FEMA made the list, compiled by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, for staging the fake news conference during the California wildfires. Agency employees posed as journalists and asked officials soft questions while real reporters got little notice of the news conference, and were barred from asking questions because the conference call was "listen only."

Center director Bob O'Neil said the bogus event was an example of fake speech substituting for free speech.

"We haven't (previously) had anything that fell into the falsification or disinformation category; this is a first," O'Neil said in a telephone interview.

The Scranton police won a Muzzle for filing criminal charges against Dawn Herb, who screamed a string of profanities when a toilet in her home overflowed. Herb's neighbor, an off-duty officer, told her to tone it down. After she continued, she was charged with disorderly conduct. A judge acquitted Herb in December, saying that though her comments might be considered vulgar, she had the First Amendment right to express herself.

The Federal Communications Commission won a Lifetime Muzzle for having won the award four times and for being in the running nearly each year of the awards' 17-year history. The commission has been nominated mostly over how it has defined broadcast indecency following situations that included U2 frontman Bono's use of the "F-word" at a 2003 awards show and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" in 2004.

A Muzzle also went to U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., for introducing a bill that would require FCC to maintain a policy that would make broadcasting a single word or image indecent, and therefore punishable.

CBS Radio and MSNBC were cited for taking controversial radio host Don Imus off the air after he made racist and sexist comments about Rutgers University's women's basketball team. The networks allowed public criticism to control their actions, O'Neil said, despite the fact that they could've used broadcast-delay technology to prevent the comments from being heard.

The Charlottesville, Va., center awards the Muzzles annually to mark the April 13 birthday of its namesake, the third president and free-speech advocate.

Other winners: Lancaster County, Neb., District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront for barring witnesses from using the terms "rape," "victim," "assailant," and "sexual assault kit" in a sexual assault trial; the New York Department of Motor Vehicles for recalling a vanity license plate after deeming its "GETOSAMA" message offensive; the managing board of The Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia's student newspaper, for firing a cartoonist because of public criticism of a strip called "Ethiopian Food Fight" — despite the fact that the editors approved the cartoon before it was published.

Enlarge File photo by Butch Comegys, The Scranton Times-Tribune/AP Dawn Herb, 33, was cited for disorderly conduct after her neighbor, an off-duty Scranton police officer, called authorities to complain about Herb using profanities on the night her toilet backed up. The Scranton, Pa., police department is among the winners of the 2008 Jefferson Muzzle Awards.

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