The Media Research Center dispensed its 2008 DisHonors Awards last week in Washington. Needless to say, the “honorees” – those whom a panel of 16 media observers deemed the country’s “Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters” – were not on hand to accept accolades from presenters such as columnists Cal Thomas and Ann Coulter and radio host Mark Levin. The winners were selected by a panel of 16 media observers including Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Steve Forbes.
A full list of categories, runner-ups and winners can be viewed at www.mrc.org. Meanwhile, here are some of the Monitor’s favorites:
● “As Violence Falls in Iraq, Cemetery Workers Feel the Pinch” – Headline over an October 16, 2007 story by McClatchy News Service reporters Jay Price and Qasim Zein.
● “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” – Host Bill Maher on his HBO show “Real Time,” March 2, 2007 discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Dick Cheney in Afghanistan had failed.
● “This is going to result in racial profiling. If, in her America, in Michelle’s America, when you look, ‘Is that Hispanic guy an illegal or is he legal?’ It reminds me so much of when they used to pull down the pants of Jews to see if they were circumcised or not. It is, it is so, so pathetic. It’s so un-American…. I want you to know, ladies and gentlemen, that what they are doing is using the police force of the United States to break up families and sow horror and pain.” – Geraldo Rivera rejecting columnist Michelle Malkin’s suggestion that citizens report illegal immigrants to the authorities, Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” June 8, 2007.
● “Everything you said about [withdrawing some troops from] Iraq yesterday, and everything you will say, is a deception, for the purpose of this one cynical, unacceptable, brutal goal: perpetuating this war indefinitely. War today, war tomorrow, war forever! And you are playing at it! Playing! A man with any self respect, having inadvertently revealed such an evil secret, would have already resigned and fled the country!… Mr. Bush, our presence in Iraq must end, even if it means your resignation, even if it means your impeachment…. This country cannot run the risk of what you can still do to this country in the next 500 days.” – MSNBC “Countdown” anchor Keith Olbermann addressing President Bush in a “Special Comment,” Sept. 4, 2007.
● “He’s come from a white family and a black family, and he’s married to a black woman, and they’re cool people. They are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they’re great looking, and they’re cool and they’re young, and they’re – everything seems to be great…. He may not win this thing because everybody in America is not going to be in a room with him somewhere. And it doesn’t quite – it worked with you on TV but, I tell you, when you’re in the room, it’s just like one of those things like Hillary Clinton, if you’re in the room you understand what a likable person she is. If you’re in with Obama, you feel the spirit. Moving.” – MSNBC’s Chris Matthews talking about Barack Obama on NBC’s “Tonight Show,” January 16, 2008.
● “There he [Bill Clinton] goes again. The man often called the most gifted politician of his generation is once again at the center of American politics, taking over the 2008 Democratic campaign. And he’s clearly loving every minute of it…. He lectures and jokes around and feels your pain and implores you to believe…. It’s so unprecedented, this personal and political partnership, so fraught with history and Baby Boomer melodrama. They have already made history, and they are out to do it again, together, through it all.” – ABC’s Terry Moran after spending the day with Clinton for a report on “Nightline,” January 24, 2008.
● “When I watched him [former President Bill Clinton] at Mrs. King’s funeral, I just have never seen anything like it…. There are times when he sounds like Jesus in the Temple. I mean, amazing ability to transcend ethnicity – race, we call it, it’s really ethnicity – in this country and, and speak to us all in this amazingly primordial way.” – MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, February 28, 2007 “Hardball.”