Year-End Awards: The Dopiest News Media Quotes of 2014

Today’s installment of the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2014,” as selected by our 40 expert judges, the “The Audacity of Dopes Award for the Wackiest Analysis of the Year.”

Winning this award: longtime Newsweek correspondent Eleanor Clift, who now writes for The Daily Beast. Appearing on the May 11 edition of The McLaughlin Group, Clift strangely insisted that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens was “not murdered” by terrorists, but merely “died of smoke inhalation.”

“Every media organization has investigated this [Benghazi] to death. This animates the right wing of the Republican Party. And I would like to point out that Ambassador Stevens was not murdered. He died of smoke inhalation in the safe room in that CIA installation.”

Second place in this category went to Washington Post business reporter Zachary Goldfarb, who penned a February 21 front-page article insisting that Obama was about to end “austerity that has dogged much of his presidency” — as if the President was some kind of tight-fisted penny pincher, when Obama had actually overseen a skyrocketing of the national debt from about $10.6 trillion when he took office to $17.4 trillion at the time Goldfarb’s article appeared:

“With the 2015 budget request, [President] Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans.”

Since Goldfarb’s article appeared in February, the national debt has risen an additional $600 billion to more than $18 trillion — so much for austerity.

Next up, a segment from NBC’s opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympic in which both the script, read by actor Peter Dinklage, and the visuals seemed to celebrate Russia’s Communist era as one of “modern history’s pivotal experiments.”

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