With only a few hardened leftists stuck on COVID-19, 2022 represented a year in which more Americans moved on and, thankfully for the team at NewsBusters, the liberal media continued to provide us plenty of content.
The liberal media remained obsessed with all things January 6 and Donald Trump along with bashing Florida, defending President Biden (when necessary), concocting conservative boogeyman wanting to control women by supporting unborn babies, and trashing conservatives for expressing concern about sexually explicit material in elementary schools to name a few.
As part of that, our top ten most-read blogs of the year touched on a litany of topics, including Biden’s mental state, the free state of Florida, Hollywood elitism, and Ukraine.
For this year, the News Analysis Division had six full-time writers crack the top ten along with two of our contributing writers. Follow the links to read our most-read lists from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.
1. January 2 — Did Gallup End 'Most Admired' 74-Year Polling Tradition to Avoid Trump Placing First?
Contributing writer Brad Wilmouth set the tone from the start of the year and didn’t look back as readers flocked to this intriguing piece about Gallup’s “most admired” poll and wondered where not only had coverage of it gone (which wasn’t entirely surprising once Donald Trump assumed the lead in 2020), but where it had gone all together.
Wilmouth noted that, back in 2018 when Barack Obama came in first, it received attention on the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
2. April 8 — Joy Behar Is Offended That Floridians Are Making Fun of California
Early in 2022, associate editor Nick Fondacaro assumed the role of beat writer for ABC’s The View and he rode that wave to frequent appearances in our internal top ten blogs of the week lists and often over a dozen citations on a weekly basis outside the MRC for his video tweets of the latest vile bile from the cackling coven.
Fondacaro called out Behar on this particular day for whining that she was “booed on stage” at an event in Florida “for saying that I lived in California” and that one state would make such generalizations about the population of another. Oh, how ironic.
3. March 31 — Whoopi Bitter When Confronted with Hollywood’s Elitism, Moral Hypocrisy
Fondacaro clocked in at number three with a segment from the week prior when she felt triggered by The Lincoln Project’s Tara Setmayer for simply pointing out much of the country views “Hollywood elites” as “a bunch of hypocrites” for leveling constant “statements of moral superiority”.
Defending the leftists elites, Whoopi insisted those people also “work for a life” and “collect a check” like those who ridicule them, so “it really pisses me off.”
Two months earlier, Whoopi was suspended for insisting “the Holocaust isn’t about race” and rather “two white groups” fighting with each other. Following a mealy-mouthed apology, Whoopi doubled down in December.
4. January 22 — Newsmax’s James Rosen Commits Journalism: Lib Media FREAKS
Columnist Jeffrey Lord had a humbdinger that had readers clicking long after publication for his item praising Newsmax’s James Rosen for having the guts to press President Biden during a January 19 press conference on his mental fitness.
But afterward, he was roundly mocked by Biden’s allies in the liberal media. In one example, MSNBC’s The Last Word host Lawrence O’Donnell called his question “absolutely disgraceful.”
5. March 17 — PBS Wonders How Much Trump Contributed to Invasion of Ukraine
Alex Christy made the leap from freelancer to full-time NewsBusters writer and excelled, including with the first of two blogs on our list. In March, Christy flagged an bonkers segment paid for with U.S. tax dollars about Russia’s unprovoked war against a sovereign Ukraine.
On PBS’s Amanpour & Company, host Christiane Amanpour wondered aloud whether former President Trump was to blame for the war because he “sen[t] a signal of some kind...to Vladimir Putin”.
6. September 10 — ‘I Need You To Stop’! Velshi Gets Mad When Historian Debunks Him
Fast-forwarding to September, Christy came across a hilarious MSNBC segment in which liberal Saturday host Ali Velshi repeatedly tried to tell historian Andrew Roberts that he had “to stop” talking because he calmly fact-checked him for his claim that the British were souring on the idea of having a monarchy at all.
Roberts noted such a belief is “wildly overstated, frankly” with at least 80 percent support for a monarchy and questioned why there’s supposed so much hate for the institution when many Commonwealth Nations express such fondness for it.
7. January 11 — Leftists Wail, Gnash Teeth Over WashPost Profile of Fox News Late-Night Star Greg Gutfeld
Executive editor Tim Graham cracked the top ten with an early-year entry as leftists pitched a hissy fit over a Washington Post Style section profile of Fox News Channel host Greg Gutfeld’s mammoth success with his solo show having moved to weeknights. Soon after the move, Gutfeld didn’t look back, routinely crushing far-left so-called comedians on the broadcast and cable networks.
8. March 24 — Biden LOSES IT When CBS Points Out Sanctions Failed to Deter Putin
Then-associate editor Kyle Drennen had a piece showing one of many Biden outbursts from 2022 as CBS’s Christina Ruffini tried to hold his feet to the fire over the fact that the threat of and leveling some sanctions against Putin failed to prevent the war in Ukraine.
Ruffini told him that “deterrence didn’t work,” leading Biden to snap back: “Let’s get something straight, do you remember, if you covered me, from the very beginning I did not say that, in fact, the sanctions would deter him.”
Thankfully, Ruffini hung in there for another round.
9. January 31 — Too Extreme for Bill Maher: Host Lashes Out at ‘Mental’ ‘Karen’ Liberals
Then-research director Scott Whitlock chronicled a number of Maher smears against conservatives (and similar attacks from Maher’s HBO colleague John Oliver), so it was only natural that he covered one of Maher’s increasingly common sense positions standing against the anti-free speech left.
In his closing commentary, Maher lambasted the Democratic Party for letting “Karens” rule the roost even though they’ve “gone mental” with “a large contingent who refuse to call them out for it.”
10. March 6 — Christie Torches Libs on ABC Panel for Blaming Trump for Ukraine
Finally, our weekday evening and Sunday daytime analyst Kevin Tober went to a reliable source of content in former Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) and his appearances on ABC’s This Week. In this early March panel, he unloaded on the liberals surrounding him for absolving Biden of blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, the panel made it all about....Donald Trump.
Bonus: March 11 — Norah O'Donnell Under Fire for 'Toxic Behavior' at CBS
In a bonus post (which was in the top ten for one of our other metrics we use at NewsBusters), we’ll include this juicy scoop from the New York Post in March which Tober wrote up for us.
According to the Post, CBS News sources alleged that things were in disarray on the set of the CBS Evening News, which remains mired in third place behind ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News with morale sinking lower due to the behavior of anchor Norah O’Donnell.
