The liberal media generally approach conservatives and their leaders with condescension, mockery, and contempt. So it’s only fair that occasionally, conservatives turn that mockery around on them.
On Thursday night, the Media Research Center held its 2016 Gala and Dishonors Awards. As an MRC staffer going back to 1989, it’s seldom more rewarding to expose media bias than when a crowd of 800 conservatives laugh, clap, and stomp the floor at what you found over the preceding year.
Gala attendees vote, table by table, for the Worst of the Worst. At the end of the night, they pick a Quote of the Year. This year, it was an unforgettable blast from last October from then-MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry.
When her guest, Latino conservative Alfonso Aguilar, praised House Speaker Paul Ryan as a “hard worker” on October 26, the MSNBC schoolmarm took exception. “I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker,’ because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like.  So, I feel you that he’s a hard worker, I do, but in the context of relative privilege.”
It’s seldom more rewarding to expose media bias than when a crowd of 800 conservatives laugh, clap, and stomp the floor at what you found over the preceding year.
The words “hard worker” were treated like some kind of racial offense. The stunned look on Aguilar’s face was priceless. He later told us “That is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.”
On Friday morning, Harris-Perry sub-tweeted a response: “Real violence, inequality despair are manifest & y'all trolling me about a year old misquote from a cancelled show? You'll be in my prayers.” 
The MRC crowd kept coming back to voting for MSNBC. In the “Damn Those Conservatives to Hell Award,” the voters selected Chris Matthews trashing Ted Cruz on February 10 on “Morning Joe,” that alleged oasis of calm and civility, “There’s a troll-like quality to Cruz. He operates below the level of human life.”
Please imagine how Matthews would consider those kinds of words to be racist if a conservative said Obama or Al Sharpton operated “below the level of human life.”
For the “Hail Hillary Award,” the voters picked Joy Reid, who replaced Harris-Perry on those weekend mornings. On April 8, Reid and Andrea Mitchell developed a case of the vapors when discussing Mrs. Clinton’s resume. These feminists always count Hillary’s eight years as First Lady (and 14 years as the governor’s wife in Arkansas) as if they were actual government experience. You would have to go back to the “Founding Fathers” to find someone with a resume as distinguished as Hillary’s:
Reid: “If you look at Hillary Clinton’s qualifications, I mean, my God, since the Founding Fathers, has anyone tried to run for president with more on their resume?”
Mitchell: “John Quincy Adams, maybe.”
Reid: “Maybe John Quincy Adams. True, true, true. Jefferson, Adams, I mean you have to go back literally to the 18th century to find somebody with a more packed resume than Hillary Clinton.”
Finally, the really tough competition is for the “Celebrity Dumbass Award.” HBO star Bill Maher won overwhelmingly by trashing the American system and the U.S. Constitution after he compared the Brexit vote to the Republicans preventing a gun-control vote: “I saw David Cameron today. You know, I’m up at 2:00 in the morning when this all happens. So I watched his whole speech and it’s like ‘well, I lost the vote, I graciously leave office.’ It’s like their system works so beautifully. We can’t even get a vote on something that 90 percent of Americans agree on and can’t get a vote. Our system sucks. It really does. The Constitution needs a page one re-write.”
Maher is always welcome to Make America Great Again by moving to London.

Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and is the Media Research Center's Director of Media Analysis and co-author (with Brent Bozell) of "Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election and How to Stop Them From Doing It In 2016."