As if to prove just what a rotted and rancid institution journalism has become, of all the media events to occur last year, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism has been given to the CNN town hall where a rape victim was booed.

You remember this event from last February, the one hosted by the far-left Jake Tapper — the one where CNN’s audience loudly booed a rape victim after learning she purchased a gun to protect herself from a second rape.

You all remember Tapper’s indecent silence as this poor woman was booed.

And that was only part of it.

The whole night was an obscene show trial, a monstrous kangaroo court where during the show those guests invited by CNN to speak on behalf of our Second Amendment civil rights were set up for verbal abuse — and where after the show they reportedly required security to make it safely through CNN’s mob.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was told by one of CNN’s hand-picked anti-gun activists: “it’s hard to look at you and not look down the barrel on an AR-15 and not look at” the monster who murdered who gunned down 17 innocent children at the Parkland, FL, high school.

Tapper’s only response was to thank the Parkland student activist for his comment.

NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch faced even worse abuse.

One student activist trashed her after she left, saying: “I wish I could have asked the NRA lady [Loesch] a question. I would ask her how she can look in the mirror, considering the fact that she has children[.]”

Again, Tapper said nothing, and she was attacked a second time when she was not present: “I had a question for Ms. Loesch but she’s not here yet, so, for her and the NRA, which she’s probably watching, and all of you puppet politicians that they are backing: was the blood of my classmates and my teachers worth your blood money?”

Tapper’s only response was to save Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, from having to answer the question.

While she was on the stage, someone in the crowd screamed “murderer” at Loesch and another one of the student anti-gun activists attacked Loesch’s motherhood:

Dana Loesch, I want to know that we will support your two children in the way that we will not — you will not. The shooter at our school obtained weapons that he used on us legally. Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic and weapons — weapons, and the modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic like bump stocks?

By far, though, Tapper and CNN’s true journalistic failure that night came from the deliberate decision to treat Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel as a hero and moral authority. For two hours, Israel lied about his own culpability and covered up his department’s incompetence and cowardice — and he was allowed to do so by demonizing law-abiding gun owners, including Loesch and Rubio.

But because Israel is opposed to the Second Amendment and CNN desperately needed this massacre to be blamed on the Second Amendment and not incompetent Democrats, Tapper and CNN even went so far as to allow “Scott Israel to take the stage before the cameras turned on and electioneer; he took that time (about 20 minutes) to start blaming law-abiding gun owners,” according to Loesch,

In other words, Tapper allowed a corrupt bureaucrat whose fellow bureaucrats did nothing as children were being murdered, to whip up CNN’s anti-gun crowd into a slathering frenzy, to set Loesch and Rubio up as the child-killing villains in this televised slaughter.

But all of that is water under the bridge, is well known…

What’s news here is that one of the most objectively disgraceful events in the history of journalism has been rewarded by those who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of journalism, which sends an unmistakable message that this is the kind of vicious, dishonest, partisan, and un-American behavior that wins you awards and plaudits.

Tell me again how the establishment media are not the enemy of the people.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.