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January
2, 2003, 11:00 a.m.
The
Professionals
Press
bias is as alive as ever.
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edia
bias is so prevalent that save for a few brave souls, most conservatives
are weary of even pointing it out anymore in fear of sounding kneejerkingly
predictable. But how do you get around winners like this?
(N.B. This is not
from a Saturday Night Live skit.) Barbara Walters narrating a 20/20
interview with Fidel Castro:
For Castro, freedom
starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba
would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate
is 96 percent.
Thanks, Ms. Walters.
And Mussolini made the trains run on time, right?
The Media
Research Center, the bravest of the brave when it comes to willingness
to delve through the media muck and chronicle the daily instances of bias
— and willingness to take the inevitable derision that comes with
it, awards Walters the "Media Hero Award" for her Castro hug
in its fifteenth annual awards for the worst reporting, issued just before
2002's end.
Phil Donahue, who,
mercifully, no one is watching in his latest incarnation on MSNBC, gets
the MRC "Ashamed of the Red, White & Blue Award" for this:
Phil Donahue:
"Let me tell you what is impressive. You're not wearing a flag.
Well, I don't want to damn you with my praise, but I say hip-hip-hooray
for that . . ."
Tom Brokaw: "Right. . . . I wear a flag in my heart, but
I think if you wear a flag, it's a suggestion somehow that you're endorsing
what the administration is doing at the time. And I don't think journalists
ought to be wearing flags."
Donahue: "And I say hear, hear, hear."
Thomas Friedman,
columnist for the paper of record gets the "Begala-Carville Award
for Bush-Bashing" for this winner found by MRC in an interview in
Rolling Stone:
I think these guys
are bought and paid by Big Oil in America, and they are going to do
nothing that will in any way go against the demands and interests of
the big oil companies. I mean, let's face it. ExxonMobil — I think
this is a real group of bad guys, considering that they have funded
all the anti-global-warming propaganda out there in the world. And Bush
is just not going to go against guys like that. They are bad, bad guys
— because of what they are doing in fighting the science of global
warming.
A tease for CNN's
Paula Zahn morning show got the "Good Morning Morons" award
for announcing: "Iraqi citizens are preparing to go to the polls
to decide whether Hussein stays in office."
Of course, all MRC's
candidates for the "Good Morning Morons" award were winners.
Like this runner-up, from CBS's Early Show last February:
Mark
McEwen: "Up and down the East coast,
it's coming our way, but we will probably see just rain in the big cities."
Bryant Gumbel: "We never get any snow."
McEwen: "Do you think it's global warming?"
Gumbel: "Yes, yes."
McEwen: "Do you, Jane?"
Jane Clayson: "Yeah."
McEwen: "We're unanimous...it's global warming."
And there is this
one, too, from The Early Show, from Mark McEwen in July:
"Last week
the President spoke, the market went down. Yesterday, the President
spoke, the market went down. Should he be quiet for a while?"
My favorite of all
of the "worst reporting" candidates walked away with the "Carve
Clinton into Mount Rushmore Award." It's back to Barbara Walters
for this one. This time she's talking to her coffee-klatch gals on The
View.
Joy Behar:
"I want to ask the audience: Clap if you would have your daughter
be an intern for Bill Clinton."
Barbara Walters: "I think that's so unfair. That's so unfair."
Behar: "Why?"
Walters: "Because the man was the President. He does need
people to work in that office and come on, I mean, let it go already."
The list, amazingly,
goes on and on. You can read all the winners here
(along with runners-up and the list of judges; in the interest of full
disclosure, I was one of the judges, as was our Kate O'Beirne).
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