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 2022 and on December 15 announced The Brian Stelter Memorial Award for Quote of the Year.
Of course, every year there is way too much bias for just one category. So Baker led a panel of NewsBusters editors to break down the Worst of 2022 into eight additional categories (The GOP Will End Democracy Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The Praising and Protecting Old Joe Award;The Media Heroes Award; The Cursing the Conservative Court Award; The Joy of Hate Award for Joy Reid Rants; The Craziest Analysis Award and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).
Today we present the WORST OF 2022: The Damn Those Conservatives Award.
Without further ado here is the winner (followed by the top runners-up):
WINNER
“I worry that in covering [Virginia GOP Governor] Glenn Youngkin and his politics of parental choice, all the focus was on how well it worked. And even in our conversations about [Florida GOP Governor Ron] DeSantis; it’s about how well they’re serving him. The truth is dehumanization as a tactic for politics is from war. Dehumanization is a tactic that’s being used right now. Russians get their soldiers to rape children by dehumanizing them. Dehumanization as a practice is a tactic of war. It’s being deployed in politics and people like you and I sometimes lose the plot and admire its effectiveness….That dehumanization has a cost right now!”
— Host Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, April 20.
The following is a montage of the runners-up and winner:
RUNNERS-UP
“I’m working hard to never say Republican Party again because they’re not a party. They’re Sinn Fein to the IRA, they are the PLO to Hamas. They are a dimestore front for a terrorist movement.”
— MSNBC contributor, TheRoot.com Editor and Morgan State Professor Jason Johnson on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, January 13.
“First and foremost, you have to name something for what it is. You can’t treat the GOP as a responsible political party because it isn’t. I call them a radical, weaponized death cult….If they take over in 2022 that is the end of democracy and we’re going to have authoritarianism.”
— Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on MSNBC’s American Voices With Alicia Menendez, January 2.
“You’re going to be the party that forces a child to bear a child of its rapist? That’s number one. That’s your party. You’re going to be the party that thinks owning weapons of war should be free and easy for everybody in an age where our children are getting slaughtered on a regular basis….And now, you’re in the party that thinks it’s funny….to mislead fathers, mothers, and babies who have fled oppression in their country, walked through many countries to get here to America to seek asylum….That must be cool, to be so unbelievably sick and coldhearted. That is the Republican Party today. It’s the party of inhumanity.”
— Co-host Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, September 21.
“We’re seeing a lot of violent rhetoric from Fox News, saying ‘It’s war, you’re — you are under attack.’ So, they’re very much doing this in a reckless way that has the ability to foment violence….In this sense, the last 24 hours does tie into what I’ve been writing about the last 25 years, because we’ve had these repeated episodes of violent rhetoric from the Republicans and from conservative TV and radio that have resulted in protracted periods of violence. And there’s a lot of concern that we may be headed, here in the United States, for another, say, Oklahoma City bombing of the 1995 variety.”
— The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank on PBS’s Amanpour & Company, August 10.
“It is grotesque to grab these people, throw them on buses, drive them up to, to, to Washington, D.C., and just drop them outside of an official residence, the Vice President’s residence. It’s grotesque what they’re doing with these human beings. This is political human trafficking.”
— Co-host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, September 16.
