We began detailing the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015” yesterday with the awards for the gooiest Obamagasms of the year. Today, we have the perennial “Damn Those Conservatives Award,” our annual look at the nasty rhetoric that liberal journalists fling at conservatives. (Thanks to our 39 judges who patiently reviewed dozens of quotes to select the very worst of the worst.)
Mark Bittman
By Clay Waters | September 14, 2015 | 11:17 PM EDT
New York Times' food writer and leftist ranter Mark Bittman is retiring, and sent himself off in the paper's Sunday Review with a seven-course feast of his usual Krugman-esque pomposity and shameless left-wing inanities under the guise of food writing. NewsBusters has long documented Bittman's limitless appetite for intrusive government in the name of safety. Bittman's self-send-off in the Sunday Review regurgitated many of his hard-to-swallow premises, like limiting the speech of food marketers and pushing for a $15 minimum wage.
By Rich Noyes | January 12, 2015 | 9:44 AM EST
Now online: the January 12 edition of Notable Quotables, MRC’s bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous quotes in the liberal media. This week, ABC's Barbara Walters pushes conservative philanthropist David Koch to stay out of politics: “Do you think it’s fair that just because you have billions of dollars, you can influence elections?”
At the same time, NBC congressional reporter Luke Russert mocks conservatives on Twitter: “The Kamikaze Caucus is alive & barking,” while The Daily Beast's Eleanor Clift says in 2015 she'll treat the GOP candidates with respect, “even though I think most of them probably belong in the clown car.”
New York Times Foodie Mark Bittman Uncoils String of Leftist Inanities Disguised as Sunday Review Piece
By Clay Waters | December 16, 2014 | 1:38 AM EST An epic example of fanciful, fatuous liberalism featured in the most recent New York Times Sunday Review, a screed from Times food writer Mark Bittman that tried to tie in every single current event into a neat package labeled Republican Evil: "The police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe "safety net." An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration. You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse."
By Mike Ciandella | June 26, 2013 | 1:16 PM EDT
Accuracy must not matter anymore, at least at The New York Times. The paper scoffed at accusations that one of its articles was misleading and contained blatant errors. The June 11 opinion blog by Mark Bittman promoted the work of “journalist (and mother)” Dominique Browning, implying that she was a grassroots activist and failing to note that she was employed by an environmental organization that raked in more than $16 million in 2011 alone.
The National Fisheries Institute (NFI) wrote a letter to the Times pointing this out, as well as challenging Bittman’s data on the dangers of eating tuna. The Times responded by arguing that neither factual point was important.
A Nasty Taste: New York Times Foodie Mark Bittman Takes on Pro-Lifers, Gay Marriage Opponents, Gun Rights
By Clay Waters | August 10, 2012 | 1:47 PM EDT New York Times food writer and reporter Mark Bittman remains unrepentant even after his apology for calling a deceased public relations executive for Chick-fil-A a "pig" for that company's opposition to gay marriage. Bittman forwarded this Twitter message from a follower: "If Chick-Fill-A's VP SUPPORTED same-sex marriage & died, sound of right-wing claims it was God's judgment would've been deafening."
And it hasn't hurt his standing at the paper; in fact he's in the print edition on Friday with "Guns, Butter And Then Some," yet another sophomoric liberal op-ed, advocating gun control, calling Fox News host Bill O'Reilly a hatemonger, and putting the word "terrorists" in quotation marks to mark those 33 Americans killed in terror attacks since 9-11.
Left-Wing NYT Food Writer Bittman Apologizes for Offensive Obit of Chick-Fil-A Executive: 'Speaking of Pigs...'
By Clay Waters | August 9, 2012 | 2:43 PM EDT New York Times food writer and reporter Mark Bittman issued an apology on his nytimes.com blog on Tuesday for a venemous post on the recent death of Chick-fil-A's vice-president for public relations Donald Perry.
In a recent blog post, I used an inappropriate phrase to refer to the late VP of PR for Chick-fil-A. My choice of words did not rise to either my own standards or to The Times’s, and the phrase has been removed from the post. I regret this lapse.
By Ken Shepherd | August 2, 2011 | 6:02 PM EDT
New York Times food writer and junk food sin-tax advocate Mark Bittman took to the August 2 edition of MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan” show as part of his promotional tour for “Bad Food? Tax It.” He found a receptive, uncritical audience in the former CNBC business reporter.
“It’s like, do you want to use taxes to help people or do you want to use taxes to hurt people? It seems to me right now we’re doing just about everything wrong, at least when it comes to food,” Bittman complained, adding "we’re subsidizing, we’re directly subsidizing the crops that produce junk food, bad meat, hyper-processed food, and we’re not subsidizing the foods that we know make us healthy.”
By Matthew Balan | July 26, 2011 | 5:34 PM EDT
CBS's Michelle Miller leaned towards supporters of taxing junk food on Tuesday's Early Show, playing three sound bites from them and none from opponents. Miller only made one vague reference to the opposing side, and she immediately followed it by playing up the supposedly positive result of a tax: "While some say a new tax is the last thing we need, it could mean a healthier America."
The correspondent led her report by hyping how "we're paying quite a hefty toll" for creating "cheap fast food," and launched into her first sound bite, which came from Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the perennial "food police" organization, the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
By Clay Waters | July 26, 2011 | 2:31 PM EDT
New York Times food writer (and food scold) Mark Bittman made the front of the Sunday Review with his latest modest proposal, the 2,100-word “Bad Food? Tax It.”
(In a March 29 column, Bittman self-righteously announced a fast on behalf of the poor against proposed G.O.P. budget cuts: “These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts -- they’d barely make a dent -- will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.”)
Bittman’s latest melodramatic bid as head of the food police involves raising taxes to change poor people’s eating habits to save “tens of millions of lives” and “tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.”
By Clay Waters | April 22, 2011 | 2:39 PM EDT
Stop Spending Cuts or People Will “Starve to Death”
“I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry....These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts -- they’d barely make a dent -- will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.” – Food writer Mark Bittman in a March 30 op-ed, “Why We’re Fasting.”
“What causes the lack? Imprisonment, torture, being stranded on a desert island, anorexia, crop failure....and both a lack of aid and bad distribution of nutrients. Some (or much) of both of these last two stem from unregulated capitalism and greed.” – Bittman on his blog at nytimes.com, March 31.
Privileged NYT Food Writer Mark Bittman Blames 'Unregulated Capitalism and Greed,' Bush, Reagan Tax Cuts for Hunger
By Clay Waters | April 1, 2011 | 4:21 PM EDT New York Times food writer Mark Bittman’s Thursday morning nytimes.com blog post on the end of his politically motivated four-day fast, “Stating the Obvious: Hunger Is a Disease,” is a followup to his bizarre left-wing rant on Wednesday’s op-ed page, where he claimed proposed spending cuts in the new House budget plan would “quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.”
After describing the symptoms of his fast, Bittman, a best-selling cookbook author, cooking-show host, and continent-hopping gourmand who has made a very good living selling his wares to other privileged foodies, nonetheless attacked “unregulated capitalism and greed” as the cause of the world’s problems.
What causes the lack? Imprisonment, torture, being stranded on a desert island, anorexia, crop failure....and both a lack of aid and bad distribution of nutrients. Some (or much) of both of these last two stem from unregulated capitalism and greed. Bad distribution is causing roughly 15 percent of the world to be overweight and 15 percent of the world to be hungry. The amount of grain being fed to industrially raised livestock in the United States alone is enough to alleviate much if not all of world hunger.