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The Best Notable Quotables of 1990:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Most Honest Confession Award |
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First
Place
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"There is no such thing as objective reporting...I've become even more crafty about finding the voices to say the things I think are true. That's my subversive mission."
-- Boston Globe environmental reporter Dianne Dumanoski at an Utne Reader symposium May 17-20. Quoted by Micah Morrison in the July
American Spectator. |
Runners-up: |
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"I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in newsrooms against their cause, they're absolutely right." "Opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists...is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society."
-- Boston Globe legal reporter Ethan Bronner in Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw's series on abortion coverage, July 1.
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"After seeing our footage, she told us that Frontline doesn't co-produce anti-communist programs."
-- Cinematographer Nestor Almendros on a Frontline producer's reaction to his anti-Castro documentary Nobody Listened, quoted by Don Kowet in the August 8
Washington Times.
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Gorbasm Award*
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First
Place |
"Gorbachev has probably moved more quickly than any person in the history of the world. Moving faster than Jesus Christ did. America is always lagging six months behind...I think we can get by easily with a $75 billion military budget. Those bombers and all of this stuff is an absolute waste of money and a joke."
-- Ted Turner, "TV chieftain with an outspoken conscience," celebrated in the January 22
Time. |
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Runners-up: |
"The supreme leader of an atheistic state was baptized as a child. Now, in a sense, Gorbachev means to accomplish the salvation of an entire society that has gone astray...Much more than that, Gorbachev is a visionary enacting a range of complex and sometimes contradictory roles. He is simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade is a global navigator."
-- Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow, January 1. |
"He has, as many great leaders have, impressive eyes...There's a kind of laser-beam stare, a forced quality, you get from Gorbachev that does not come across as something peaceful within himself. It's the look of a kind of human volcano, or he'd probably like to describe it as a human nuclear energy plant."
-- Dan Rather on Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in the May 10 Seattle
Times.
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Thurgood Marshall Judicial Reporting Award
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First
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"Supreme Court nominee David Souter wants the world to stop viewing him as a nerd. Senate Democrats want to know if, instead, Souter is a neanderthal -- a mean-spirited conservative bent on wrecking constitutional protections for women, minorities, and accused criminals."
-- Beginning of September 13 USA Today cover story by legal reporter Tony Mauro.
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Runners-up:
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"Chief Justice Rehnquist had the kind of image problems that might be expected of a jurist who habitually rejected constitutional equality for women, approved the execution of allegedly insane prisoners without a hearing, denied constitutional equality to aliens and bastards, asserted that the public did not have a constitutional right to attend court trials, said prisoners had no rights to practice religious freedom, and spoke warmly of the legendary Isaac ('Hanging Judge') Parker, who cheerfully ordered eighty-five executions."
-- Former CBS News law reporter Fred Graham in his book Happy
Talk. |
"Senator Simon, is there any doubt in your mind that [Souter's] views pretty well parallel those of John Sununu's which means he's anti-abortion or anti-women's rights, whichever way you want to put it?"
-- Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, July 23. |
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