The coronavirus pandemic dominated 2021 as, following the rollout of the vaccines and more information about the virus, the liberal media and their friends did their best to keep the fear porn alive along with narratives new and old, including the insane claim that Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t being taught or applied in schools, conservatives are all but enemies of the state, and there’s no crisis at the border.
Through it all, NewsBusters had you covered with liberal media highlights, lowlights, fact-checks, firings, hirings, and ratings.
Continuing what’s become a staple of our year-end packages, NewsBusters used our Google Analytics to compile our ten most-read stories from 2021, which saw four writers from our News Analysis Division seeing stories crack the top ten along with one from MRC Culture and two from MRC’s Free Speech America. Follow the links to read our most-read lists from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
- August 22 — ‘You Can’t Have It Both Ways’: Rep. Issa Schools Foolish Acosta Blaming Trump on Afghanistan
Our invaluable mornings and View writer Kristine Marsh took the top spot in 2021 with an absolute humdinger in which weekend afternoon CNN Newsroom host and former White House carnival barker Jim Acosta had his tail handed to him by Congressman Darryl Issa (R-CA) amid the collapse of Afghanistan.
Instead of examining the Biden administration’s performance, Acosta decided to pin the chaos on Trump. Needless to say, it didn’t go well for him.
Former Free Speech America writers Alec Schemmel and Corinne Weaver had an incredible piece on the heels of Amazon having “terminated its contract” for webhosting “free speech platform Parler for ‘violent content on your website’” that showed Amazon didn’t seem to have had a problem with violent content on their own site if meant wishing death on conservatives and Republicans.
By their count at the time of publication, they identified “at least 204 examples of merchandise sold on Amazon that promoted violence, either toward President Donald Trump, Republicans or members of the police force.”
Now our deputy managing editor, Nicholas Fondacaro struck gold when NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd threw a hissy fit and dismissed the notion of liberal media bias when Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) for its meddling in the 2020 election by having censored coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
- March 17 — JEEZ: WH’s Psaki Gets Personal in Battle with Fox’s Kristin Fisher Over Biden’s Border Crisis
I made the first of two appearances on the list with a viral White House briefing blog that, surprisingly, didn’t feature Fox’s Peter Doocy. Instead, this story consisted of Psaki throwing down with Doocy’s then-colleague, Kristin Fisher.
Prior to joining the evil empire at CNN to cover space, Fisher tested Psaki on illegal immigration amid the spring surge with questions about press access and discouraging children to make the dangerous trip. Instead of staying professional, Psaki lashed out and, at one point, questioned Fisher’s motherhood.
- September 14 — After Learning She’s the ‘1 Percent,’ Whoopi Rants Against AOC’s ‘Tax the Rich’ Message
Making the list for something from one of her beats, Marsh chronicled a hilarious View segment in which longtime ABC co-host Whoopi Goldberg reacted to socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Tax the Rich’ dress at the Met Gala by questioning whether it was “inappropriate” for her to have attended “if she wants to get the wealthy on board with taxing the rich.”
Goldberg didn’t stop there:
You know what freaked me out about this? I've been trying to figure out -- because they say the 1% -- you know how much the top 1% is considered? People who make about $421,000 a year make you part of the 1%. For me this is outrageous. You know because -- listen, in America you're supposed to be able to come and turn yourself into everything, you know?
MRC Culture managing editor Matt Philbin clocked in at number six with our most recent story of the ten as, just last week, he wrote up a BBC World News interview coming to a crashing halt when longtime actor and comedian John Cleese battled host Karishma Vaswani over cancel culture as she accused his views of being “old-fashioned” which didn’t “tak[e] into consideration the feelings of people who have been hurt” by comedy.
Having battled her for a few moments, Cleese stormed off, telling her he wasn’t “interested in doing this interview anymore.”
Contributing writer P.J. Gladnick joins the list with one of two items to click big in 2021 as, following one of President Biden’s speeches defending his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, then-MSNBC anchor Brian Williams gushed over it as having been a “consequential speech” in which Biden “didn’t turn from it, he owned it” because, “as he put, the buck stops with him.”
That didn’t sit well with veteran Matt Zeller, who told Lyin’ Brian and the rest of the MSNBC co-hosts: “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled. There was such a profound bold-faced lie in that speech…The thing that they were most concerned about were the optics of a chaotic evacuation.”
As I wrote on Election Night, “MSNBC was beside itself with DEFCON-1 levels of hysteria” in preparing for and reacting to the results in New Jersey and Virginia with co-hosts Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and Nicolle Wallace resorting to “a rhetorical bloodbath with unhinged hatred.”
More specifically, the trio were incensed about parents being upset about something they claim didn’t exist in critical race theory (CRT) to only then describe CRT and the racially and politically divisive results.
Gladnick’s other entry into our top ten joined the foray in March when Parkland survivor-turned-gun control activist David Hogg attempted to launch his own pillow company as the woke alternative to the Christian pillow company created by Mike Lindell.
As the headline showed, however, the notion of woke pillows was so absurd it never got off the ground despite plenty of positive media headlines.
Closing out our list was a second entry from Fondacaro during a summer in which education expert Chris Rufo became a public enemy of the left as he surged in prominence for calling out the spread of CRT into schools and American life more broadly.
While I was on vacation and away from covering Joy Reid’s show The ReidOut, Fondacaro blogged Rufo entering the lion’s den the night prior and, despite Reid’s incessant interruptions and general lack of respect for human beings who think differently than her, Rufo methodically broke down lies about CRT defenders and Reid for her “word games.”
