Best of NQ 2010

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


Category 13 of 16

The Half-Baked Alaska Award for Pummeling Palin



Winner

Joe McGinniss (76 points)

“I think it’s probably a lesson for the American people of the power Palin has to incite hatred and her willingness and readiness to do it. She has pushed a button and unleashed the Hounds of Hell, and now that they’re out there slavering and barking and growling. And that’s the same kind of tactic — and I’m not calling her a Nazi — but that’s the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the ’30s. And I don’t think there is any place for it in America.”
— Author Joe McGinniss talking about the reaction to his renting the house next door to Palin while he works on a book about the former Alaska governor, NBC’s Today, June 1. [MP3 Audio]


Runners-up

Chris Matthews (55 points)

“If she were on Jeopardy right now and the topic was national government, American government generally defined, would she look like an imbecile, or would she look okay? Does she know anything?... Have you ever been an eyewitness to her actually reading something? Have you seen her — no, I’m dead serious about this. Have you ever seen her reading words on a piece of paper? A newspaper, magazine, anything? Have you ever seen her read something?”
— Chris Matthews to Alaska’s Democratic Senator Mark Begich during MSNBC’s election night coverage, November 2. [MP3 Audio]


Chris Matthews (44 points)

“How does the neo-conservative right, the hawkish right, find such success in finding these empty vessels like her? Like W.? Like, like Quayle? They find these empty vessels who know nothing about the world! Nothing about foreign policy! Who immediately begin to spout the neo-con line. I read her book — it’s full of that crap. Where, where do they find these people? They went on a cruise up there? What [Bill] Kristol and Fred Barnes went on some cruise to Alaska and they found her standing at the docks with an empty head saying, ‘I’m willing to say what you want me to say.’”
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of the book Game Change about the 2008 presidential campaign, January 12 Hardball. [MP3 Audio]


stillshot

Joe Klein (40 points)

“What she said was drivel. No, let me amend that: it was anti-intellectual drivel....Those who celebrate Sarah Palin’s lack of knowledge as a form of ‘authenticity’ superior to Barack Obama’s gloriously American mongrel ethnicity and self-made intellectuality are representatives of a long-standing American theme — the celebration of sameness, and mediocrity, in a country that has succeeded brilliantly because of its diversity and restlessly eccentric genius.”
— Political columnist Joe Klein on Time’s “Swampland” blog about Palin’s Tea Party speech, February 7.


Jami Floyd (24 points)

“The governor says she’s an extraordinary asset to her party. I say she’s an extraordinary ass, frankly.... I pray Sarah Palin is their opponent for Barack Obama. The more the woman says, the more trouble she gets into.”
— TruTV anchor and former ABC 20/20 reporter Jami Floyd on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co., November 19. [MP3 Audio]