The Media Research Center has given their awards for the worst reporting of 2002. Good God, some of these people are stupid. Everyone else has been linking to this, so I figured I would, too. Here's the link to the complete list. Check it out if you haven't already. You'll need to scroll down to find the awards, which confused me for a few seconds.

A couple of comments. One, that I've heard repeated over and over, is that Carter has been the best ex-President. Nonsense. Carter has been a publicity hound who has been publicly annoying the poor of the world for years. If I had to pick a best ex-President, it would be either John Quincy Adams, "Old Man Eloquent" of the House of Representatives (he was the guy who argued for the slaves in the Amistad case, so you've seen him in the movies); William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; or Theodore Roosevelt, who continued to play an important role in politics between the end of his term in 1908 and his death in 1919. Richard Nixon, who wrote several books on politics and international affairs after his resignation, would be fourth. Harry Truman was a party elder after his presidency, and a lot of Americans remember him because he lived so long, twenty years after his term ran out.

We bragged a while back that this blog had actually broken a story, the time we noticed that Noam Chomsky's department at MIT gave unanimous support to the anti-Israel petition going around a while back. We're calling co-dibs on another one, too, the story of Jessica Lange's dissing of America on September 25 in an appearance at a film festival in San Sebastián, which won one of MRC's awards. Both Iberian Notes (on its old site) and Atlético Rules had the story in translation for our readers the next day. It didn't hit the US mass media till more than a week later.