The Monkeyfisher: an Award for the Year’s Worst Journalism

    Back in 2017, President Trump had a great idea. He proposed that there should be an annual trophy for the most extreme example of fake news. The president tweeted, “We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!”

    It’s a wonderful idea that should be implemented. The only change should be to widen the lens and include not just Trump but the overall worst examples of sloppy reporting, flat-out lies, omitting inconvenient facts, and on-air imbecility.  Remember the bogus Washington Post piece on Russian hackers getting access to America’s electricity grid? (Of course, I have my own beef with that disgraced organization.)

    I’m calling the award the Monkeyfisher. In 2001 a man named Jay Forman wrote a piece for the socialist website Slate called “Monkeyfishing.” Forman said he took a trip to Florida’s Lois Key with a “monkeyfisherman.” The monkeyfisherman, claimed Forman, floated by on a boat, then cast a fruit-baited fishing line onto the island where research monkeys were kept. A monkey takes the bait and is captured. Anyone not educated in the Ivy League would instantly know this is ridiculous. 

    “Monkeyfishing” was instantly revealed to be total nonsense. However, it took Slate several years, and an investigation by some journalism students at Columbia University, for them to admit as much. The editor of “Monkeyfishing,” Jack Shafer, went on to become the media critic for Politico (these people always fail upwards), where he worked until 2024. Shafer was in denial about monkey fishing for many years. He finally came clean in 2007:

In 2001, Jay Forman wrote an article about “monkeyfishing” that I edited and published in Slate. Almost immediately,bloggers, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, and the New York Times ($) gouged huge holes in the piece.  

At first, Forman defended his first-person story—which described a trip he’d taken with a “monkeyfisherman” to Florida’s Lois Key—as completely true. In Forman’s piece, a monkeyfisherman casts a fruit-baited fish line from his boat onto the island where rhesus research monkeys were kept. A monkey perched in a tree takes the bait. Caught, the monkey is dragged down into the water.

    The Monkeyfisher can be a handsome bronze trophy featuring a monkey fishing from a rowboat. The award — maybe nicknamed “The Monk” – represents not just a stupid mistake, but arrogance that refuses to admit it’s wrong. The Monkeyfisher can fill in for what was the best media disgrace award show — the annual DisHonors Awards given by the Media Research Center. (Full disclosure: I worked for the MRC.) It’s good timing for the Monkeyfisher. We are 25 years from the original article, and we are celebrating forty years of the Media Research Center.

    The MRC was founded in 1987, and for four decades, president Brent Bozell and his staff exposed liberal bias in the media. In 2017, the last time the DisHonors were held, there was the “30th Anniversary Gala featuring the 2017 DisHonors Awards: Roasting the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporting.” The DisHonors featured categories such as the Dan Rather Award for the Stupidest Analysis, the Kathy Griffin Celebrity Dumbass Award, and the Trumpocalypse Award, which was given to “Every Single Person We Don’t Like in the Liberal Media.” The DisHonors Awards category winners were determined by the audience.

    The Media Research Center had its last DisHonors gala in 2017. Brent Bozell stepped down as president of the MRC in May 2025. It’s time to resurrect his concept. Also, the cash award for the Monkeyfisher Award will not go to the journalists, but will be paid by the journalist into the Mark Judge Appreciation Fund or the Anti-Communist Film Festival.

Editor’s Note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.

Help us maintain that fight! Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.