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Media | The year’s worst journalism highlights unchanging nature of “mainstream” reporting | Marvin Olasky

Each year for the past 19 I've served as a judge for the Media Research Center's awards for the year's worst journalism. The winners will be announced any day now, and on my ballot MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift are two of the leading candidates.

Olbermann said on Sept. 11, at the site of the World Trade Center, "Who has left this hole in the ground? We have not forgotten, Mr. President. You have. May this country forgive you." On Oct. 18 he announced that the Bush administration is "more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from."

Clift, declaring on April 7, "There's nothing this administration won't do under the guise of battling terrorism," called for Americans to "stop Bush's imperial expansion of power." But Clift on July 15 said Russia's Vladimir Putin has "a commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who's ineffective."