This page contains videos for all of the quotes, in four award categories, in the ballot for the Media Research Center’s “DisHonors Awards of 2013: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporting.”
Judges: To vote, please return your picks via the ballot you were sent. You may e-mail it back, fax or mail the PDF version -- or, using the category names and number assigned to each quote on this page, e-mail your picks to: bbaker@mrc.org
You DO NOT need to watch these videos in order to vote, but if you wish to see video of any or all of the quotes on the ballot, scroll down this page.
Category A: Puppy Love Award
1) “His [Barack Obama] whole life has been crystal clear, and clean as a whistle and transparent. We know his whole life, through all the great, excellent education he’s had, the good pro bono work he’s done throughout his life. He’s never been a money-grubber. He’s never done anything wrong in his life — legally, ethically, whatever. His family is picture-perfect. The way he’s raised those daughters. Everything is clean as a whistle. And yet, they just refer to him as evil. They just refer to him as a liar. I’ve got to believe it’s ethnic with these people. They just got a problem with this guy being President. Is there any other evidence to justify why they keep calling him a bad man?”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, June 5, 2013.
2) “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.’And is he using the country’s historic demographic shift to do it? Can he combine the new American power of Hispanics and other minorities with the immediate aspirations of women to lob himself into the highest level of presidential greatness?”
— MSNBC host Chris Matthews on Hardball, February 18, 2013.
3) “Last stand. Secretary Hillary Clinton, filled with fiery emotion in her last appearance before Congress....The indignation. And then, the tears in her eyes. [Hillary Clinton: “I put my arms around the mothers and fathers and the wives left alone to raise their children.”] ...It was a valedictory that showed her indignation and emotion as she ends this tenure on the public stage.”
— Anchor Diane Sawyer opening ABC’s World News, January 23, 2013.
4) “When we talk about women’s participation and women’s involvement in the world, I must bring up the fact that your mother [Hillary Clinton] — she graced us all. Everyone is thrilled that she is now on Twitter. She has, in my humble opinion, one of the best Twitter bios on the Twittersphere.”
“This is, I think, the fifth anniversary of your mother’s ‘shattering the glass ceiling’ speech. Do you think we need — and I’m not naming names — do you think we need a woman in the White House? Do you think America needs to sort of achieve that milestone, being the leader in the globe that we are today?”
— Two of MSNBC host Alex Wagner’s questions for Chelsea Clinton on the June 14, 2013 edition of Now with Alex Wagner.
5) “People see you putting on this event, they heard you at the convention make a barn-storming speech, an incredible speech….I was there. You electrified the place. And they all say, ‘Why do we have this goddamned 22nd Amendment? Why couldn’t Bill Clinton just run again and be President for the next 30 years?’…We’re trying to change the rules in Britain, actually, because if you can’t be President again here, we’d quite like you to be Prime Minister in our country. Are you available if it comes to it, if I get this through?”
— CNN’s Piers Morgan to Bill Clinton, September 25, 2012 Piers Morgan Tonight.
Category B: Damn Those Conservatives to Hell Award
1) “Repeal equals death. People will die in the United States if ObamaCare is repealed. That is not an exaggeration. That is not crying fire. It’s a simple fact….[The Obama campaign should say] ‘No, we’re not calling Mitt Romney a murderer. What we are saying is that if he’s elected President, a lot of people will die.’”
— Ex-Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, August 9, 2012.
2) “The IRS is being used in exactly the same way as they tried to use the President’s birth certificate... Despite the complete lack of any evidence linking the President to the targeting of Tea Party groups, Republicans are using it as their latest weapon in the war against the black man in the White House.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir, June 5, 2013.
3) “The problem is there are people in this country — maybe ten percent, I don’t know what the number, maybe twenty percent on a bad day — who want this President to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t President....They can’t stand the idea that he’s President, and a piece of it is racism....It’s the sense that the white race must rule. That’s what racism is. And they can’t stand the idea that a man who’s not white is President.”
— Chris Matthews appearing as a guest on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, May 15, 2013.
4) “Clarence Thomas’s actions here today, though consistent, though tragic to me, are even more so in light of the bulk of decisions he’s rendered in the name of a judicial vote on the Supreme Court: A symbolic Jew has invited a metaphoric Hitler to commit holocaust and genocide upon his own people.”
— Georgetown U professor and MSNBC analyst/fill-in host Michael Eric Dyson on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, June 25, 2013 talking about the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling.
5) “When Ronald Reagan was President, Grover Norquist was in diapers and Rush Limbaugh was a disc jockey, I think, in St. Louis. You have had a hermetically-sealed culture grow up on the right in this country that, as we saw during the last election, is removed from reality and is extreme in the most egregious way.”
— Time magazine’s Joe Klein on CBS’s Face the Nation, December 30, 2012.
6) “Let me finish tonight with this: Ted Cruz of Texas is a disaster....Pay attention to Senator Cruz because he is the unsmiling contemptuous face of the wild, nasty hard-right fringe of a party that once competed with the Democrats to be the country’s governing party. All Cruz wants to do is prove that self-government is evil or impossible, or whatever else will justify his existence as a hard-right political bomb thrower.”
— Chris Matthews ending the May 24, 2013 Hardball.
7) “This is not about true conservatism. It is about resentment and it’s about hate and it’s about anger. And if you get along with the other side, then you’re not sufficiently conservative. And let them just boil in their own stew because these people, by excluding Chris Christie, have shown their hands and it is a great, great service to the conservative movement, true conservatives like me. So many of those people are shams, they’re not true conservatives. And we can see it now. They don’t care about winning. They care about hate, resentment, selling books, talk radio, things that in the end keep us out of the White House for another generation.”
— Co-host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, February 26, 2013 talking about CPAC not inviting New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to speak.
Category C: Dan Rather Memorial Award for Stupidest Analysis
1) “I do not believe what the IRS was reported to have been doing is an outrage. I believe that the IRS agents in this case did nothing wrong. Let me say it again. You won’t hear it anywhere else. The IRS agents did nothing wrong. They were simply trying to enforce the law as the IRS has understood it since 1959.”
— Host Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word, May 15, 2013.
2) “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So, part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
— MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry in a “Lean Forward” spot which began airing in early April, 2013.
3) “It’s silly that there’s a liberal bias in media. Obviously, there are liberal voices and there are conservative voices. But overwhelmingly, media in the United States — television, newspapers, and that sort of thing — the bias shifts towards the right. It’s a center-right media in this country.”
— Former NBC reporter and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, April 27, 2013.
4) “Talk about something else [besides snow] that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”
— CNN Newsroom anchor Deborah Feyerick to Bill Nye ‘the science guy,’ February 9, 2013, during discussion about a blizzard.
Category D: The Barbra Streisand Celebrity Dumb Ass Award
1) “George Bush, over the Memorial Day weekend, held the Wounded Warrior 100K [bike ride], which was a kind of a celebration for wounded warriors who came back from Iraq, and I guess they walked or ran or something on their prosthetic limbs. And I found this to be nauseating. I mean, first he sends them off to war to get their limbs blown off, and then he has them over for a barbecue. This is like the Cleveland guy having a pizza party for those girls he had in his basement.”
— HBO’s Bill Maher on Real Time, May 31, 2013.
2) “So you have people like these Tea Party people protesting government and then asked if they really want to give up their Social Security payments. And they don’t seem to know that, that is actually part of what government is. There’s a rejection of the sort of basic idea of human community behind the Reagan, behind Reagan-era ideology that is really frightening. And it leads us to terrible, terrible places. And now that we’re facing challenges like climate change that absolutely demand a global collective response, an organized global collective response. We have no hope for survival as a species if we continue down the path of this kind of psychotic individualism.”
— Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner on PBS’s Charlie Rose, February 14, 2013.
3) “This has become a kind of conventional wisdom — that the Republican Party has gone so far right, Reagan himself wouldn’t fit in. But I’m here tonight to call bullshit on that. Ronald Reagan was an anti-government, union-busting, race-baiting, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, who cut rich people’s taxes in half, had an incurable case of the military-industrial complex, and said Medicare was socialism that would destroy our freedom....He was the original, official pitchman for bat shit. When they hold up signs that say ‘No Socialized Medicine,’ where do you think they got it from? We got it from you dad, we got it from you.”
[Reagan audio: “If you don’t do this and if I you don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in America when men were free.”]....
“Both sides really should stop pretending he was something other than the man most responsible for our decline.”
— Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, June 7, 2013.
4) “First of all, give an honor to god and our lord and savior Barack Obama!”
— Actor Jamie Foxx during the Soul Train Awards, November 25, 2012 on BET.
5) War correspondent Sebastian Junger: “Everything has a kind of intensity. The soldiers aren’t psychopaths, they don’t miss killing, they don’t miss getting killed, but what they miss is that sense of meaning and the bond that arises in that situation....”
Bill Maher: “Well, some of them are psychopaths. I mean, let’s be honest. Some people join the Army because it’s the one place where you can kill people for free, where you’re not charged with murder.”
— Exchange on HBO’s Real Time, April 5, 2013.
That's it, you've reached the end of the four categories in the 2013 "DisHonors Awards" ballot.