SCENE
The Bias Busters' Ball
Cal Thomas
served as master of ceremonies. © Media Research Center
BY LIZ COX
On
the evening of March 27, employees of the Media Research Center
— along with sponsors ranging from the National Rifle Association
to the National Review (which paid between $1,500 and $25,000
each), individual supporters (at $150 to $175 a head), and members
of a Congressional Host Committee (twenty-five Republicans and
a Democrat, Ralph M. Hall of Texas) — gathered in the Regency
Ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington D.C. for the
third annual Media Research Center DisHonors Awards “roasting
the most outrageously biased liberal reporting of 2002.”
The stones were flying in that glass house.
Fox News Channel’s Cal Thomas, in black tie, welcomed the
800 or so revelers with a reminder of the evening’s objective.
“Tonight,” Thomas said, “we will expose the insincerity,
the bias, the anti-Americanism, and class warfare of the media
elite.” It was a rough paraphrase of the Media Research Center’s
(MRC) everyday mission — to which it directs its $6 million
annual budget — of “documenting, exposing and neutralizing”
purported liberal media bias. After a quick Bill Moyers joke and
a jab at Eric Alterman, Thomas restated the night’s purpose
more succinctly: to deliver “to the liberal press our version
of shock and awe.”
Thomas’s Fox News Channel colleague, Sean Hannity, commenced
the shock treatment by presenting the Ozzy Osbourne Award for
Wackiest Comment of the Year, the first of the night’s six
prizes. Each award was selected by a panel of fifteen judges —
sharp-eyed bias-spotters all — including William F. Buckley,
Jr., Steve Forbes, John Fund, Lucianne Goldberg, Lawrence Kudlow,
Rush Limbaugh, Robert Novak, Kate O’Beirne, Michael Reagan,
and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Owing to a remark he made about Saddam
Hussein’s electoral mandate — that Saddam won “99.96
percent of the vote,” but that “it is impossible to
say” whether it is “a true measure of the Iraqi people’s
feelings” — David Wright of ABC’s World News
Tonight edged out Hearst’s Helen Thomas and ABC’s
George Stephanopoulos to take the first trophy.
For the And They Called it Puppy Love Award, Barbara Walters triumphed
over The New York Times’s Howell Raines and CNBC’s
Brian Williams. Walters’s wayward words? During an interview
with Fidel Castro, she noted that “if literacy alone were
the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on
earth,” as its “literacy rate is 96 percent.” Laura
Ingraham, a radio talk-show host and author of The Hillary
Trap, explained to the crowd that the Puppy Love award “goes
to the journalist who did his or her best last year to fawn over
a liberal hero.” Ingraham then gave her own fulsome introduction
to the “hero of the conservative movement,” Judge Robert
Bork, who was — wink, wink — accepting the award “on
Walters’s behalf.” The heretofore subdued audience obliged
with a standing ovation and clinked their dinner utensils against
their glasses.
Next, Ingraham announced the Ashamed of the Red, White, and Blue
Award, given, she said, “to that journalist who made the
most outrageous statement distancing himself from his country
in a time of war.” Winner: the well-known journalist Bill
Maher. To be sure, there was no such “distancing” in
the Regency Ballroom, where red, white, and blue light-projected
stars rotated disco-like on the walls, flag lapel pins abounded,
and the Pledge of Allegiance was recited twice (with emphasis
on the words “under God”). In fact, in its livelier
moments the place had the feel of a pep rally, with Hannity as
head cheerleader for the “coalition of the winning,”
gleefully observing that “our military” hits its targets
“again and again and again.”
Ann Coulter, author of Slander: Liberal Lies About the American
Right, was on hand to announce Bill Moyers’s first win
of the night — the I Hate You Conservatives Award —
for his commentary on the Bush administration (in part, “If
you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture”).
These same words earned Moyers the Quote of the Year, though he
could not be there to pick up his prizes because, Tony Blankley
of The Washington Times informed the audience, he was “embedded
in his limousine.”
The night reached an aural climax when L. Brent Bozell III, the
MRC’s founder and president, took the stage to discuss the
war “for public opinion” that his organization is waging,
and to tally, in his estimation, the ammunition stockpiled by
the Left and the Right. “They have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC,
MSNBC, and PBS,” Bozell shouted, to affirmative crowd noise.
“We have Fox, and that’s just fine.”
As the musical guest, Charlie Daniels, tuned his fiddle on the
stage at the rear of the ballroom, Bozell acknowledged the MRC
staffers, whom Cal Thomas had earlier described as “analytical
sleuths” who “combed through hundreds of thousands of
stories to find the most outrageous instances of bias.” Similar
attention to detail was apparently not extended to the evening’s
three-course dinner menu, which was helpfully printed in the program.
On a night when the French were the butt of more than one well-received
joke, guests dined happily on grilled filet mignon, gratin Dauphinois,
and sautéed French haricots verts. The red wine was from
the blue state of California.
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Liz Cox is
an assistant editor at CJR.
