April was a banner month for bad journalism. Let’s ring in May with my usual monthly update of candidates for the 2005 Mapes Awards for lousy journalism, and the 2005 Coleman Award for the worst anti-blog tantrum by an MSM journalist.

For those of you new to Rathergate.com, the Mapes Awards dishonor recognize the year’s most atrocious crimes against journalism. Last year’s first-place trophy (found here, with the runners-up here, here and here) was taken by CBS management for its stonewalling during the Memogate fiasco. The awards are named for Mary Mapes, the producer of the discredited story based on forged memos whose quixotic crusade caused her downfall.

Six contenders entered the race during April. The New York Times officially entered the race this month with three nominations:

Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom is suspended and investigated after fabricating an account of a Final Four game that placed two alumni there that did not in fact attend. The error brought to the fore the syndrome of the superstar columnist.

A New York Times reporter and her editors make a deal with Columbia University for an advance copy of an anti-Semitism investigation, on the condition that the journalist not quote the students making the accusations.

Once again, The New York Times lists convicted liar and genocide accompolice Walter Duranty in its annual hallowed hall of Liberal Medal of Honor Pulitzer Prize winners.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune and The New York Times run editorials praising the ongoing Democratic Party filibuster efforts as necessary to democracy, when 10 years ago both papers called for the filibuster’s abolition when the GOP used the filibuster to stop President Clinton’s legislation.

A Los Angeles Times reporter is fired for a March 29 story regarding college hazing that was filled with factual errors and so many anonymous quotes that many people concluded that he never visited the college and in fact fabricated the tale.

The Chicago Tribune misidentifies two innocent Chicagoans as notorious mobsters on two consecutive days.

And an old award has been updated — Boston Herald columnist Charles Chieppo was added to the long list of columnists and reporters taking money to pander.

The Coleman Award is named for Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Nick Coleman, whose tantrum aimed at Powerline, replete with name calling and small penis jokes, was so childish and lacking that you can’t even find it on the Strib’s site anymore. This month’s entries:

David Shaw, L.A. Times media critic: “Bloggers require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even important differences between bloggers and mainstream journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part of an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.

When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column, for example. They will have checked it for accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel, among other things.”

Shaw was nominated in part because the Times’ humiliatingly bad and error-filled story nominated above for a Mapes Award ran two days after Shaw assured the public of the Times’ safety net of editors. Shaw now has two nominations, the first being for a quote in the wake of CNN news chief Eason Jordan’s resignation.

On a similar thread:

Chris Matthews, Hardball, MSNBC: “Let me ask you about the news industry itself. And its taken a lot of raps, because we have such a wide definition of what news is today, with, you know, stuff coming across the cable industry. And it’s coming out of blog sites and stuff that is unedited in a lot of cases, which is my big problem with it. There’s no editors around. What do you make of what we’re doing right now?”

But I’m saving the worst best for last. Coleman is officially in the running for the Coleman, thanks to an ill-conceived e-mail to Jay Rosen at Press Think:

“Which side are you on? I thought that was your game plan. You ripped me last fall without even speaking to me because I had the poor judgment (or maybe the balls) to confront right wing wingnut bloggers who have my newspaper (and most others) in the crosshairs of a constant all-out partisan attack. And they are winning, prof. The Star-Tribune now has hired a by-god certifiable right wing activist and power megaphone. Funny, I haven’t seen you make any mention of that yet. Nor do I remember you defending me in December when I criticized the dudes at Powerline, who I called extremists while most of the academic press fakers of the world were bending over to kiss their jodhpurs.”

And due to overwhelming response from Rathergate.com’s denizens, his original December 2004 column that made the award his namesake is now in play. There’s too much of it to post here, but allow me to share the time Coleman decided that a dick joke was good journalism for a family paper:

“The lads behind Powerline are a bank vice president named Scott Johnson and a lawyer named John Hinderaker. If you read Powerline, you know them better by their fantasy names, Big Trunk (that’s Johnson) and Hind Rocket (Hinderaker). I will leave it to the appropriate professionals to determine what they are compensating for …”

So as of today, we have 18 Mapes Award candidates, and 14 quotes gunning for the Coleman Award.