As we have all week, NewsBusters is reviewing the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2014,” as a way to review the worst media bias of the year. Our thanks to the 40 judges — a panel conservative radio and TV hosts, editorial writers, bloggers and expert media observers — who labored over all of these outrageous quotes to come up with this year’s worst of the worst.
Today, the Ku Klux Con Job Award for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges. One of the more unfortunate trends of the Obama years has been for liberal journalists to smear conservative opponents of the President as racist. Not surprisingly, all four finalists in this category could be found on MSNBC.
Winning this dubious award was Chris Matthews, who on the October 21 Hardball regurgitated the claim that efforts to prevent voter fraud was a Republican scheme to “slaughter” and “murder” the black vote:
“Killing the black vote. This is Hardball....Good evening, I’m Chris Matthews in Washington. This is rotten stuff, isn’t it? The Republican effort to kill the black vote in state after state: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, Texas. We can all see what they’re doing. Believing they can’t convert the African American vote, they’ve decided to slaughter it....This is murder in broad daylight.”
Right behind Matthews was MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry, who on her December 8, 2013 show ridiculously claimed that merely using the term “ObamaCare” was “derogatory” and meant to “demean” the black President:
“I want to talk today about a controversial word. It’s a word that has been with us for years and, like it or not, it’s indelibly printed in the pages of American history. A word that was originally intended as a derogatory term, meant to shame and divide and demean. The word was conceived of by a group of wealthy white men who needed a way to put themselves above and apart from a black man, to render him inferior and unequal and to diminish his accomplishments.... Y’all know the word that I’m talking about: ObamaCare.”
A few days later, on the December 16, 2013 edition of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, former CNN and MSNBC host Bill Press, now a left-wing radio host, claimed the Tea Party was a racist institution:
“The essence of this Tea Party is a racist institution. It is born of the fact that they cannot stand the fact that a black man is President of the United States. But it also shows me that despite what happened in Virginia — right? — this Republican Party hasn’t learned one lesson. They still will go as far right as they can, as extreme on the extreme fringe of the Republican Party. That’s who’s leading the party today.”
Then on April 30, MSNBC afternoon host Ed Schultz growled that it was racist not to support liberal demands for a higher minimum wage:
“I think not raising the minimum wage is a racist policy....Not raising the wage, the minimum wage, is every bit as racist as comments made by Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. It’s just displayed in a different way.”
Tomorrow, the Damn Those Conservatives Award. Check out the complete Best Notable Quotables of 2014, with 14 categories and Quote of the Year, at www.MRC.org.
