It was a challenging task but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors led by MRC President L.Brent Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2023 and on December 18 announced The Brian Stelter Memorial Award for Quote of the Year.
Of course, every year there is way too much bias for just one category. So Baker led a panel of NewsBusters editors to break down the Worst of 2023 into eight additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The Joy of Hate Award for Joy Reid Rants; The Jihadist Journalism Award for Helping Hamas; The Damning Florida’s Dictator Award; The Praising and Protecting Old Joe Award; The Cursing the Conservative Court Award and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).
Today we present the WORST OF 2023: Celebrity Freak-Out Award.
Without further ado here is the winner (followed by the top runners-up):
WINNER
Actress Jane Fonda: “We’re not going back. I don’t care what the laws are. We’re not going back….It’s true. It’s the truth. We’re not going to do it. We’re going to fight.”
Co-host Joy Behar: “Besides marching and protesting, what else do you suggest?”
Fonda: “Well, it does involve murder.”
Actress Lily Tomlin: “Well, it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a miraculous – What did you say?”
Fonda: “Murder.”
Behar: “She’s kidding. Wait a second, she’s just kidding.”
— ABC’s The View, March 10.
RUNNERS-UP
“So, here’s something really scary. Mike Johnson, he’s the Republican Party new head chief over there in the House. This came out, he was talking to a prayer group. He said ‘depraved America deserves God’s wrath’ — came out there, exactly sounds like Bin Laden. Now, the Republican guy sounds like bin Laden and Trump sounds like Hitler.”
— Host Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, November 17.
“If you vote for anyone but Joe Biden, you are voting to destroy American Democracy.”
— November 17 tweet by director/actor Rob Reiner.
“Call it what it is. Anti-CRT policies are an attack on black history and an attempt to erase the contributions of black people from the history books. That’s what it is. You are trying to erase black people and a lot of black people wouldn’t mind some of that erasure, as long as that black person is Clarence Thomas.”
— Comedian Roy Wood Jr. at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, April 29.
“Oh say can you see by the blood in the streets / That this place doesn’t smile on you colored child / Whose blood built this land with sweat and their hands / But we’ll die in this place and your memory erased / Oh say, does this truth hold any weight / This is not the land of the free, but the home of the slaves!”
— Singer Jill Scott re-writing the lyrics to the National Anthem when she performed it at the Essence Festival, June 30.
“A new Wall Street Journal poll says that, in a hypothetical GOP primary matchup, DeSantis beats the former president 52 percent to 38 percent. Yay? Also maybe boo? It’s hard to know who to root for here. It’s like a poll between gonorrhea and a slightly more racist gonorrhea….Apologies to gonorrhea.”
— Host Stephen Colbert on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, December 14, 2022.
