Earlier this week, the Media Research Center announced our “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by a distinguished panel of 42 expert judges who reviewed dozens of quotes to select the worst examples of media bias in 2013.
Over the next few days, we’ll present these Notable Quotables as a way to review the worst media bias of 2013. Today, the best quotes in our “Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award, for Obsequious Obama Interviews,” and our “Obamagasm Award,” a title which should need no further explanation. (Winning quotes and video below the jump.)
First, the "Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award"
ABC’s Barbara Walters “won” this category with this pillow-fluffing question she posed to the First Couple at the end of 2012:
“Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you [hugging] that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?”
In the same vein, CNN New Day host Chris Cuomo tossed this softball Obama’s way in an August interview:
“What is more daunting to you: The prospects of protecting the free world, or dealing with a teenager and a near teen? What gives you more pause for concern?”
Winning the Obamagasm award for 2013, Newsweek’s Inauguration cover touted “The Second Coming” of Barack Obama: “America Expects. Can He Deliver?”
Coming in second in this category: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who spent his President’s Day show (February 18) thinking about his beloved Obama making it onto Mount Rushmore:
“Is Barack Obama going for it? Is he set on becoming one of the great presidents in history? I’m not talking about Mount Rushmore, but perhaps the level right below it. I’m talking, to use his word, ‘transformational.’... If he [Obama] were hearing us talking about him, maybe, mounting Mount Rushmore, getting up there with the great presidents, secretly, not what he would say to other people, what would he be thinking — ‘that’s exactly what I’m doing’?”
Tomorrow: the awards for journalists’ denying the many Obama scandals of 2013. The full report, with 15 categories plus the judges' selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
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