Since 2004, my website, ConWebWatch, has given out the Slantie Awards, which highlight the year's worst reporting and most outrageous statements in the right-wing media.
It's that time once again. So without further ado: the 2009 Slantie Awards!
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The first award is for the most egregious example of bias in a "news" story. We didn't even bother to compile nominees for this because there's one painfully obvious winner: WorldNetDaily, for its coverage of Barack Obama.
When Joseph Farah wasn't telling obvious lies about Obama, Jerome Corsi was peddling bogus documents purportedly linking Obama to wrongdoings in Kenya, and Aaron Klein was desperately playing guilt-by-association by trying to tie Obama to various radicals, terrorists and -- even worse -- communists. WND also glommed onto the Obama birth certificate non-controversy and pimped it like Wings Hauser in "Vice Squad" (and with approximately the same amount of psychotic ferocity) -- blithely ignoring the fact that WND itself declared the birth certificate to be "authentic" and that a lawsuit claiming Obama isn't a citizen "relies on discredited claims." And Farah himself joined the fun by lying about that.
WND and its writers have won all or part of this award since its inception. We might as well just officially name it the WorldNetDaily Award.
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The next award is the LoBaido Award for the silliest statement made by a writer for a conservative news Web site (named after Anthony LoBaido, who wrote a post-9/11 column for WorldNetDaily that was so unhinged -- he blamed the attacks on America's immorality since "all that is evil in the world can be found in New York" and, for good measure, called Hillary Clinton "openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic" -- WND eventually pulled it from its website). The full list of nominees, with a heavy emphasis on Clinton and Obama derangement, can be found here.
This year, we have a tie: Hilmar von Campe's declaration that Barack Obama is "an enemy of God," and Janet Folger Porter's threat to Obama voters:
To all those who name the name of Christ who plan to willfully disobey Him by voting for Obama, take warning. Not only is our nation in grave danger, according to the Word of God, so are you.
Both von Campe and Porter have issues with Obama (and both opinions were published by WorldNetDaily). They perfectly illustrate the intensity of the hatred the far right has toward Obama. Expect four more years (at least) of this.
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Our final award is the Slantie Award for Career Achievement in Conservative Bias. This goes to a reporter or commentator with a consistent record of biased and slanted reports that fly in the face of time-honored journalistic practice, the truth and/or common sense.
And the winner is ... Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid. A longtime conspiracy theorist and right-wing ranter, Kincaid went into Obama overdrive in 2008, kicking things off by spreading lies about Obama and playing guilt by association, later peddling the idea that the world financial crisis was engineered by George Soros to get Obama elected. Kincaid climaxed (if you will) with an article headlined "Was a Communist Obama's Sex Teacher?" in which Kincaid merged his obsessions of Obama, anti-communism and sex into a skeevy paranoiac stew.
It's not often one finds a way to aggressively mix sex with anti-communism, and Kincaid may very will have earned the award through that feat alone. But he did so much more, and that clinched it.
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Since the mere idea of a President Obama has so far proven enough to make right-wing media heads explode, just wait 'til Obama actually takes office. The resulting hatred and bile will pretty much guarantee that we'll see you again this time next year.