Before we ring in 2007, it's worth taking a look back at some of the liberal media's goofiest or most outrageous moments, courtesy of the Media Research Center's Best Notable Quotables of 2006: The Nineteenth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting. The awards were determined by a panel of 58 distinguished media observers, including radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, editorial writers and informed media observers. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was a big "winner" this year, winning two categories (the "Damn Those Conservatives Award" and the "Cranky Dinosaur Award for Trashing the New Media") and placing in two others (the "Tin Foil Hat Award for Crazy Conspiracy Theories" and the "Madness for King George Award for Bush Bashing"). In September, Olbermann railed against Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace for daring to ask obvious questions to Bill Clinton, calling Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster" and calling Fox News "a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would have quit." But while Olbermann demanded royal respect for Clinton, he used the language of the paranoid left in attacking the current President, addressing Bush in an October Special Comment: "You, sir, have now imposed subjugation and called it freedom....These things you have done, Mr. Bush -- they would constitute the beginning of the end of America." Another media target that our judges zeroed in on: Katie Couric, who began the year at NBC's first-ranked Today and ended it at CBS's third-ranked Evening News. Couric was both winner and first runner-up of the "Good Morning Morons" category, a fine hat trick when you consider that she spent only five months of 2006 on morning television. She also won the "Drowning Polar Bear Award for Promoting Gore's Inconvenient 'Truth'" for a lapdog interview she conducted with Gore while still at NBC back in May. Couric touted Gore as "funny, vulnerable, disarming [and] self-effacing," and let him ramble along with his "The End Is Near" prophecies. As Gore talked about the world's oceans swallowing up major cities, Couric helpfully asked, "even Manhattan would be in deep water, right?" Two of Couric's former co-hosts battled for the top spot in our "Politics of Meaninglessness Award for the Silliest Analysis." Former Today co-host Bryant Gumbel won it for complaining in February that the 2006 Olympics suffered from "a paucity of blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention." Runner-up Matt Lauer took a day off from the Today show to host a very Gore-like special on the Sci-Fi channel. "Us homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid," Lauer argued on Countdown to Doomsday. "Earth's intricate web of ecosystems thrived for many years as natural paradises until we came along, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives." Our "Media Hero Award" was packed with fawning tributes to Senator Barack Obama, who ABC's Terry Moran treated to a syrupy profile on Nightline in November. "You can see it in the crowds. The thrill, the hope. How they surge toward him." Moran edged out Time's Joe Klein, who helped propel the Obama media boom with an October 23 cover story, "Why Barack Obama Could be the Next President." Klein held nothing back: "There aren't many people -- ebony, ivory or other -- who have Obama's distinctive portfolio of talents....Obama's candor is reminiscent of John McCain." There are many more such quotes, many with downloadable audio and video clips, at our awards section at www.MRC.org. And it seems likely that 2007 will see more such inanity from the liberal press.
