MSNBC Host Martin Bashir's Career-Wrecking Rant Wins Quote of the Year

RESTON, VA – The Media Research Center (MRC) is proud to announce the Best Notable Quotables of 2013: The 26th Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting, with former MSNBC host Martin Bashir taking home the “Quote of the Year” honor for a disgusting, misogynist rant aimed at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin:

“One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘a slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners’ savagery and inhumanity....When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”

Not only did Bashir’s November 15 quote take the year’s top prize, he won by one of the largest margins in the 26-year history of Notable Quotables.

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 Bashir is his MSNBC comrade Ed Schultz, who on September 30 – the eve of ObamaCare’s disastrous rollout – touted Healthcare.gov’s ease of use:

“This is the Web site folks, HealthCare.gov. If you go to this Web site, you will find out how easy it is to read, how easy it is to navigate all the information, all the basic questions, and all the direction you need to take to get involved, to get health care. This is a great guide, if I may say, for any of you out there who feel so confused by all of these right-wing commercials that are just permeating through your television screen.”

Second runner-up is moonbat New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who made the baffling claim on April 21 that the Boston Marathon bombing could have been prevented with the carbon tax:

“Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men....And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.”

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

“For the liberal media, 2013 will be long remembered as a year that began in triumph and ended in tragedy. After whistling past the IRS, Benghazi, and NSA scandals, Barack Obama’s press corps of cult-like devotees marched face first into the rancid mess of ObamaCare – a rat’s nest of lies and incompetence so big and so rank that even the president’s loyal media cheer squad couldn’t hide its cloud of toxic stink.

“And then there’s our ‘winner,’ the detestable Martin Bashir, whose unrepeatable verbal assault against a proudly conservative woman has earned him a permanent place in MSNBC’s pantheon of disgraced so-called ‘journalists.’ Good riddance to another nasty little cog in the liberal media hate machine.” 

The winners were selected by a panel of 42 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 national radio host Monica Crowley, nationally syndicated talk radio host Lars Larson, Weekly Standard senior writer Stephen Hayes, GMU professor of economics Walter E. Williams, and SiriusXM radio host and Fox News Channel contributor David Webb among many others.

**For audio and video clips of the broadcast quotes, to access full quotes, or see winners and runners up, please visit www.MRC.org**

Other “winners” include:

“The Tea Party Terrorists Award”
“We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too....We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.”

— Ex-Boston Globe Magazine writer Charles Pierce in a post on Esquire.com’s “The Politics Blog,” October 1.


“The Audacity of Dopes Award, for the Wackiest Analysis of the Year”
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children....We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children....We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

— MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry in an early April “Lean Forward” spot.


“The Kamikaze Award, for Disparaging Conservatives During the Shutdown”
“Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America.”

— Politico’s chief political columnist Roger Simon in an October 14 column.


“The Ku Klux Con Job Award, for Smearing Conservatives with Phony Racism Charges”
“What does your study tell you about the nature of the racial piece here of the Tea Party?...Is it sort of a resumption of the Old South, of the way things were before the Civil War, for example? Is it like that old dreamy nostalgia you get in the old movies, Gone With the Wind? Is it that kind of America they want to bring back or what? When there were no gays, where blacks were slaves, Mexicans were in Mexico? I mean, is this what they want?”

— Chris Matthews to author Christopher Parker on MSNBC’s Hardball, March 20.