It was a challenging task but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors led by MRC President L.Brent Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2021 and on December 15 announced The Chris Cuomo Memorial Award for Quote of the Year.
Of course, every year there is too much bias for just one category. So Baker led a panel of NewsBusters editors to break down the Worst of 2021 into seven additional categories (The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The GOP Wants To Bring Back Jim Crow Award; The Joy of Hate Award for Joy Reid Rants; The Praising and Protecting Old Joe Award; The Media Heroes Award; The Craziest Analysis Award and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).
Today we present the WORST OF 2021: The Craziest Analysis Award.
Without further ado here is the winner (followed by the top runners-up):
WINNER
Fox News Is “Danger to Democracy”
“Since Donald Trump, it [Fox News] has completely become a tool of propaganda. We shouldn’t even treat it like the press anymore. They have news in their title which is to mock the name of news. We have to call them out when they do this because we see how incredibly destructive this is to democracy. There is no doubt, Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are now a danger to democracy and they should be treated that way. If they won’t do it in the federal government challenging licenses or any way that they can do it there regulation, we have to keep doing it in the press. We have to keep pounding away at it.”
— Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik on CNN’s Reliable Sources, April 25.
The following is a montage of the runners-up and winner:
RUNNERS-UP
Triggered by the American Flag
“I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend. And I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with you know, expletives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which you know is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear: ‘This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.’”
— New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, June 8.
Cars Have Become Sentient Beings
“Waukesha will hold a moment of silence today, marking one week since a car drove through a city Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring scores of others.”
— November 28 tweet CNN’s official Twitter account. The driver of the car, who was not mentioned in the initial tweet, was Darrell Brooks, a felon who has reportedly expressed hatred for white and Jewish people.
Washington Post Slams the Statue of Liberty
“Compared with other icons of national identity, it is ambiguous and ambivalent. As familiar to some Americans as the flag, the statue is just as meaningless or foreign to others, a sign without significance, or worse, a symbol of hypocrisy or unfulfilled promises…The noble sentiments of the poem by Emma Lazarus — ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ — were all but effaced in the past four years of strident and often violent anti-immigrant sentiment.”
— Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott in July 3 column “Maybe it’s time to admit that the Statue of Liberty has never quite measured up.”
Apparently CNN Doesn’t Vet Freelancers for Anti-Semitism
“The world today needs Hitler.”
— May 16 tweet by CNN freelance contributor Adeel Raja about growing violence between Israel and Palestinian forces. Raja was later fired. Raja wrote 54 articles for CNN.com.
