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The Sixteenth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Romanticizing the Rabble Award for Glorifying Protesters
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First
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 “The size of the demonstrators, at least here, at least in Europe, seems to underscore, Chris, that there are now perhaps two world superpowers. There’s the United States and then there are those millions of people who took to the streets opposing U.S. policy.”
– MSNBC’s David Shuster to Hardball host Chris Matthews, February 17. [81 points] |
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Runners-up:
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 “Across the country, citizens have been coming out to voice their opposition, all calling for the same things. They want government accountability, they want environmental justice, and most of all, they’re calling for peace....While protesters like today are a statistical minority, in American history protests like this have been prescient indicators of the national mood. So the government may do well to listen to what’s said today.”
– ABC correspondent Chris Cuomo previewing an afternoon protest rally planned for Times Square, on a special five-hour Saturday edition of
Good Morning America, March 22, three days after the war began. [70]
“It was a party a hundred thousand strong, flowing haltingly below the slated mansard roofs of Paris’s stately avenues, accompanied by balloons and banners and vendors selling foot-long hot dogs and fries. If there is one thing the French know how to do, it is how to conduct a demonstration.
“Ladies in stiletto heels and fur-fringed jackets, fathers pushing strollers trailing McDonald’s balloons, drably dressed union members, students in face paint and carnival clothes - all turned out to make some noise. Yet despite the gay atmosphere beneath a brilliant blue sky, the message was stark, even dark.
“‘The United States is a barbarian country,’ shouted some. ‘Bush, let’s murder,’ shouted others. One group chanted, ‘Bush, Blair, Sharon, Putin, Chirac: Justice in Palestine, don’t touch Iraq.’”
– Introduction of Craig Smith’s February 16 New York Times story, about anti-war protests in Paris, headlined, “Throwing a Party With a Purpose.”
[56]
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Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity
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First
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 Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore: “What happened to the search for Osama bin Laden?...You don’t think they [the U.S. government] know where he is?”
Bob Costas (astonished): “You think they know where Osama bin Laden is and it’s hands off?”
Moore: “Absolutely, absolutely.”
Costas: “Why?”
Moore: “Because he’s funded by their friends in Saudi Arabia! He’s back living with his sponsors, his benefactors. Do you think that Osama bin Laden planned 9/11 from a cave in Afghanistan? I can’t get a cell signal from here to Queens! I mean, come on, let’s get real about this. The guy has been on dialysis for two years. He’s got failing kidneys....I think the United States, I think our government knows where he is and I don’t think we’re going to be capturing him or killing him any time soon.”
– Exchange on HBO’s On the Record with Bob Costas, May 9. [81 points]
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Runners-up:
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“The lie that brought us into war was that Iraq was a threat to us....It was an attempt at a corporate takeover. This was about oil. It wasn’t about human rights. It’s not about human rights....It is the Bush/Cheney cartel’s fault....Team Bush is more radically corrupt than Richard Nixon ever tried to be....It is, in fact, a conspiracy of the 43rd Reich.”
– Left-wing activist/comedienne Janeane Garofalo on CNN’s
Crossfire August 20, halfway through her week as the show’s guest co-host. [59] |
Video
Part 1
Video
Part 2 |
“Being a man, I’ve got to say that we’ve got this guy in the White House who thinks he is a man, you know, who projects himself as a man because he has a certain masculinity, and he’s a good old boy, and he used to drink, and he knows how to shoot a gun and how to drive a pickup truck, et cetera, like that. That’s not the definition of a man, God dammit!”
– Actor Ed Harris speaking at a January 21 NARAL Pro-Choice America banquet televised on C-SPAN. [43]
Craig Kilborn: “Use the words ‘compassionate’ and ‘conservative’ in the same sentence while being neither ironic nor scornful.”
Actor/activist Tim Robbins: “That’s a tough one. Neither ironic nor scornful?”
Kilborn: “Yeah.”
Robbins: “Alright. F*** compassionate conservatives!”
– Exchange in “5 Questions” segment on CBS’s Late Late
Show, October 30. CBS bleeped the F-word. [38]
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Begala & Carville Prize for Demonizing George W. Bush
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First
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“This is the worst President ever. He [George W. Bush] is the worst President in all of American history.”
– Hearst White House columnist Helen Thomas at a Society for Professional Journalism banquet, as quoted by the Torrance, California
Daily Breeze’s John Bogert in a January 19 story. [80 points] |
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Runners-up:
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“A friend of mine here at CNN has a theory about the Bush administration. They’re convinced that everything Bill Clinton ever did was wicked, bad and awful, and so they want to do the opposite....Clinton wanted to save all that wilderness area in Alaska; and Mr. Bush wants to drill for oil there. Clinton fussed about clean air; this President wants to ease new restrictions on coal-burning power plants.... Clinton, my friend noted, had surpluses. Obviously, the Bush administration thinks those are evil, because what they want is deficits – big ones, maybe the biggest ever.”
– CNN’s Bruce Morton on Late Edition, February 9. [51]
“Is it fair to say that the White House...at the end of the day thought that to make progress, the benefit for these 11.9 million children should go in order to, in part, save the dividend benefit for investors?...I just want to make sure that you are saying that the White House agreed to make the choice to leave these children behind.”
– ABC’s Terry Moran to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, referring to efforts to extend the child tax credit to non-income taxpayers, at a May 29 press briefing. [39]
“Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel.”
– Joe Klein in a column in the June 9 Time magazine. [35]
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