In the Spirit of Ving Rhames, I give the Ed Driscoll Award for Best Media Pundit to Brent Bozell

Back in early 1999 or so, I first had my cable modem installed, which was branded at the time with the logo of @Home, then later by AT&T, and now Comcast – and I may be forgetting an interim broadband provider or ten along the way. Web surfing immediately became fun, fast, cheap and with unlimited access, no longer a nasty, brutish, slow, and expensive Hobbesian proposition. I immediately started searching online for Websites that went against the grain of the MSM. You young kids on the Web today may not believe this, but back then, in those Paleolithic pre-Blogosphere days, there weren’t that many choices. If I’m remembering correctly, there was basically:

• Matt Drudge
• National Review
• Reason
• World Net Daily
• The Brothers Judd (back when it was solely a book review site)
• Townhall
• Free Republic
• And the Media Research Center

At least, that’s where I spent the bulk of my time surfing for political news and opinion, until I discovered someone calling himself an “Instapundit,” who had linked to an article I had written for National Review Online. That was in early September of 2001, only a few days before the world changed.  I have a lot of respect for those early Websites and organizations that were willing to buck the establishment. They were the first to “think different” – as a popular ad campaign advised us all to do back then, while espousing perfect conventional wisdom sorts of figures – in the period before Weblogs made publishing on the Internet available to everyone. (Including me; I didn’t start blogging until March of 2002, and up until about 1999 or so, I was writing almost exclusively for that quaint medium called “dead tree.”)

So, I’m certainly honored to both once again be included in Doug Ross’s “Fabulous 50” list for the second year in a row, this time winning “The Bozell Award for Best Media Pundit.” Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center and the even older Accuracy in Media were calling the MSM on their leftwing bias back when the World Wide Web was just a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.

Will I make it again for 2012? If not, it certainly won’t be for a lack of material, as the MSM promises to throw everything including the kitchen sink at whoever the GOP presidential candidate turns out to be. It’ll be a Dresden-like carpet bombing campaign by the media, to coin an MSNBC-approved metaphor.

And beyond that? Well, back in 1998, when actor Ving Rhames (from Pulp Fiction and the Mission: Impossible movie franchise) won a Golden Globe for playing Don King in a made-for-TV-movie, he immediately handed the award over to Jack Lemmon and said, “I feel that being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you.” The two immediately received a standing ovation from the audience. Maybe if I keep at this blogging thing for a few more decades, I’ll be able to hand over the Ed Driscoll Award for Best Media Pundit to Brent Bozell. In the meantime, a big thanks to Doug for the award, and for everyone for stopping by over the years – particularly since this coming March will mark our tenth anniversary in the Blogosphere.