The Media Research Center‘s (MRC) NewsBusters division has picked the “worst biased quote of the year” from the establishment news media’s anchors, reporters, and hosts.
The nonprofit media watchdog announced its editors selected CNN host Don Lemon as the 2022 winner of the organization’s “Brian Stelter Memorial Award for Worst Quote of the Year.”
Lemon was awarded the dishonorable distinction for comments made during his Nov. 28 appearance on CBS’s Late Show when host Stephen Colbert asked: “The word on the street is, you guys aren’t allowed to be liberal anymore. Is that the case?” referring to the news network’s new CEO Chris Licht.
“I don’t think we ever were liberal,” Lemon responded.
“What?” Colbert asked. “That’s not me saying that. That’s the people out there saying that he (Licht) is not letting you be liberal anymore.”
“Listen, what I think what Chris is saying is that he wants Republicans, sensible Republicans, he wants to hold people to account,” Lemon said. “But he wants people to come on and feel comfortable with coming on and talking on CNN.”
MRC President L. Brent Bozell called Lemon’s response so ridiculous, it even stunned Colbert.
“The notion that CNN was never ‘liberal’ was so ridiculous on its face that it even caught lefty late-night host Stephen Colbert by surprise. It’s even more absurd coming from the man who has spent his CNN career attacking conservatives and advancing the left’s agenda,” he said.
According to MRC Newsbusters, this is the second year in a row Lemon has won the Worst Quote of the Year award. Last year he took home the award for asserting: “If you voted for Trump, you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support. You voted for the person who the alt-right supports. That’s the crowd that you are in.”
Last September, Lemon was bumped from the primetime show that he had hosted on the network for eight years and moved to a morning slot. Some conservative commentators suggested at the time that he was demoted because of his show’s low ratings. His show, “Don Lemon Tonight” averaged only 660,000 viewers in August to rank No. 40 among cable news programs, according to Fox News.
Runners-up for the MRC NewsBusters 2022 award for Worst Quote of the Year included:
MSNBC presidential “historian” Michael Beschloss: During a Nov. 2 appearance on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes”, he said, “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law….A historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”
The Nation’s “justice correspondent” Elie Mystal: Appearing on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” on May 3, Mystal said, “{Supreme Court Justice Samuel} Alito’s fundamental legal reasoning is that abortion is not a fundamental right….and he’s right about that. The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the Founding Fathers were racist misogynist jerk faces who didn’t believe that women had any rights at all!”
Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik: During a Feb. 4 appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources, he said, “CNN is one of the stations….of all the television broadcast networks and cable channels it pushed harder from 2016 to 2020 against Trump and it was part of the firewall that I think has saved democracy this far, under Jeff Zucker.”
The MRC NewsBusters annual “Worst Quote of the Year” award is named for Brian Stelter, a former CNN host/correspondent, who was let go from the network last August when his show “Reliable Sources” was canceled. He was best known for his attacks against former President Donald Trump and conservative news outlets.
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