Best of NQ 2011

The Twenty-Fourth 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:

  • FNC's Hannity. MRC President Brent Bozell discussed the award-winning quotes with guest host Mark Steyn on the Fox News Channel on Thursday, December 22. Video
  • .

Online:

Print:

Flunk the Founding Fathers Award



Winner

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Richard Stengel (75 points)

“The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion — but they also gave us the idea that a black person was three-fifths of a human being, that women were not allowed to vote and that South Dakota should have the same number of Senators as California, which is kind of crazy....If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”
Time managing editor Richard Stengel in the magazine’s July 4 edition, which featured a picture of the U.S. Constitution going through a shredder with the headline, “Does It Still Matter?”


Runners-up

Norah O'Donnell / Ezra Klein (69 points)

Fill-in anchor Norah O’Donnell: “When Republicans take over next week, they’re going to do something that apparently has never been done in the 221-year history of the House of Representatives. They are going to read the Constitution aloud. Is this a gimmick?”

Washington Post writer/blogger Ezra Klein: “Yes, it’s a gimmick. [Laughs] I mean, you can say two things about it. One, is that it has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.”

— MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown, December 30, 2010. [MP3 Audio]


Chris Matthews (47 points)

Clip of Michele Bachmann: “We have to recapture the Founders’ vision of a constitutionally conservative government if we are to secure the promise for the future.”

Host Chris Matthews to Michael Steele: “What is this, Michael? The Protestant Reformation? That somehow we’re going back to the purity of the original Christian church? We’re going back to the original perfection of slaveholders and how perfect they were and government is the enemy. She speaks pure Tea Party lingo.”

— MSNBC’s Hardball, June 27. [MP3 Audio]


John Donvan (29 points)

“The reality is that the Framers — posed in paintings as though frozen on an American Olympus — they were not gods, they were guys: guys who didn’t give women the vote, and let slavery stand for the time being, and who, by the way, were trying to create at the time a stronger central government (of course, not too strong), leaving to us a Constitution that we could fix as needed (sorry, make that amend), which we’ve now done 27 times.”
— ABC’s John Donvan in a report for This Week, July 3. [MP3 Audio]