Best of NQ 2010

The Twenty-Third Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting


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Media Coverage

In addition to discussions on numerous talk radio shows where hosts cited quotes or interviewed MRC representatives, the Best of NQ Awards issue has been highlighted by these outlets:

Television:

Print/Online:

Category 1 of 16

The Poison Tea Pot Award for Smearing the Anti-Obama Rabble



Winner

Tavis Smiley (92 points)

Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, talking about radical Muslims: “Somehow, the idea got into their minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter.”

Host Tavis Smiley: “But Christians do that every single day in this country.”

Ali: “Do they blow people up every day?”

Smiley: “Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that’s what Columbine is — I could do this all day long....There are folk in the Tea Party, for example, every day who are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people ‘nigger’ as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people. That’s within the political — that’s within the body politic of this country.”
— PBS’s Tavis Smiley, May 25. [MP3 Audio]


Runners-up

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Frank Rich (41 points)

“There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank....How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.”
— New York Times columnist Frank Rich, March 28.


Bob Schieffer (35 points)

“A year-long debate that’s been rancorous and mean from the start turned even nastier yesterday. Demonstrators protesting the bill poured into the halls of Congress shouting ‘Kill the bill!’ and ‘Made in the USSR.’ And as tempers rose, they hurled racial epithets, even at civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, and sexual slurs at Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank. Other legislators said the protesters spit on them, and one lawmaker said it was like a page out of a time machine.”
— Bob Schieffer leading off CBS’s Face the Nation, March 21. [MP3 Audio]


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Colbert King (26 points)

“The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school’s first black student, bravely tried to walk to class. Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. ‘They moved closer and closer,’ recalled Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. ‘Somebody started yelling, “Lynch her! Lynch her!”’”
— The Washington Post’s Colbert King in a March 27 column.


Dan Harris (22 points)

“The NAACP points to the racial epithets allegedly hurled at black members of Congress by Tea Party members during the health care debate and to the racist signs that critics say they spotted at Tea Party events to support its conclusion that the ‘Tea Party movement is a threat to the pursuit of human rights, justice and equality for all.’...[to Tea Party official who is black] We’ve all seen the signs. There have been signs that compare Barack Obama to a monkey, there have been signs that have had the ‘N’ word on them. When you see those signs, how do you feel?”
— ABC’s Dan Harris on World News, July 13. [MP3 Audio]