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WORST OF 2025: The Damn Those Conservatives Award
It was a challenging task, but an esteemed panel of NewsBusters editors, led by MRC President David Bozell and MRC’s Vice President for Research and Publications Brent Baker, boiled down all the biased outbursts from lefty hack hosts, anchors, reporters and pundits in 2025 and on December 17 announced The Media Research Center Award for Worst Quote of the Year.
Of course, every year, there is way too much bias for just one category. So we broke down the Worst of 2025 into five additional categories (The Craziest Analysis Award; The Trashing Trump Award; The Damn Those Conservatives Award; The ICE Breakers Award for Hating Trump’s Deportation Policy; and the Celebrity Freak-Outs Award).
Today, we present the WORST OF 2025: The Damn Those Conservatives Award.
WINNER
“I think some people might say Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was extreme. You know, I think that’s the conversation that happened. People condemned political violence, but they also felt a great deal of discomfort with his language, suggesting that these kinds of words lead to violence. I don’t know, I’m just kind of sharing my observations as I saw the conversations unfold.”— Host Katie Couric to Sen. John Fetterman on her podcast Next Question with Katie Couric, November 13.
RUNNERS-UP
“We tried to forget about him, but Ron DeSantis is still governor of Florida. He took the Comfy Couch hosts on a tour of the concentration camp that he’s building in Florida in order to round up people, brown people, and throw them in a camp because he doesn’t want them in Florida.”— Former MSNBC host Joy Reid on The Joy Reid Show podcast, June 28.
“There’s a reason that there’s so much hate going around. There’s a reason that there’s so much anti-Semitism and so much racism going around….You can place it at the feet of one person [Donald Trump] who didn’t start this but certainly exacerbates it and foments hate and bigotry…. The racism. The bigotry. The anti-Semitism. The transphobia. The homophobia. It certainly does happen on one side more than the other….That’s the thing that makes the MAGA wheel spin. That’s the motor. That’s the axle. Is hatred and bigotry.”— Former CNN anchor Don Lemon discussing the arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor’s mansion as aired on his podcast The Don Lemon Show, April 14.
“What the Trump Administration is providing Democrats right now are those cuts. They’re giving them the punchline to, ‘Oh, they’re gonna cut billionaires tax cuts, but guess what they’re gonna do?’ They’re going to take away medical research that saved your daughter or saved somebody in your family. They’re going to take away and fire people in the FAA. So, those plane crashes that you’re seeing, you’re gonna see more of them.”— Co-host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, February 19.