The Alexandria, Virginia based conservative media watch dog organization Media Research Center released their “twenty-fourth annual awards for the year’s worst reporting.” A panel of 48 radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and expert media observers (of which I was one) voted on 18 different media categories ranging from “The Obamagasm Award” to “Flunk the Founding Fathers Award.”
New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman won the MRC’s “quote of the year” award for his inane posting on his New York Times blog about the September 11th attacks during the 9/11 anniversary this year:
“What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. [The] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neo-cons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons….The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.”
One runner-up for the MRC ‘quote of the year” award was Stephen Marche of Esquire Magazine, who was cited for saying:
“Can we just enjoy Obama for a moment? Before the policy choices have to be weighed and the hard decisions have to be made, can we just take a month or two to contemplate him the way we might contemplate a painting by Vermeer or a guitar lick by the early-seventies Rolling Stones or a Peyton Manning pass or any other astounding, ecstatic human achievement? Because twenty years from now, we’re going to look back on this time as a glorious idyll in American politics, with a confident, intelligent, fascinating president riding the surge of his prodigious talents from triumph to triumph….’I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy….Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”
The other runner-up for this award was MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews who said his daily cable news program, “Hardball is absolutely non-partisan.”
Those who attend the Media Research Center’s annual gala have the opportunity to see the awards presented with their corresponding video clips.
