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The Best Notable Quotables of 1990:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Damn Those Conservatives Award |
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First
Place
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"If you're miffed because the Cold War's over, Ceaucescu's dead, the Sandinistas lost the election in Nicaragua and it seems like here's no one around to hate any more, then maybe The Hunt for Red October is just the thing....This is a Reagan youth's wet dream of underwater ballistics and East-West conflict."
-- Washington Post film critic Desson Howe in the "Weekend" section, March 2. |
Runners-up: |
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"In a year that has had some of the dirtiest, the sleaziest, the most misleading ads ever, it's hard to pick the very worst, but here are a couple that the experts chose. North Carolina's Jesse Helms, who battled a black opponent, last week overtly introduced the most divisive issue of the contest, race....The truth is Gantt supported the vetoed civil rights bill which he argued specifically warned against quotas."
-- ABC reporter Jackie Judd on Nightline, November 6.
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"What Helms has done is taken the words 'North Carolina values' -- a beautiful phrase that evokes the small-town, good-hearted sense of place that one feels when one travels the state -- and redefined them as the values belonging to a certain group of North Carolinians, mostly white, mostly male, mostly unhappy with the changes of the last 30 years. To Helms and his supporters, 'North Carolina values' seems to translate into a status quo view of the world in which blacks, women, and poor people know their stations in society."
-- Reporter Juan Williams in The Washington Post Magazine, October 28.
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"Are you not also in danger of people looking at the Republican Party after this whole experience, and saying, 'Oh, now we do know what they stand for that's different. They stand for helping the rich and at the same time, the President's talking about vetoing the civil rights bill, so helping the rich and white guys?'"
-- ABC and NPR reporter Cokie Roberts to Richard Darman, October 21
This Week with David Brinkley.
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Paul Ehrlich Ecological Panic Award
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First
Place |
"If nothing is done to reverse ozone damage, scientists predict hundreds of millions of skin cancer cases in the U.S. alone, not to mention increased global warming that would turn much of the planet into a desert."
-- Reporter Mark Phillips on the January 16 CBS Evening News. |
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Runners-up: |
"The missteps, poor efforts and setbacks brought on by the Reagan years have made this a more sober Earth Day. The task seems larger now."
-- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, April 20. |
"Clean air and water, pure food and natural beauty, which most Californians were all for a few months ago, have been made to seem a radical and expensive idea that has to be rejected at the polls on Tuesday. The stakes are very high in California because environmentalists know that if the Big Green initiative happens to pass there, the idea of cleaning up the air and water could spread like wildfire to all the other states. The forces opposing it know that too."
-- Charles Kuralt on America Tonight, October 31.
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Good Morning Morons Award
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First
Place |
"We would like to believe the State of the Union address is a time when the President tells the American people the way it is. But no one really wants to hear that, so the President keeps reality down to a minimum. The President was remarkably upbeat for a man who runs a country with a monstrous national debt, huge balance of trade problems, a crumbling infrastructure, dirty air, countless homeless people, a coast-to-coast drug epidemic, and a faltering self-image."
-- CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith, February 2.
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Runners-up:
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"The bottom line is more tax money is going to be needed. Just how much will be the primary issue on the agenda when Congressional leaders meet with the President later today, Wednesday, May the 9th, 1990. And good morning, welcome to Today. It's a Wednesday morning, a day when the budget picture, frankly, seems gloomier than ever. It now seems the time has come to pay the fiddler for our costly dance of the Reagan years."
-- Bryant Gumbel opening NBC's Today, May 9. |
Bob Squier, Democratic Strategist: "I think that it was a game of chicken. I think what you had was Gingrich, who is supposed to be part of the leadership, leading people literally out of the deal."
Bryant Gumbel: "Acting irresponsibly."
Gumbel: "....Is this the legacy of Ronald Reagan politics, I mean, feel-good politics of the '80s, no-responsibility politics of the '80s?"
Roger Ailes, Republican Strategist: "I think that's a
misnomer..."
Gumbel: "But weren't the '80s about spending what we didn't have? And that was Ronald Reagan."
-- Exchanges on Today, October 5. |
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