MRC’s Bulldog Awards Take A Hateful, Transphobic Bent

Last year, the Media Research Center started giving out Bulldog Awards to fellow ideologues who push right-wing narratives, and it was as lame and predictable as you’d expect. This year’s awards were just as lame — but with a clear bent toward hate and transphobia.

One winner is Matt Walsh, who has made hating transgender people his calling card, to the point that he lied about moving to a Virginia school district in order to rant about the district not hating LGBT people enough and tried to deceive transgender people into appearing in an anti-transgender film he was making. Ironically, the award comes a few days after his employer, the Daily Wire, doubled down on its support for Walsh after old comments resurfaced showing an obsession with wanting to see teenage girls impregnated.

Another winner is Chaya Raichik, whose homophobic Libs of TikTok inspires death threats against her targets and whose exposure as the Twitter account’s author drew rage from the MRC against the reporter who exposed it. Other winners include right-wing writers Mary Margaret Olohan, Karol Markowitz and Andrew Kerr and right-wing radio host Chris Plante.

The MRC went on to demonstrate how it doesn’t understand how genuine awards work:

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 “unflinching reporting that captured the complex consequences of life after Roe v. Wade, including the story of a Texas teenager who gave birth to twins after new restrictions denied her an abortion.” The Atlantic was honored for a “compelling accounting of the Trump administration policy that forcefully separated migrant children from their parents…”

In announcing the 2023 winners of the Bulldog Awards, Media Research Center founder and President Brent Bozell III said: “The Bulldog Award winners are trusted truth-tellers, unlike left-wing operatives who win Pulitzers. These are courageous individuals dedicated to informing Americans about stories the leftist media ignore. Congratulations to all!”

The MRC didn’t identify any factual errors in those stories, nor did it explain how covering those topics without the right-wing spin it demands means a “liberal agenda” was pushed.

The MRC also gave out a “Bulldog Award for Lifetime Achievement” to Fox News’ Brit Hume. We doubt he was being honored for his pre-Fox News work in the “liberal media,” though the MRC would like you to believe otherwise:

For decades, Hume stood as a rarity in the established media, a reporter for ABC News who showed respect for conservatives while displaying honesty and candor in his years as a White House reporter covering both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Hume’s 23 years at ABC News, with the final eight as White House correspondent, earned him a reputation as a reporter who delivered the news with honesty and candor. In January of 1997, he moved to the brand-new Fox News Channel, following his wife Kim, who started the D.C. Bureau months before. Hume took on the role of managing editor and chief Washington correspondent, tasked with building up the TV news bureau.

That was followed by two more paragraphs gushing over Hume’s work for Fox News, along with noting that “In 2009, the Media Research Center honored Hume with the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence.” In the MRC’s world, “media excellence” equals right-wing media bias.

Meanwhile, our Slantie Awards are better and more entertaining.