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 9 of 16

Dumb and Dumber Award for Matthews and Olbermann's Leftist Blatherings



Winner

Keith Olbermann (67 points)

“In Scott Brown, we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives.”
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Countdown, January 18, the night before Massachusetts’ special election. [MP3 Audio]


Runners-up

Chris Matthews (48 points)

Chris Matthews: “Congresswoman Bachmann, are you hypnotized tonight? Has someone hypnotized you? Because no matter what I ask you, you give the same answer. Are you hypnotized? Has someone put you under a trance tonight? That you give me the same answer no matter what question I put to you?”

Rep. Michele Bachmann: “I think the American people are the ones that are finally speaking tonight. We’re coming out of our trance....I think people are thrilled tonight. I imagine that thrill is probably maybe not quite not so tingly on your leg anymore.”
— From MSNBC’s election night coverage, November 2. [MP3 Audio]


Keith Olbermann (41 points)

“[The Tea Party-backed Republicans are] a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told, in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get, backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the ’30s, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the trusts and the robber barons...It is nothing short of an attempted use of democracy to end this democracy, to buy America wholesale and pave over the freedoms and the care we take of one another, which have combined to keep us the envy of the world.... If you sit there tomorrow, and the rest of this week, and you let this cataclysm unfold, you have enabled this. It is one thing to be attacked by those who would destroy America from without. It is a worse thing to be attacked by those who would destroy America from within.”
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann in a 21-minute “Special Comment” on Countdown, October 27. [MP3 Audio]


Chris Matthews (28 points)

“What’s going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going on in that party, where they’re going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, if you’re not far right, you’re not right enough.”
— Chris Matthews during an MSNBC primetime special about President Obama’s Q&A with House Republicans, January 29. [MP3 Audio]


Chris Matthews (26 points)

“The message coming out of the Tea Party people, and lot of them are good people, is every man for himself, basically. ‘No more taxes, no more government, no more everything. No more safety net. No more health care for everybody. Everybody just get out there, make your buck, save it, screw the government, move on.’ Right? You know these people, if they were every man for himself down in that mine they wouldn’t have gotten out...They would have been killing each other after about two days.”
— Chris Matthews talking about the 33 miners rescued in Chile after being trapped for 10 weeks, MSNBC’s Hardball, October 13. [MP3 Audio]