With our fourth annual Bulldog Awards in six categories announced today, the Media Research Center is honoring conservatives in the media who truly deserve accolades yet will never receive them from the news media establishment.
The winners of the MRC’s 2025 Bulldog Awards: Thomas Sowell, Elon Musk, Megyn Kelly, Scott Jennings, Kimberley Strassel, Erick Erickson, Gabe Kaminsky and Spencer Lindquist.
The biggest journalism awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, were announced on Monday, May 5. As usual, they honored journalists who pushed liberal agenda topics. (See the bottom of this post for some examples.)
“As trust in left-wing media continues to collapse, independent news sources featuring fearless truth-tellers are on the rise,” said Brent Baker, MRC Vice President for Research and Publications. “This year’s MRC Bulldog winners are replacing discredited leftists who claim to report the news, yet failed the American people when it came to stories like the Russiagate scandal and Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Congratulations to this year’s winners!”
Details on the eight winners of the MRC’s 2025 Bulldog Awards announced Tuesday, May 6:
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Lifetime Achievement: Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell’s decades of work distinguish him as one of the most important and influential figures in the conservative movement, a brilliant intellectual who for decades led the charge against the worst ideas of liberal orthodoxy and the media establishment.
Sowell biographer Jason Riley hailed his “intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence, skepticism toward the kind of fashionable thinking that comes and goes. And then there’s the clarity. Column after column, book after book, written in plain English for general public consumption.”
His invincible analysis has, as the Manhattan Institute noted, “enraged fellow intellectuals, the civil-rights establishment, and much of the mainstream media. The result has been a lack of acknowledgment of his scholarship among critics who prioritize political correctness.”
His credentials, which include an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a PhD in economics, easily could have earned him a comfortable spot among America’s intellectual elite. But instead, he chose to dedicate much of his career to exposing the awful ideas of academia.
He is currently the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, where he has worked since 1977.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Social Media Personality: Elon Musk
Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk completely changed the battle for free speech by purchasing the censorship-obsessed Twitter in October 2022, soon cleaning house by re-engineering its staff and platform into the phenomenal digital town square it is today.
Since then, Musk has been an outspoken champion for freedom of speech, completely unfazed by his numerous censorial critics in the liberal media and world leaders that have sought to silence him. His social media presence has since exploded to over 219 million followers as he continues to share his unvarnished opinions to the world, becoming arguably the most powerful voice in the free speech movement. As Musk himself stated during an X Space interview in January 2025, “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy.”
Musk’s leadership, innumerable posts and direct interactions with X users have shifted the global political dynamic. He has become a voice for the multitudes who have been censored for expressing their views by his tyrannical Silicon Valley competitors like Meta, Google and TikTok.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Podcast: Megyn Kelly
Megyn Kelly has become an independent podcast powerhouse resisting the liberal media after her career at Fox News and a brief stop with NBC News. She has a daily show the SiriusXM satellite radio service and The Megyn Kelly Show has become one of the top ten podcasts in America. Her YouTube channel alone has more than 3.5 million subscribers.
She describes The Megyn Kelly Show as “your home for open, honest and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal and cultural figures. No BS. No agenda. And no fear.” Her show regularly features prominent experts, as her audience can count on her to deliver pointed and informed takes on the news of the day, almost always providing a fresh perspective not addressed by the legacy media.
On the 2024 campaign, Kelly mocked the media for acting in sync “like a school of salmon, to support the Democratic candidate, whoever it might be.”
Kelly has recently expanded her reach. In February, she started AM Update with Megyn Kelly, a “15-minute dive into the biggest stories of the day” for SiriusXM. She’s also recently become a major player in the podcast space, launching MK Media, a network of podcasts.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Achievement Behind Enemy Lines:
Scott Jennings
As a CNN senior political commentator, Scott Jennings has become a household name for his clear-sighted analysis and jovial attitude amid often multiple ferocious debates in segments in which he’s most often in the ideological minority.
His viral moments drive the conversation on social media as he defends conservative principles, the Trump agenda, and Western civilization with facts and disarming humor.
Jennings’s appearances — which range from early-morning to primetime, and overnight on convention, debate, and election nights — have become appointment viewing, particularly on CNN’s NewsNight With Abby Phillip where he’s always outnumbered by fellow panelists and the hostile host.
Whether it’s standing up for conservatives on the border and the economy, delivering fact-checks of liberal falsehoods, demanding honest debate in the public sphere, or lambasting the left’s collective cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, few have so quickly captured the attention of conservatives and the ire of angered liberals.
In addition to serving as co-founder of RunSwitch Public Relations and past roles on Capitol Hill and the George W. Bush administration, Jennings is also the host of the Flyover Country podcast and a columnist with the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Mail.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Columnist: Kimberley Strassel
Kimberley Strassel is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Since 2007 she has written the weekly “Potomac Watch” column, printed on Fridays, and has worked for the Journal in Brussels, London, and New York. She lives in Alaska, giving her a wider view of the world not so centered on the liberal coasts and the DC beltway.
Strassel’s columns combine reporting with incisive analysis to give her readers the big picture takeaways on major political players and trends. Her columns during the fall campaign in 2024 explored how Democrats “trash-talked” the voters, and Kamala Harris borrowed Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” as Harris contended Trump was “harmful” and easily “manipulated” and stands for fascism “to his core.” She observed that “Mrs. Clinton battered Mr. Trump in 2016 as more toxic than botulism, utterly unfit for the Oval Office,” but that message didn’t lead to victory.
In addition to her column, she’s a regular on the Fox News Channel’s The Journal Editorial Report. She also offers her opinions in the Potomac Watch podcast and the All Things with Kim Strassel newsletter. She has also authored books, most recently “The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden’s Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years.”
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Radio Talk Show Host: Erick Erickson
A former guest-host for Rush Limbaugh, the Atlanta-based Erick Erickson proudly calls the late-great conservative talk show host a “mentor.” Erickson has done his best to follow in the footsteps of the revered Limbaugh by blending humor with hard-hitting and sometimes unpredictable political analysis.
Erickson got his start in radio when Herman Cain left his timeslot to run for president in 2010. Cox Media offered Erickson the spot. While initially reluctant to turn his back on his political and legal career, Erickson was pushed into the radio gig by Limbaugh: “Rush insisted he’d never talk to me again if I didn’t get on the radio. So I did.”
Erickson holds down the old Limbaugh timeslot (12-3pm ET) where he’s tops in the Atlanta radio ratings at 95.5 WSB. His show is nationally syndicated on about 60 stations. In addition to his weekly radio show, Erickson has a popular podcast and Substack site/email newsletter.
Previously, Erickson had been a political contributor for CNN (three years) and Fox News (five years). Erickson also wrote for The Resurgent and was Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the RedState blog. On a personal note, Erickson has inspired his audience with heroic tales of the battle with cancer by his wife Christy.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalist: Gabe Kaminsky
Gabe Kaminsky, who joined The Free Press in February this year, had spent the previous two years as an investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner as an indispensable expert on liberal dark money groups, particularly the behemoth Arabella Advisors.
Kaminsky was the lead reporter behind the exposure of the Global Disinformation Index, a State Department-funded entity tasked with creating a blacklist of conservative websites to then share with advertisers in an attempt to censor them. By December 2024, the Biden administration notified Congress it would be shutting down.
In 2024, Kaminsky hit the ground running by exposing the far-left groups trying to remove Donald Trump from the ballot as funded by dark money groups and quantifying the millions wasted (over $16 million) on DEI trainings. Another report torpedoed Cori Bush’s career in Congress by revealing that three-quarters of a million dollars was spent on her private security.
Kaminsky showed his versatility with revealing reports, from a major Joe Biden donor’s ties to an investment group linked to the Chinese Communist Party to George Soros pledging six figures to Hamas propaganda groups and fraudulent local news operations to Kamala Harris encouraging donations to 2020 Black Lives Matter rioters.
Kaminsky is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and the Young America’s Foundation’s National Journalism Center.
♦ 2025 MRC Bulldog Award for Outstanding Blogger: Spencer Lindquist
Spencer Lindquist is a blogger for The Daily Wire Web site whose impeccable reporting has provided a national spotlight on Colony Ridge, Texas, a new town north of Houston that Lindquist described, in his first investigation in September 2023, as a plot of land the size of Washington, D.C. “where thousands of illegal immigrants are believed to have settled, raising concerns among experts and elected officials.”
Since then, he’s documented rising crime in the greater Colony Ridge area, including a child abduction, drug overdoses, drug trafficking, drunk driving, murders, and hideouts for criminal illegal immigrants. Despite that, Lindquist reported that developers view mass immigration as a business opportunity, including the systematic targeting of illegal immigrants by allowing them to purchase land without a Social Security number.
Lindquist’s reporting in 2024 showed that, in addition to two illegal immigrant murder suspects having been found within Colony Ridge, a Guatemalan national and Colony Ridge property owner was arrested as part of a “mass casualty smuggling event.”
Thanks to Lindquist’s reporting, Colony Ridge has been put squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, including immigration operations that have nabbed over 100 illegal aliens and MS-13 gang members.
Formerly a reporter with Breitbart News and contributor to The Federalist, Spencer is a 2022 graduate of Pepperdine University.
2025 Pulitzer Prizes. As noted above, the biggest journalism awards were announced on May 5. Inevitably, they honored journalists who pushed liberal agenda topics, but not any conservative outlet or agenda topic.
Pulitzer Prizes administrator Marjorie Miller set the left-wing tone by claiming criticism of the news media is “an attempt to erode the First Amendment of our Constitution.” She championed how the finalists and winners displayed “courageous reporting and impactful storytelling from unbowed newsrooms.” (X video of her introductory comments.)
Examples of winners awarded for advancing liberal causes:
> ProPublica got the “Public Service” prize for “urgent reporting...about pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgently needed care for fear of violating vague ‘life of the mother’ exceptions in states with strict abortion laws.”
> Mosab Abu Toha of The New Yorker earned the “Commentary” prize “for essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”
> Former Washington Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit the paper when it decided to not print her repetitive cartoon ridiculing tech and media billionaires for their subservience to President Trump, garnered the “Illustrated Reporting and Commentary” prize “for delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
> 2024 MRC Bulldog Award winners (Lifetime Achievement: Victor Davis Hanson)
> 2023 MRC Bulldog Award winners
> 2023 MRC Bulldog Award for Lifetime Achievement: Brit Hume
> 2022 MRC Bulldog Award winners
> 2022 MRC Bulldog Award for Lifetime Achievement: Cal Thomas
