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The Best Notable Quotables of 1990:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Jim Florio Tax Advocacy Award |
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First
Place
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"The overall tax burden for Americans, local, state and federal, is actually quite low....The fact is Americans could pay more taxes and the country wouldn't go down the tube. Taxpayers don't believe this because they are being conned by the politicians....The truth is that the United States needs higher taxes and can afford them. Some political leaders are now starting to say that, but until more say it, the country will remain in trouble."
-- Commentator John Chancellor on the NBC Nightly News, April 17. |
Runners-up: |
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"The fact is that most government spending cannot be cut. The way out of the mess is for the government to raise some money through taxes and at last that's being done. And there's encouraging news in the returns from yesterday's elections. Six states from Massachusetts to California rejected measures designed to limit taxation. Can it be that the great tax revolt of the 1980s is coming to an end? If true, maybe the country can get on with the business of balancing its books in a sensible and logical way."
-- John Chancellor on NBC Nightly News, November 7.
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"[Except] for capital gains, it is certain the President won't mention the T word, and yet taxes are very much at the heart of what all our potential solutions are. How long can both sides pretend that a hike's not needed?"
-- Bryant Gumbel on Today, January 31.
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Media Hero Award/Abroad
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First
Place |
"Ortega's defeat is something American Presidents had sought for ten years. Yet Ortega's statesman-like acceptance of the voters' decision has prompted some in Washington to call the Sandinista leader a champion of democracy."
-- Today co-host Deborah Norville before interview with Daniel Ortega, April 24.
"We talked to one observer who told us that if he were awarding the Nobel Prize, he would nominate Mikhail Gorbachev and Daniel Ortega. What do you think of that?"
-- one of Norville's questions to Ortega.
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Runners-up: |
"Fidel [Castro] touched this young machine adjuster, and the man enjoyed a mild ecstasy. I know the feeling."
-- Institute for Policy Studies Senior Fellow Saul Landau in his pro-Castro documentary
The Uncompromising Revolution, aired along with Nobody Listened on PBS August 8. |
"Mandela leaves as a principled man, with all but the dullards understanding why he would embrace the Palestinians, whose children are being killed and family homes bulldozed in Israel just as black families' are in Soweto....Moreover, if Mandela is a terrorist -- as conservatives have called him -- he would fit right in with U.S. patriots such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, Nat Turner, and Harriet Tubman. If it had not been for those terrorists, what would we have to wave our flags about on the Fourth of July?"
-- USA Today Inquiry Editor Barbara Reynolds, June 29.
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Media Hero Award/At Home
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First
Place |
"The problem for Florio is that, as history has shown, when you step up and are a leader, people often don't like you. And it can take a long time, even centuries, for history to look back and say that was a good guy....I think that Florio will go down as the first, I hope not the last, brave man of the '80s and '90s."
-- Washington Post "Outlook" editor Jodie Allen on N.J. Governor who raised income taxes, July 29
Money Politics.
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Runners-up:
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"Let Ronald Reagan ride off into the sunset untroubled by fleeting memories of astrologers, smoke-and-mirrors budget arithmetic, and arms-for-hostages swaps. Dwell instead on those political tall timbers still standing, the heirs of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln....Only Jesse Jackson, still an acquired taste for most white Americans, can strike the kind of inspirational pose that one could imagine being immortalized in granite."
-- Time Senior Writer Walter Shapiro in the September GQ. |
"[Justice William Brennan] loved the flag clearly, and the Constitution, too...Maybe the way to remember Brennan's years on the Court is with some words he spoke to another Georgetown University event back in 1979. 'The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end,' he said. The quest, though always old, is never old, like the poor old woman in Yeats' play. 'Did you see an old woman going down the path?' asked Bridget. 'I did not,' replied Patrick, who had come into the house just after the old woman had left it. 'But I saw a young girl and she had the walk of a queen.' William Brennan loved and served two young girls who walked like queens -- his country, and its highest court."
-- Conclusion to story by reporter Bruce Morton on the July 21 CBS Evening
News. |
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