Mike Carlton, Chris Kenny, Miranda Devine, Rowan Dean and Prue MacSween. Dan Box. Peter Hartcher. Peter Dutton.

Journalist and naval historian Mike Carlton has come up with the Kenny Awards – prizes for right-wing commentary that might otherwise go unnoticed and ungarlanded.

The awards are named after former bag-carrier for Fishnets Downer and

Iraq war champion Chris Kenny, who scribbles for The Catholic Boys Daily and spruiks repetitively and predictably on a little-watched telly show.

Kenny has two main themes in life: the ABC is terrible and Gillian Triggs is terrible. This is interlaced by unreadable treatises on “values”, which often contain the spooky phrase “Green Left”.

The most recent Kenny Award has gone to Daily Smello opinion scratcher Miranda Devine, who came up with a piece blaming the police shooting of Justine Damond on the Black Lives Matter movement. Devine told her readers: “But what we can safely assume is that Justine Ruszczyk Damond’s death was made more likely by an anti-police atmosphere whipped up in the US by the anarchic ‘Black Lives Matter’, or BLM, movement.”

When a journalist tells you it’s safe to “assume”, they are adopting a shorthand for the fact there are more than a few loose ends to the story.

It was left to Media Watch on Monday night to point out that black people in the United States are more than twice as likely to be shot dead by police than non-blacks.

Minneapolis’s StarTribune from July last year reports: “Since 2000, at least 148 people in Minnesota have died after being shot, Tased or restrained by a police officer. To date, no officer has been charged in any of those deaths.”

For some strange reason, Carlton has chosen a statuette of an attractive gilded dog as the trophy for Kenny winners. Apart from Devine, there has been an award presented to Rowan Dean and Prue MacSween (a tie).

Given the strong field of contenders, this is a category that the journalists’ union should have instituted years ago, but that is now an unlikely initiative given that Sky “News” chief Angelos Frangopoulos is chairman of the Walkley advisory board.