MRC’s New Bulldog Awards Are As Lame As You’d Expect

Back in March, the Media Research Center announced it was creating an award to give to its fellow right-wingers who in its judgment best advance right-wing narratives:

The Media Research Center has had fun bestowing our DisHonors Awards on those members of the media least deserving of accolades. Now, we want to recognize those most deserving of accolades and we’re looking for the guidance of NewsBusters readers to help us select the deserving winners of the Media Research Center’s Bulldog Awards for the best in journalism.

[…]

Let us know who you think has done outstanding work in the areas covered in the six categories, the kind of work appreciated by conservatives that is so disdained by the legacy media which will never honor it as they pile on honorifics for left wing advocacy by all too many “journalists.” Look at it as our version of the Pulitzer Prizes. 

Of course, announcing it would consider only biased work that advances its political agenda saps much of the alleged prestige from it, ensuring it will be considered much closer to the Slanties than the Pulitzers in terms of credibility. The MRC effectively confirmed that when the award winners were announced in May:

With our first annual Bulldog Awards in six categories, the Media Research Center is honoring conservatives in the media who truly deserve accolades yet will never receive them from the media establishment.

[…]

Left-wing journalists are regularly honored for their liberal advocacy with awards throughout the year. On Monday, the biggest journalism awards, the Pulitzer Prizes, were announced. Inevitably, they honored left-wing journalists who pushed the liberal agenda. (The Washington Post won “for its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021” and the Houston Chronicle earned a prize for how they “revealed voter suppression tactics, rejected the myth of widespread voter fraud and argued for sensible voting reforms.”)

In announcing the winners of the Bulldog Awards, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell explained: “Today’s MRC Bulldog Award recipients have been selected after careful consideration. Their impactful work is trusted and respected by Americans nationwide, unlike the work of the left-wing operatives that call themselves ‘journalists.’ As the liberal media celebrate themselves with Pulitzers, we wanted to shine a light on the real truth-tellers who are greatly dedicated to informing the American public on stories the legacy media ignores. Congratulations to this year’s winners!”

Only in the MRC’s right-wing world is reporting on a violent insurrection and exposing dishonest attacks on voting part of a “liberal agenda.” 

The award winners are as lame and predictable as you’d expect, as if the MRC’s main goal was to bestow awards on its friends and fellow travelers instead of rewarding actual quality content. The award for “outstanding talk show host” was given to Mark Levin, a good friend of MRC chief Brent Bozell whom the MRC aggressively defends no matter what and to whom the MRC’s “news” division, CNSNews.com, devotes a considerable amount of stenography.

Dan Bongino received an award for “outstanding podcast”; he too is an MRC fave not only for investing in right-wing Twitter clone Parler (which just so happens to be bankrolled by the MRC’s chief bankroller, Rebekah Mercer) and for railing against vaccine mandates (even though he is fully vaccinated). The “outstanding blogger” award was given to Stephen Gutowski, a former MRC employee — what a coincidence! — who now runs a pro-gun blog.

The manufacturers of new right-wing narratives also got honor. The right-wing New York Post’s Miranda Devine was named “outstanding columnist” for putting Hunter Biden’s laptop out there before the 2020 presidential election, but as we’ve noted, she didn’t provide independent verification of the laptop or its alleged contents, making sure that non-right-wing outlets would not take it seriously and treat it as the dubious October surprise that it was. The right-wing Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak was given an award for “outstanding investigative journalism” for “blowing the whistle on the sexual assaults in Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Schools and the subsequent attempts to cover them up by the far-left administration and school board”; we’ve documented how that work was transphobic in nature and particularly obsessed with an incident in which a transgender student sexually assaulted a female student — but hid the fact that the student previously had consensual sexual encounters before the incident. Finally, Drew Holden of the right-wing Washington Free Beacon was named “outstanding social media personality” main for tweeting things the MRC likes. 

All of this is explicitly ideological — pushing narratives is more worthy of MRC reward than telling the truth. We put more work, and more honesty, into the Slanties.