFK s daughter.”

Notice how every endorsement, every speech, and every move by Mr. Obama is elevated to some kind of supernatural event.

This is ABC’s Chris Cuomo to Barack Obama in a Dec. 27, 2007 interview on Good Morning America:

“What do you think the bigger obstacle is for you in becoming president, the Clinton campaign machine or America’s inherent racism?”

This is a typical hate-America strain found in the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. They often see America as racist, imperialist, and all the rest.

I think one of the runner-ups for the Murtha Award is even more outrageous as it plays the race card to silence criticism of Mr. Obama. It is from Associated Press writer Douglass K. Daniel, Oct. 5, 2008, referring to Mrs. Palin’s comment about Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist and his friend and close collaborator, Mr. Obama:

“Her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain may come to regret…Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee ‘palling around’ with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America.”

1. The attack was not un substantiated, but totally and absolutely substantiated on countless occasions. Mr. Obama began his campaign in Mr. Ayers’ home. His alter ego and chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admitted that Messrs. Obama and Ayers were “friendly.” In addition, Messrs. Ayers and Obama closely collaborated in a project designed by Mr. Ayers to radicalize Chicago students. So simply to say Mr. Obama was palling around with terrorists (Mr. Ayers and his terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn) was an understatement of the total relationship.

2. There was no racial subtext. It was a simple statement of fact about terrorists who happen to be white and a candidate who happened to be black. The only one that played the race card during the campaign was none other than Barack Obama, but the mainstream media ignored that outrage.

3. Gov. Palin might have also added that Mr. Obama not only palled around with terrorists but also closely associated with hate-America types and bigots such as Reverend Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.

Here is something NBC reporter Lee Cowan wrote for a network advertising supplement that went into a newspaper supplement:

“When NBC News first assigned me to the Barack Obama campaign, I must confess my knees quaked a bit … I wondered if I was up to the job , I wondered if I could do justice to the campaign.”

The Media Research Institute named one winner and four runner-ups in this category. It is not surprising that Chris Matthews was the recipient of all four awards. I think this runner-up best captures the sheer idiocy of Mr. Matthews. Here he comments on Mr. Obama’s speech on race relations:

“A speech worthy of Abraham Lincoln … What I personally view as the best speech ever given on race in he country … I think this is the kind of speech I think first-graders should see, people in the last year of college should see before they go out in the world. This should be, to me, an American tract. Something that you just check in with, now and then, like reading Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn … One of the great speeches in American history.”

As bad as these notable quotables are, they are only half the story. Even worse is what the mainstream media did not cover. The mainstream media simply ignored or downplayed any information that might be detrimental to the candidacy of Mr. Obama.

Whether you’re conservative or liberal, whether your Republican or Democrat, you want the truth and fair and balanced news and information. You are simply not going to get anything close to that from the mainstream media. So get involved in the battle against the mainstream media. One good way to start is by getting involved with and supporting media monitors such as the Media Research Center. You can get daily bias updates and the latest from the MRC by visiting its Web site — www.MRC.org. You can also sign up for a free e-mail newsletter of what’s notable quotable by going to its Web site at www.MRC.org/subscriptions.

You can also get valuable information from other media monitors such as www.AIM.org (Accuracy in Media), www.honestreporting.com and www.camera.org. The last two focus only on bias in Middle East Reporting. You can also lend support to a boycott of the New York Times by signing a petition at www.boycottnyt.com. That boycott has been organized by AIM.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.

The quotes that follow show you how extreme the biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism of the mainstream media has become.

Just do what millions have done: cancel your subscriptions!

A Pew Research poll found that an overwhelming majority of the pubic thought the media was routing for Mr. Obama.

That would be "rooting", for those of you speaking English.

As for "pubic", well, that explains the tingling of Chrissy's leg, I guess.

“There has been no “reporting”. I would call it “advertising” for the DNC.”
Or what the government-mafia bosses expect of us.

Along these lines, some weeks ago NPR went to Oklahoma (reddest of the red states) and interviewed McCain supporters. Then went to malls, churches, some patriotic street parade -- they went all over, seeking out people who had voted for McCain. And they asked these people "In the month since the election, has your impression of Barrack Obama changed at all?"

And you know what? It seems that 100% of the McCain voters in Oklahoma are now strong Obama supporters. They had all been impressed. They were all pleased. They were all optimistic about the future. They all thought that the country was now moving in a better direction.

Pretty amazing, isn't it?

Just do what millions have done: cancel your subscriptions!

I once subscribed to NewsWeek, but I cancelled it in 1978. Once you do that, you don't have any further effect.

One of my favorites from Dean Reynolds:

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

I wonder how many people they had to interview to get a couple minutes worth of soundbytes from flip-flop voters.

I canceled my 40 year-old subscription to The Hartford Courant the two days after the election when they ran a sympathetic cover story about the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright and how he was doing after being savaged by evil Republicans.

I wrote them a letter telling them exactly why I was canceling, how I had delivered the paper as a boy and how I had been a subscriber for over 40 years and my parents before me. I suggested that their obviously political bent in their reporting was undoubtedly related to the demise of their's and almost all other papers in the country.

I'm not sure they got the point.

"The sun glinted off chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games."

And the year isn't over yet!

The worst thing about waiting in a Doctors office is only having Newsweak and Slime Magazine to read. I try but can’t do it. I find the unreadable.

What is even more frightening than this guy flying over the cuckoo nest is that he is now considering a run for the U.S. Senate out of Pennsylvania. We can easily handle his raving and ranting on MSNBC, but I shutter to think the kind of damage he could inflict as a U.S. senator.

What's really frightening is that if he does win, he could possibly be joining Al Franken in the Senate. Talk about a debasement of "The World's Greatest Deliberative Body"!

I wonder how many people they had to interview to get a couple minutes worth of soundbytes from flip-flop voters.

Actually, I think the interview subjects were the equivalent of seminar callers: lifelong Democrats, people who campaigned for Obama, but who were willing to go on the radio and say "I am a Republican, but you know what? I now believe that Obama is the greatest president we've ever had!"

I’m sure they didn’t get it and chucked your letter into the “That guy’s a racist” bin.

They will continue to do that until they find that either something is wrong with them, or EVERYBODY is a racist.

almost everything they said about Sarah Palin was not only in error, but downright nasty. hardly journalism’s greatest moments.

How about the prince of jokers? The biggest joker of all the anointed one, the appointed one, the messiah.

Since we're nitpicking...

We can easily handle his raving and ranting on MSNBC, but I shutter to think the kind of damage he could inflict as a U.S. senator.

I'm quite sure he intended to say shudder.

20 posted on 12/30/2008 7:00:14 AM PST by cuz_it_aint_their_money (I'll show their president the exact same respect and loyalty that they have shown my president.)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.