The general election has apparently begun. This week, the liberal media launched a pre-emptive attack on Republican campaign tactics even as TV interviewers slobbered all over Barack Obama. Here are the Media Research Center’s "Worst of the Week" (audio and video links below the fold):

# GOP: Merchants of Slime and Hate. It’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not the GOP, which has pummeled Barack Obama these past weeks, but journalists are nevertheless impugning Republicans as dirty campaigners. The May 19 Newsweek cover story channeled Democratic talking points to claim "the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968." (Ever listen to Democratic rhetoric on Social Security?) Co-authors Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas questioned whether John McCain really wanted to "rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet...who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech."

MRC President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the May 9 edition of Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" to discuss media coverage of the Democratic primary race. Bozell held that while the conventional wisdom that Clinton's candidacy is all-but-over may be accurate, political reporters who should be objectively reporting the campaign have taken on the role of pundits and commentators. What's more, Bozell added, it's precisely this sort of cheerleading by the referees that has called the game for Obama well before the clock's run out. [audio available here]

The saga of horror novelist Stephen King's disgraceful comments about America's military took an interesting turn Monday when shortly after instructing visitors to his website to send me a message stating "Hi, Noel—Stephen King says to shut up and I agree," his own message boards were shut down.

This followed the creation of a number of threads by members that wanted to comment about King's remarks.

The cover-story for shutting down the boards came from the Moderator in a thread entitled "Stephen King Insults Soldiers":

Hillary Clinton's recent appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" was a play for superdelegate support at the Democratic Convention, MRC President Brent Bozell argued on the May 2 "Fox & Friends" in a segment joined by liberal talk show host Mike Papantonio. [audio available here]

Asked about the media and if it will follow up any more on the Rev. Wright controversy, the NewsBusters publisher quipped that, "[u]nless Jeremiah Wright sends a cruise missile back in their direction, no, the networks aren't going to touch this, and the New York Times is going to leave this alone. That's the end of the story, that's the way it goes."

Below is a transcript of some remarks from Bozell's appearance on the May 2 "Fox & Friends":

Leftist MSNBC host Keith Olbermann attacked NewsBusters and the Media Research Center in his "Worst Person in the World" segment on Monday night, awarding us the "Worser" prize with a typical sneer: "The nice thing about being on the opposite side of the war with the Media Research/NewsBusters crowd is they're really stupid." Olbermann singled out Tim Graham's Friday post on Nancy Pelosi hailing both the Pope and the Dalai Lama as "Holinesses." Media Matters posted on Friday that President Bush had done the same thing. Olbermann, whose broadcast often cribs heavily from that site, pounced:

MRC President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared opposite liberal radio talk show host Mike Papantonio on the April 24 "Fox & Friends" program in two short segments in the 8 a.m. half-hour. Topics included the cancellation of a planned CBS North Carolina Democratic primary debate and the recent Los Angeles Times's article hinting that John McCain "may face "fitness questions" in light of his U.S. Navy disability pension. [see video here; audio available here]

In the first segment, Bozell applauded ABC for a hard-hitting Pennsylvania debate and lamented that the primary debates up to it had mostly been "a farce." In the second, the MRC president slammed the April 22 Ralph Vartabedian article in the Times as worse than being a mere "cheap-shot," it's just merely "stupid" and nonsensical.

A transcript of Bozell's remarks appears below:

Update (16:54): Schroeder Mullins added links to our videos on EyeBlast.tv. The old Politico had a dead link to our livecast from last evening. She also corrected the error about last night's function being the 20th anniversary. MRC is in its 21st year.

Politico gossip columnist Anne Schroeder Mullins picked up on the 2008 MRC Annual Gala in her April 11 "Shenanigans" feature. The column is devoted to "[s]hifting the spotlight from the buttoned-up, straight-laced world of politics to the fun, tawdry side of Washington."

We're pleased to make the cut, particularly since she mentioned the portion of the program that honored posthumous Medal of Honor recipient Michael Murphy.

But I do have a few quibbles:

MRC President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell was on "Fox & Friends" during the 7 a.m. EDT hour today to recap last night's "DisHonors Awards."

You can find videos of the Awards program here at EyeBlast.tv, the MRC's online archive and video-bookmarking site. You can also sign up for an EyeBlast.tv account here.

[Audio available here]

I have to give props to the "Fox & Friends" graphics guys for this graphic for our "How We Adore Clinton-Gore Award," which you can see below the page break:

Chris Matthews will forever be linked with his "thrill up my leg" remark about Barack Obama's [a]rousing oratory. There's no doubt Matthews is among the loudest in the media when it comes to proclaiming, "Hosanna" whenever he talks about the Obamessiah.

But Matthews also won recognition last night at MRC's 2008 DisHonors Awards for comparing Bill Clinton to Jesus.

"There are times when he sounds like Jesus in the Temple," Matthews oozed on the February 28, 2007 "Hardball."

The winner of the MRC's 2008 Dan Rather Memorial Award for Stupidest Analysis went to the editors of McClatchy Newspapers for an October 16 headline that spun the good news of the surge's success in Iraq into a tale of woe for Iraqi gravediggers. See, with the success of the surge and the corresponding drop in violence and death, Iraqi cemetery workers were "feel[ing] the pinch" to quote the headline.

We blogged about this at the time at NewsBusters here. You can find the article still archived at McClatchy here.

Our "recording artists" Michelle Humphrey and Kristine Lawrence prepared MRC gala video overnight for posting at Eyeblast.tv.

We were entertained by the usual mockery of the liberal media, but we were also inspired by Tony Snow's speech accepting our William F. Buckley Award and choked up by the story of Medal of Honor winner Michael Murphy.

In tribute to Murphy and his family, T. Boone Pickens donated $1 million to the Medal of Honor Foundation.

Confirming the important role that NewsBusters played in exposing Hillary Clinton’s bogus “sniper fire” story, CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson told the Los Angeles Times’s “Web Scout” blog that it was in fact our March 18 NewsBusters item that prompted her to debunk Clinton’s claims in a March 24 report for the CBS Evening News.

According to the April 8 posting by David Sarno, the Times’ Internet culture and online entertainment writer:

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson didn’t realize she had a story on her hands until a colleague e-mailed her a link to 12-year-old footage of the Bosnia trip that she herself had reported on, which had been posted on newsbusters.com [actually, NewsBusters.org] several days earlier. “I clicked on a link and was stunned to see it was the same trip,” Attkisson said in an interview.

NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard appeared on tonight's edition of the CNN Headline News show "Glenn Beck" where he discussed his recent exposé of the BBC being cowed by a radical environmentalist into removing information from a story about how global temperatures are declining, not rising as climate alarmists suggest.

Update: The show reruns at 9PM ET and midnight ET.

Update: The video is up now. It's pretty long. If you're familiar with the story already, fast-forward to the 7:00 mark to see Beck discuss it with Sheppard.

Al Gore, who famously claimed to have invented the Internet, now denies –in the face of powerful evidence to the contrary— that he is in a position to make an immense fortune from global warming-mitigation efforts. Ian Wilhelm, a Chronicle of Philanthropy reporter, asked the private equity firm Generation Investment Management LLP (GIM) to respond to my latest post, The Media Ignore Al Gore's Planned Global Warming Profiteering.

Business & Media Institute Managing Editor Amy Menefee appeared on "Fox & Friends" on April 2 to discuss the media's involvement in sparking recession fears.

Rescuing viewers from "solid recession talk," Menefee said that specifically network news reports already "have gone far beyond recession, they are already concerned about a depression."

"They're not tell-they're not allowing people on the networks to say ‘Hey, let's get this in perspective right now,' as you said we haven't had a quarter of negative growth yet."

Brent Bozell, President of the MRC which runs NewsBusters, appeared Tuesday night on FNC's Hannity & Colmes. Topic: The delay in the media covering Hillary Clinton's inaccurate boast of coming under sniper fire when arriving in Bosnia in 1996. Sean Hannity also raised media coverage of Jeremiah Wright.

Prompted by Hillary Clinton's comments today, Tuesday's ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts all led with stories that featured the 1996 video undermining Clinton's claims.

The MRC's Rich Noyes got this whole thing going with his March 18 NewsBusters posting with CBS News video from our archive, video which was soon posted by many on YouTube. Rich's posting: "Hillary Shot At in '96? No Media Mention of Bosnia 'Sniper Fire."

Audio: MP3 clip of Bozell's appearance (6:00)

One week after Hillary Clinton claimed that she faced sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia — and six days after NewsBusters posted contemporaneous news footage from CBS showing that she did not — the big broadcast networks have finally jumped on the story of Hillary’s big fib. Last night, as NewsBuster’s Noel Sheppard has already noted, the CBS Evening News featured a Clinton-busting report by Sharyl Attkisson, one of the journalists who accompanied Clinton on her trip 12 years ago and who narrated the video we posted last week.

Also last night, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who was also on the 1996 trip, filed her own report on the obvious discrepancies, and this morning all three morning shows led with how the Clinton campaign now admits her claim, “I remember landing under sniper fire...There was no greeting ceremony and we basically were told to run to her cars. Now, that is what happened,” was an accidental misstatement.

We have now officially passed a milestone: fifty episodes of "NewsBusted." Thanks to everyone for watching, spreading the word, and helping us take the truth about media bias to a larger audience!

Topics in today's episode: Thirteen percent of Americans incorrectly think Barack Obama is a Muslim, should harming the environment be a sin? A study claims 1-in-4 teenage girls has an STD, and new TV shows from the AARP?

On Wednesday, Fox News became the first news network to pick up on the contradiction between claims made by Senator Hillary Clinton about her 1996 trip to Bosnia and the reality reported by journalists at the time. In a speech on Monday, Clinton asserted that “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

But no news outlet mentioned sniper fire at the time, and TV news footage from the day of Clinton’s visit, which was first posted Tuesday on NewsBusters, shows Clinton and her daughter walking around without helmets, greeting various people including the acting President of Bosnia and a Bosnian child who read a little speech for the then-First Lady.