Starting last week, NewsBusters has been revealing the winners and top runners-up for each category in the MRC’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Ku Klux Con Job Award,” for smearing conservatives with phony racism charges. Winning this category: Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who on April 8 let loose a litany of complaints about the modern-day GOP, and claimed they were “really the party of Jefferson Davis.”
MSNBC
By Rich Noyes | December 28, 2015 | 9:02 AM EST
Starting last week, NewsBusters has been revealing the winners and top runners-up for each category in the MRC’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Audacity of Dopes” award, for the wackiest analysis of the year. Winning this “honor,” Vox.com writer Dylan Matthews, who wrote a piece just before the July 4 Independence Day holiday calling the American Revolution a “mistake” because it led to things like the 2nd Amendment (horrors!) and a federal government that spends less (scandalous!) than the typical European parliamentary government.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 28, 2015 | 8:13 AM EST
What's more sexist: Donald Trump saying "schlonged" to describe the way Hillary Clinton lost in 2008, or Hillary herself orchestrating a campaign to discredit and destroy women, including Monica Lewinsky, whose "bimbo eruptions" threatened Bill and Hillary's hold on power?
According to Al Sharpton on today's Morning Joe, Trump's offense is the graver. Sharpton suggests that Hillary's attack on Monica Lewinsky should be understood as a woman "dealing with someone who was in an indiscretion with her husband." Sharpton thus paints a picture of poor Hillary, the wronged woman, fighting her rival for the affections of her husband. As Trump said of Hillary playing the woman card: "give me a break."
By Rich Noyes | December 27, 2015 | 9:47 AM EST
Since last week, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Hopeless Haters Award,” for the worst quotes denigrating the conservative GOP presidential candidates. Winning the top slot: MSNBC Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch, who on March 23 slammed just-declared GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “scary,” “slimy” “dumb” “ignorant” and “dangerous.”
By Tom Johnson | December 27, 2015 | 1:32 AM EST
President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.)
After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the primary blogger for the Maddow show's website, wrote in a Monday post that “hearing Obama talk about this got me thinking about other ways in which the contemporary GOP is an international ‘outlier.’”
By Rich Noyes | December 26, 2015 | 9:59 AM EST
Since Monday, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Ruining the Revolution Award,” for journalists wailing about how awful it will be for communist Cuba to become more like the capitalist U.S. Winning this award, Fox News Channel anchor Shepard Smith who fretted that if American businesses such as Taco Bell or Lowe’s moved to Cuba, it could “ruin the place.”
By Rich Noyes | December 24, 2015 | 9:34 AM EST
This week, NewsBusters is presenting the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “What Difference Does It Make?” Award for denying Hillary’s scandals. Winner: ABC chief anchor and longtime Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos, who treated author Peter Schweizer as a hostile witness during an interview about Schweizer’s book revealing potential conflicts of interest between contributions to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary’s work as Secretary of State.
By Curtis Houck | December 23, 2015 | 4:16 PM EST
After the Wednesday editions of CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today attempted to excuse the Washington Post cartoon depicting Ted Cruz’s daughters as moneys, various hosts and guests throughout the day on CNN and MSNBC followed suit by chiding the “weird” and “controversial” Cruz for sending out fundraising e-mails related to the smear and “not reacting kindly” to cartoonist Ann Telnaes’s latest work.
By Rich Noyes | December 23, 2015 | 9:06 AM EST
This week, NewsBusters is presenting the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Pantsuit Patrol Award,” for boosting Hillary Clinton. Winning this category was Mark Halperin, a veteran of ABC News and Time magazine, who gushed over Hillary: “The two words she needs are ‘fun’ and ‘new.’ And part of why yesterday was so successful is she looks like she’s having fun and she’s doing, for her, new stuff. We’ve never seen her get a burrito before. Fun and new.”
By Mark Finkelstein | December 23, 2015 | 7:43 AM EST
There was surprising consensus on today's Morning Joe concerning the Washington Post cartoon that depicted Ted Cruz as an organ grinder and his youngs girls as monkeys. From Mika Brzezinski to Joe Scarborough to Harold Ford, Jr., there was universal condemnation of Ann Telnaes' foul image.
Willie Geist said it best: "people look for moments of bias in the media. Here's one right here. You can't be selectively offended by cartoons. If that had been a Democrat, or God forbid the President of the United States, they would have lit the house on fire. There would have been wall-to-wall coverage on it."
By Kyle Drennen | December 22, 2015 | 5:27 PM EST
Appearing in the 3 p.m. ET hour of MSNBC Live on Tuesday, Hardball host Chris Matthews revealed how terrified he is at the prospect of Texas Senator Ted Cruz becoming president: “...Cruz is scarier than Trump and that will be a frightening prospect to realize....if we weren't talking about Trump, we’d be talking about the horror of this country possibly being led by Cruz.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 22, 2015 | 3:56 PM EST
As MSNBC's Chris Matthews appeared on Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports to promote his special on Donald Trump's life, substitute MSNBC host Luke Russert wondered why the "divisions that had ravaged the country" did not go away after President Barack Obama's election because "everybody thought that we were now coming into a post-racial society, that 'hope and change' was going to carry the day."
A bit later, he brought up segregationist Alabama Democratic governor and former presidential candidate George Wallace as he wondered whether Trump was more like Wallace or Ross Perot.