Yesterday, the Media Research Center announced our “Best Notable Quotables of 2014,” with CNN daytime anchor Carol Costello “winning” Quote of the Year for telling viewers to “enjoy” an audio recording of Sarah Palin’s daughter recounting for police how she was physically assaulted. (Thanks to our 40 judges who patiently reviewed dozens of quotes to select the very worst of the worst.)
Over the next few days, we’ll present the most outrageous of this year’s Notable Quotables as a way to review the worst media bias of 2014. Today, the winner and top runners-up of our “Move Along, Nothing to See Here Award, for Denying Obama’s Scandals.” The full list of winners can be found at www.MRC.org.
Winning this category: CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker, who announced May 19 to New York Times television reporter Bill Carter that his network would not be “shamed” into covering hearings conducted by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
“We’re not going to be shamed into it [covering the Benghazi hearings] by others who have political beliefs that want to try to have temper tantrums to shame other news organizations into covering something. If it’s of real news value, we’ll cover it.”
It turns out, Zucker wasn’t bluffing: while Fox News provided 41 minutes of live coverage of the committee’s first public hearing on September 17, CNN refused to air any of the hearing live, giving viewers instead just a 15-second news brief at the top of the 10am ET hour that day.
Second-place in this category went to MSNBC All In host Chris Hayes, who chose April 15 (Tax Day) to boost the tax collecting agency as essential to the federal government’s existence and blasted conservative attacks on Lois Lerner as a scurrilous effort to discredit the IRS.
“Without the IRS, or something like it, we wouldn’t have a government. In fact, it’s the cornerstone upon which the entire edifice of the federal government is built. And that is precisely the reason conservatives have so consistently taken a sledgehammer to it....For almost a year, they’ve gone to war with ex-IRS official Lois Lerner, over allegations the IRS improperly targeted conservative groups....Conservatives recognize that one of the only things standing between us and a genuine plutocracy are thousands of anonymous bureaucrats doing the basic work of enforcing our nation’s laws.”
Next up: Chris Matthews on the May 5 edition of Hardball, sneering that Republican efforts to investigate the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack were “partisan enemies” of Hillary Clinton engaged in “voodoo” and “cultism.”
“The enemies of Hillary Clinton, by that I mean the partisan enemies, have got their voodoo doll. It’s called Benghazi. Every time they put the pin in, they hope it hurts Hillary....It’s become an obsession bordering on cultism among Republicans, with even John Boehner falling under its spell. You can almost smell the incense. ‘Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.’ They keep chanting the word until it gets Hillary to fall.”
Finally, Sirius-XM Press Pass radio host Julie Mason, a former White House correspondent for the Houston Chronicle, Washington Examiner and Politico, appeared on the June 29 edition of FNC’s MediaBuzz and ludicrously insisted that “every journalist” in D.C. would “love” to cover an Obama scandal “if there was proof.”
“All these hearings, all these investigations — where’s the proof of the crime? Howie, this morning, there were 100,000 stories on Google News about the IRS investigation. There’s a welter of coverage... but there’s no proof of a crime. And the coverage reflects that. Every journalist in town would love if there was proof of a scandal, they would be galloping after it. They’re not trying to protect President Obama. That’s over.”
Tomorrow: the worst “Obamagasms” of 2014. The full report, with 14 categories plus the judges’ selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
