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In a Monday, December 23 write-up, Associated Press National Writer Jocelyn Noveck went so over-the-top in her awe at Miley Cyrus's ability to attract attention during 2013 that she called her "this year's pop-culture prom queen," and included a mention of Cyrus in her rundown of "pop culture moments" during every month of the year.

As I noted earlier this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), a few days after Noveck went all-Miley, all-the-time, an AP report noted that the wire service could only round up 70 responses from thousands of subscribing news organizations to its "Entertainer of the Year" survey. Though actress Jennifer Lawrence "won" the award by getting 15 votes to Cyrus's 14, the real winner was clearly either "None of the Above" or "Who Cares?" Had she known, it seems that Noveck would still have engaged in the nincompoopery which follows the jump (bolds are mine):

I guess we should have expected this.

According to a Christmas Day report at ABCNews.com, race hustler Jesse Jackson on Monday demanded a meeting with A&E to discuss the comments of Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson.

On April 10, the New York Times almost singlehandedly revived the political career of disgraced Anthony Weiner with an 8,300-word profile of the former Congressman, his wife, and their baby boy Jonathan. Clay Waters at NewsBusters noted shortly thereafter that Jonathan van Meter's profile, which revealed Weiner's intention to become a candidate in New York City's mayoral race while somehow avoiding still-open questions about Weiner's "underage girl problem," had its intended effect, as the major broadcast networks fell in line to "promote his political rehabilitation."

We all know that the attempted rehabilitation failed spectacularly, because the supposed personal rehabilitation which formed its basis turned out to be completely fictional. In late July, a Times editorial called for Weiner to withdraw from the race without owning up to the role the paper had played in his attempted revival. So it figures that the Times, which identified Weiner's demise as one of 2013's "political lowlights" earlier in the day, would ignore Weiner's "Look at me" Thursday Facebook post.

Today’s installment of the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by our 42 expert judges: the “Let Them Eat Dog Food Award, for Freaking Out Over the Sequester’s Puny Cuts,” and “The Kamikaze Award, for Disparaging Conservatives During the Shutdown.”

In late February, as automatic spending cuts were about to take a tiny sliver off of the $3.5 trillion annual federal budget, reporters mindlessly parroted the Obama administration's doomsaying about the consequences. Then in October, when conservatives attempted to block the implementation of the dysfunctional ObamaCare law, journalists blasted them as lunatic terrorists out to destroy America. (This year’s winners and videos below the jump.)

Barbara Walters didn't get everyone she wanted for her final "10 Most Fascinating People" special. According to an anonymous source who spoke to Radar Online, the three stars too elusive for Walters were rapper Jay Z and actors Kristen Stewart and Robert Downey Jr. These were part of a wish list that Walters started with before narrowing it down to her final list of ten.

"Typically, Barbara very carefully starts approaching people in September for the special, but she always accounts for getting turned down by some of her interview targets. They start with 30 names and narrow it down to get all the interviews done for Thanksgiving," the insider said. Meanwhile, has-been comedienne Sandra Bernhard hated Walters latching on to the "Duck Dynasty" crew:

According to its Frequently Asked Questions page, the Associated Press "currently (has) around 1,400 U.S. daily newspaper members and thousands of television and radio broadcast members."

The wire service attempted to identify 2013's Entertainer of the Year by sending out an "annual survey of its newspaper and broadcast members and subscribers." Based on the response rate, it should have either called the whole thing off, or named "None of the Above" or "Who Cares?" as the year's hands-down winner. Wait until you see how many responses AP got to its survey, as noted in Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen's report after the jump (bolds are mine):

On Tuesday, Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple wrote a long analysis of daytime programs on MSNBC, where he underlined the Pew Research Center’s finding that the Lean Forward network offers much more opinion than hard news. To be precise, a study of three days in late 2012 (after the election), MSNBC offered 85 percent commentary, 15 percent news.

Then he identified traits such as “MSNBCitis, defined as the propensity to ask a liberal why those horrible conservatives do the odious things that they do.” Wemple cited an Alex Wagner interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi:

As NewsBusters has reported for years, the hatred liberal media members have for and display towards former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin knows no bounds.

On MSNBC’s Ed Show Thursday, substitute host Joy Reid castigated Palin first for having the nerve to show family pictures on Fox & Friends Christmas Eve – the horror! – but also for having a Christmas tree on - wait for it! - Christmas (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Monday's All In with Chris Hayes, host Hayes for a second time griped over Fox News giving attention to reports of primarily black teens playing a "knockout game" in which they target white victims for violence, suggesting that the game does not really exist.

As he awarded his choice for the "over-covered" and "under-covered" news stories for the year, Hayes began:

A month back, I noticed the usual back-scratching that goes on when The Washington Post makes a list of the year’s best books, and two of the top five nonfiction books of the year were former Posties.

When the New York Times list came out in mid-December, a similar thing happened: one of their Ten Best Books came from Times reporter Peter Baker, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in The White House."

Something absolutely marvelous happened on MSNBC Thursday that could have only been a better Christmas gift to those fighting liberal media bias if the host at the time had been a more prominent person on that so-called “news network.”

When MSNBC Live substitute host Kristen Welker scolded the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald for appearing to always be defending NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Greenwald marvelously shot back, “I do defend him just like people on MSNBC defend President Obama and his officials and Democratic Party leaders 24 hours a day” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On the Monday, December 23, All In with Chris Hayes show on MSNBC, after Richard Kim of the far left The Nation magazine awarded the "Rookie of the Year" award to 84-year-old gay rights activist Edith Windsor, host Chris Hayes delivered a sappy tribute to gay rights as he imagined that for "thousands of years" same-sex couples have managed to form marriage-like relationships in spite of not being recognized by the state.

After bringing up Windsor, Kim referred to an article from the New Yorker as he recalled:

Did you ever notice how the liberal media can obsess for days over a Koran-burning stunt, but ignore feminist groups that have a serious hatred problem with the Catholic Church? Via Chicks on the Right, we learned that the bratty anti-Catholic leftists of FEMEN have pulled their latest stunt. A woman with the message “I AM GOD” painted on her body jumped up on the altar and screamed in the middle of a Mass on Christmas at Cologne Cathedral, the home of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cologne and one of the tallest cathedrals in the world.

In their own statement, FEMEN boasted “Josephine foiled Christmas mass in the main cathedral.” As if a woman throwing a momentary screaming fit and getting dragged out somehow expels Christmas from a church. (Video below)

Their stated excuse is, "These could never happen here, so why should U.S. news consumers care?" Their real excuse is, "We don't want anyone thinking that Obamacare could lead to this, even though there are already plenty of signs that it will."

Two weeks ago, the UK Daily Mail reported on three just-released "damming reports" on Great Britain's government-run National Health Service. A separate December 20 UK Telegraph dispatch reports that the NHS is "on the brink of crisis" because it has been "treated as a 'national religion' while millions of patients receive a 'wholly unsatisfactory' service from GPs and hospitals." A scroll through supposedly U.S.-based news results from December 11-26 in a search on "national health service" (in quotes" at Google News returns precious little actual coverage here; the few exceptions are at conservative-leaning outlets like Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog. Excerpts from both UK items just noted follow the jump.

Barack Obama reportedly told People magazine last week that he would like to hang out with the family on A&E's Duck Dynasty.

Eli Lake, the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast, disagrees, and thinks the President would be better off sitting down with - wait for it! - rapper Kanye West.