HAPPY NEW YEAR

HOW BAD WAS THE NEWS REPORTING IN 07??
Bad enough to win AWARDS!:


Winning Quotes in MRC's Annual Awards
for the Worst Reporting
The winning quotes in the MRC's "Best Notable Quotables of 2007: The Twentieth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting." As noted in previous CyberAlerts, the awards issue was posted, with videos, on Monday, December 17, but following tradition, today, Friday and Monday -- the last weekdays of the year -- CyberAlert will run the winning quotes followed on succeeding days by the runners-up.
The Media Research Center's annual awards issue provides a compilation of the most outrageous and/or humorous news media quotes from 2007 (December 2006 through November 2007). To determine this year's winners, a panel of 53 radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and media observers each selected their choices for the first, second and third best quote from a slate of five to eight quotes in each category. First place selections were awarded three points, second place choices two points, with one point for the third place selections. Point totals are listed in the brackets at the end of the attribution for each quote. Each judge was also asked to choose a "

Quote of the Year" denoting the most outrageous quote of 2007.
A list of the judges, who were generous with their time, appears in item #2 below.
The MRC's Michelle Humphrey, Kristine Lawrence and Melissa Lopez distributed and counted the ballots, then produced the numerous audio and video clips that accompany the Web-posted version. Brent Baker and Rich Noyes assembled this issue and Eric Pairel posted the entire package, with dozens of Flash videos, on the MRC's Web site: www.mrc.org
MS Word and Corel WordPerfect files of the entire text of the issue are also available at the above link.
For an Adobe Acrobat PDF that matches the eight-page hard copy version: www.mrc.org
Now, the winning quotes in the 17 award categories:
Dynamic Duo Award for Idolizing Bill and Hillary
"When I watched him [former President Bill Clinton] at Mrs. King's funeral, I just have never seen anything like it....There are times when he sounds like Jesus in the temple. I mean, amazing ability to transcend ethnicity -- race, we call it, it's really ethnicity -- in this country and, and speak to us all in this amazingly primordial way."
-- Chris Matthews, MSNBC's Hardball, Feb. 28. [93 points]


America Makes Us Sick Award
"Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform....We pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?...[T]he recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary -- oops sorry, volunteer -- force that thinks it is doing the dirty work."
-- WashingtonPost.com military columnist William Arkin in a January 30 column reacting to a report by NBC reporter Richard Engel. Arkin later apologized for using the word "mercenary." [107 points]


Damn Those Conservatives Award
"I'm just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That's a fact."
-- Host Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time, March 2, discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed. [91 points]


Blue State Brigade Award for Campaign Reporting
Senator Barack Obama: "Let's roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, let's make certain that those resources go to the people who need it....We're not going to solve it by pretending that issues of poverty and struggle among working families are just going to go away magically because the stock market is going up." Moderator Chris Matthews: "So much of what you say just grabs people like me, because it sounds like Bobby Kennedy. It sounds like the '60s at its absolute best."
-- Exchange at AFSCME Democratic candidates forum shown live on MSNBC, June 19. [78 points]


Madness of King George Award
"You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought [they] were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc....Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of 'I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?'"
-- Ex-Washington Post sports reporter and Seinfeld writer Peter Mehlman in a June 20 Huffington Post blog item. [68 points]


Channeling the Nut Roots Award
MSNBC's Chris Matthews: "Russ Feingold wants to censure the President, the Vice President..." Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore: "Good idea....Personally I'd like to see a perp walk coming out of the West Wing of the White House." Matthews: "Do you think they're guilty of war crimes?" Moore: "Absolutely....I think we need a trial, in this country, where Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush would be brought up on charges for causing the deaths of so many people...." Matthews: "It's interesting if you go back....the Nuremberg Trials weren't about the genocide, it was about waging an aggressive war. I love reading some of that language. It's interesting."
-- MSNBC's Hardball, July 23. [79 points]


Media Millionaires for Higher Taxes
"It takes leadership. After World War II, we maintained the infrastructure we had and we built an incredible network of highways, and leaders in both parties agreed that these were priorities. Now we have this tax-averse society, rallied by the Republicans, tax-averse, where everything becomes sort of a right-wing, libertarian refusal to let government spend any money or raise any money."
-- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift discussing the Minneapolis bridge collapse, August 25 McLaughlin Group. [74 points]


O Great Goreacle Award
Co-host Harry Smith: "President Bush getting ready to go to Europe for the G-8. The folks in the European Union want to do emissions reductions. The President said yesterday we're not going to participate....If you were president, you would have probably signed on?" Former Vice President Al Gore: "Yeah, yeah." Smith: "Do you mind if I-? [holds up a ‘Gore 2008' pin]...There you go. You can hold it. [laughter]....Here, let's see what it looks like. [holds pin to Gore's lapel]...All right, all right. Save that in a freeze frame."
-- Exchange on CBS's The Early Show, May 30. [64 points]


Politics of Meaninglessness Award for Silliest Analysis
"Perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for [the falsely arrested Duke lacrosse players] Reade Seligman, Collin Finnerty and David Evans is just a bit misplaced....As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives....They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team."
-- Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran writing on his "Pushback" blog on ABCNews.com on April 12, the day after the North Carolina Attorney General declared the players innocent of highly-publicized rape charges. [66 points]


Good Morning Morons Award
"So I'm running in the park on Saturday, in shorts, thinking this [warm weather] is great, but are we all gonna die? You know? I can't, I can't figure this out."
-- Co-host Meredith Vieira talking about global warming on NBC's Today, January 8. [57 points]


Media Hero Award
"He was not what I expected. He was very dignified. He was warm, friendly. He likes the U.S. It's George Bush that he doesn't like. He also was very personal. He talked about how hard his life was, that he wished he could be in love but you can't be when you are heading a country."
-- ABC's Barbara Walters recounting her interview with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, March 16 Nightline. [79]


Tin Foil Hat Award for Crazy Conspiracy Theories
Co-host Joy Behar: "Is there such a thing as a man-made stroke? In other words, did someone do this to him?..." Co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck: "Why is everything coming from the liberal perspective a conspiracy?..." Behar: "I know what this [Republican] Party is capable of."
-- Discussing Democratic Senator Tim Johnson's illness on ABC's The View, December 14, 2006. [72 points]


Perky Princess Award for Katie's Cutesy Comments
"Do you worry at all that non-believers may feel excluded and diminished at a time when we're so divided about so much?"
-- Katie Couric to The Nativity Story's Catherine Hardwicke and Mike Rich in a December 4, 2006 CBS Evening News story about Hollywood movies based on Biblical themes. [84 points]


Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity
"I just want to say something: 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?...If you were in Iraq, and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?"
-- Co-host Rosie O'Donnell on ABC's The View, May 17. [64 points]


Drive By Media Award for Shooting at the Competition
Matt Lauer: "He [Rush Limbaugh] makes a living poking fun at Democrats, but now some think he has gone a little too far in taking on Senator Barack Obama...." Reporter Michael Okwu: "Weeks before the Imus controversy, Rush Limbaugh started airing this ditty about Senator Barack Obama:" Song parody: "Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C." Okwu: "Which lead some to wonder, has Limbaugh been getting a free pass?..." Paul Waldman, Media Matters for America: "This is basically the radio equivalent of a black-faced, minstrel show. You're going back to Amos and Andy and all of those, kind of, racist shows in the past." Okwu: "For his part, Obama says he doesn't listen to Limbaugh but says being targeted is part of being a politician....Legitimate political satire or something darker?"
-- NBC's Today, May 21. Limbaugh's parody was inspired by a black writer who used the term in a March 19 Los Angeles Times op-ed, "Obama the Magic Negro." [79 points]


Not Biased Enough Award
"As we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the plantation mentality that governs Washington turned the press corps into sitting ducks for the war party, for government, and neoconservative propaganda and manipulation....What's happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence, but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. I'm doing a documentary this spring called Buying the War, and I can't tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?"
-- PBS's Bill Moyers, in a January 12 speech to a conference on "media reform" aired four days later on the left-wing Pacifica network's Democracy Now. [95 points]


Quote of the Year
"As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch"
-- Headline over an October 16 story by McClatchy News Service reporters Jay Price and Qasim Zein.