2015’s Best Examples of Bad Media Reporting

The Media Research Center (MRC) is proud to announce the Worst of the Worst of 2015: The 28th Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting, with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry taking home the “Quote of the Year” honor for scolding a guest who referred to Speaker-to-be Paul Ryan as a “hard worker:”

Alfonso Aguilar, Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles: “If there’s somebody who is a hard worker when he goes to Washington, it’s Paul Ryan. …”

Host Melissa Harris-Perry: “I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker,’ because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like. So, I feel you that he’s a hard worker, I do, but in the context of relative privilege.”
— Exchange on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, October 24.

This year’s winners were selected by a distinguished panel of radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and expert media observers. The runner-up after Harris-Perry was the Associated Press (AP) which on June 20 showed a photograph of Ted Cruz speaking at a ‘Celebrate the 2nd Amendment’ event that day in Johnston, Iowa with a gun pointed at his head.

MRC President Brent Bozell reacts to this year’s winners:

“If you thought the liberal media could not top 2014, you were dead wrong. In 2015, the media used the race card on conservatives with impunity, ramped up its fawning coverage of our failed president, spun Hillary’s lies and incompetence as positives for her uninspiring presidential candidacy, and continued to show why their numbers are plummeting. The left wing media’s contempt for conservatives and those with traditional values was laid bare day after day as reporters and anchors used their pulpit to brazenly slant coverage and slander President Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s political opponents.

“MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is the crown jewel in the liberal media’s year of abject failure. For her constant, consistent dispensing of leftist tripe posing as intellectually-rigorous analysis, I can think of no better ‘winner’ this year. This woman is an embarrassment even by MSNBC’s standards. Think about that.”

The winners were selected by a panel of 39 judges, including nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, Wall Street Journal editorial board member James Taranto, nationally syndicated talk radio host Mark Levin, Fox News Channel news analyst and Washington Times Online Opinion Editor Monica Crowley, radio host and Editor of Red State Erick Erickson, The Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen Hayes, and Senior Editor of The Federalist Mollie Hemingway, Op-Ed Editor at the New York Post Seth Mandel among many others.