Over the past year, we have cataloged the foibles, foul-ups, and facts-averse finagling seen in the press, and with the flip of the calendar, we recognize and reward the best (worst) examples in journalism from 2023. For this inauspicious honor, we have created The Golden Remington Trophy, a nod to days past when reporters would grind out work, burn shoe leather chasing stories, and journalism ethics still existed.
For this final iteration, we present The Remmy – our statue of the classic typewriter, encased in luxurious repurposed 8-karat gold — to select examples of exemplary journalistic sub-excellence found throughout 2023. These are randomly ordered, but the big prize is the Public Service Honor for the most significant reporting of the year.
So, without any further fanfare, here are The Remmy Select Honors:
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
Jake Lahut, Zachary Petrizzo - THE DAILY BEAST
As part of a “report” (more mock-piece) on the not-as-yet-announced Ron DeSantis presidential bid, the duo delivered a lightly-sourced but heavily hyped episode from four years back said to be “enshrined in DeSantis Lore.” The claim, from insiders, was that during a plane trip, the Florida governor was seen eating pudding with his three fingers. That Trump’s people latched onto this trivial nugget says all there is to say.
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN PANEL DISCUSSION PUNDITRY
The announcement that Jack Smith was moving forward with an indictment of Donald Trump clearly had the folks at CNN over the moon with excitement. So much so the network had a new and exclusive report with a reporter staked out at a Subway location, and then assembled a panel of seven pundits to sit and marvel over the meaning and messaging behind Jack Smith…ordering a sub sandwich. Yes, we are being completely serious about this.
"Jack Smith going to Subway today is a message to Donald Trump. ... Jack Smith with no words and a simple $5 sub in his hand saying 'I'm not going anywhere.'” – John King
"The imagery was intentional and spoke volumes. What is important here is the imagery here. That image is very different from what we saw in the former president’s posts, which is that he’s a deranged individual." – Dana Bash
“Look, I can count probably 5 or 6 sandwich shops between his office and that location he was at - he stood in line just like everybody else. I could not tell if it was a footlong or…what it a 6-inch sub…” --Evan Perez
John King marvels, "Jack Smith going to Subway today is a message to Donald Trump. ... Jack Smith with no words and a simple $5 sub in his hand saying 'I'm not going anywhere.'" Dana Bash adds "the imagery was intentional and spoke volume." (2/2) pic.twitter.com/nDmd952R2c
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 18, 2023
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN MEDIA ACTIVISM
Emily Heil – Washington Post
Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports was planning a pizza-fest in September. He has, over the years, become a very influential voice in the pizza business with his reviews. As his festival was set to kick off with numerous shops from across the country involved, he got wind that the Washington Post was contacting vendors about Dave’s controversial past and appeared to be angling to get them to pull out. All without having reached out to Portnoy himself.
So he contacted the reporter, Heil, and flipped the script on her and her outlet. The video of their interaction received tens of millions of views, just on Xitter, far more than the attempted hit piece would see after it was quietly released on a Friday night.
I Caught Wind That The Washington Post Was Writing A Hit Piece About Me And My Pizzafest So I Did What I Do. I Went on the Offensive pic.twitter.com/5oK2zJqVAs
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) September 20, 2023
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN JOURNALISM AWARDS
(co-winners) The Norman Lear Center / The White House Correspondents Association
For their Walter Cronkite Awards, honoring television journalism, the Norman Lear Center at USC had the stones to give Ben Collins recognition for “Special recognition for incisive reporting from the trenches of the information war.” NBC News suspended Collins for his obsessive Elon Musk work, and he has barely worked at all this year. He has not filed anything in three months and has a total of four pieces all year. Most baffling in their honoring the perpetually wrong journalist was pointing out his coverage of “the anti-trans campaigns in the lead-up to the Club Q shooting,” given that after claiming it was a transphobic event, he was undone when the shooter was learned to be non-binary.
At the Nerd Prom this year, the WHCA gave the Washington Post’s Matt Viser its Aldo Beckman Award for excellence in White House Coverage. The ever-fawning, never-critical Viser was noted for a lengthy puff piece on the Biden family relationships that was praised for — we kid you not — “plumbing emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop to illuminate the relationship of the two brothers.”
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN EXPLANATORY REPORTING
Rachel Maddow – MSNBC
The esteemed mind and the savvy reportorial style of Ms. Maddow can be distilled in its essence down to just three words:
Guns - For - Babies
This was her conclusion after some exhaustive investigation (we guess as many as three web searches had been conducted) to learn that a gun manufacturer has created a smaller .22 caliber rifle for use by young shooters – like most other previous models made over generations to help train kids in shooting skills. This gun, however, is dubbed the “JR-15”, and it even has a logo of a skull and crossbones with a pacifier. It is almost as if it was marketed with hysterical journalists in mind to generate free publicity.
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN CREATIVE HISTORICAL FACTS
Ken Burns – CNN Guest Expert
While shopping around his latest PBS-funded documentary, video historian Ken Burns addressed issues he has with Ron DeSantis and mentioned the governor attacks those who disagree with his policies and asserted that the Founding Fathers are rolling in their graves over his actions. Burns named a few of the Founders, including John Adams, which was a curious choice. One would expect the historian to know that Adams was known to have jailed opposition journalists while he was president, something DeSantis has fallen very short of doing.
Ken Burns Calls Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson 'Huge Threat to Our Republic'
— RedState (@RedState) March 8, 2023
https://t.co/OqC6gw3v46
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN CONSPIRACY REPORTING
Jason Baragona – THE DAILY BEAST
Sometimes, you cannot script a better event. In this instance, we have an investigative piece of a real interview that is said to have been faked, based on a fake interview that really took place. If you are twisting your head like a dog hearing a harmonica, allow this explanation.
Donald Trump gave a call-in interview with John Solomon on Real America’s Voice. Tech issues were making the audio poor in quality, and many felt this was Solomon falling for a hoax interview. Baragona then spoke with the CEO of Real America’s Voice, who was upset at the hoax and was calling for journalism retraining for his staff as a result to be held.
Problem: Solomon, as a former Trump staffer, did, in fact, speak with the former president, while Baragona had been duped by a hoaxer posing as the network’s CEO.
The Daily Beast has understandably pulled down the article.
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN MONEY-SHOT JOURNALISM
(co-winners) MSNBC / CNN
We do not want to say that the news industry was in a collective coital climatic reaction to the Trump mugshot release – instead, we will show you.
With Trump and his surrogates indicted in Georgia, the courts there (finally!) released the mugshots of those involved – and the cable news giants ran with this in an impressively obsessive fashion. In one 24-hour span, the two networks combined displayed the mugshots of the Trump defendants nearly 200 times.
CNN worries Trump will use mug shot to advantage....also CNN: "Over the last 24 hours, CNN and MSNBC have shown mugshots of Trump's co-defendants a combined 188 times." @cnn #TrumpMugShot @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/ySpe1UEn0W
— Aaron Flint (@aaronflint) August 25, 2023
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN SPORTS REPORTING
In the already lowered standards of sports journalism, this was a remarkably bad effort, and it kept getting worse. Phillips attempted to drag a 9-year-old boy at a KC Chiefs football game, accusing him of wearing blackface and a racist Native American headdress, and then push responsibility onto the NFL. Phillips accused the lad of hate in his fan display – the kid was painted in team colors, and then it was revealed he is himself of Native American heritage.
The piece was rewritten a few times, once trying to get the tribe of the family to condemn his attire, and then ultimately — under threat of a lawsuit — the piece was entirely gutted. The pictures were scrubbed, and all reference to the boy was entirely removed, now just a whiny treatise about the league needing to address racial portrayals.
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN OBSESSIVE REPORTING
Rolling Stone Magazine - The Jason Aldean Hysteria
Over the summer, a ridiculous controversy erupted when country star Jason Aldean released the video for his single “Try That in a Small Town.” Cries of racism, gun violence, lynching, and other hysterics were heard, and leading the charge was Rolling Stone. Over the course of a couple of weeks, an almost daily arrival of a new outrage was seen in the attempt to cancel Aldean. The result: His song rocketed to #1 on the National Singles Chart, a rarity for country hits.
I mean, c'mon already... pic.twitter.com/OaYUuBoIKK
— Lie-Able Sources (@LieAbleSources) January 3, 2024
(sub)EXCELLENCE IN PUBLIC SERVICE
Israel-Hamas Errant Missle Coverage – Various Outlets
We are still having the trophies processed for the numerous winners in this one, so rampant was the malpractice seen in reporting on the crisis in Gaza. The reports of an Israeli missile striking a hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people people, were slightly incorrect considering:
The Hospital was not hit
500 people did not die
The rocket had been fired from Gaza at Israel
There was a solitary source on this: Hamas
The reporting was so bad yet so widely reported it was unthinkable how poorly it all had gone. These faulty reports led to riots in other countries, attacks on embassies, and at least one diplomatic meeting with Joe Biden canceled.
The amount of major news outlets who completely butchered their credibility with this errant accusation that Israel “bombed” a hospital is both pathetic, and unsurprising.
— Brad Slager: Flips On The Highbeams In Fog Of War (@MartiniShark) October 18, 2023
The @NYTimes was not alone, but possibly the worst example.
1/ pic.twitter.com/pUuDV7MgBP
Compounding this idiocy was that just days later, the news outlets had not learned their lessons and — again, based on Hamas intel — went forward with reports Israel bombed a church housing hundreds seeking shelter, reducing it to rubble. Then, by daybreak, it was learned the church was still standing.
Two realities we are dealing with in the Press:
— Brad Slager: Flips On The Highbeams In Fog Of War (@MartiniShark) October 25, 2023
- The media loves to run unverified Hamas claims
- Hamas loves round death figures
Last week an unbombed hospital had "500 killed", an uncollapsed church supposedly had "500 dead" inside.
(screencaps thread anticipating edits) pic.twitter.com/oUXwKqpAsW
As far as this entire war coverage goes, it has been a complete fiasco for the news outlets — a shameful display for an industry incapable of that emotion.
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