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The Best Notable Quotables of 1991:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Gomer Pyle Award |
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First
Place
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"Remember all the chatter about a short war? Well, forget it."
-- Time Senior Writer George J. Church, March 4 issue. |
Runners-up: |
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"Well, they [U.S. soldiers] really didn't risk that much, number one. And second, to honor people who believe in violence is to honor the ethic of violence. And if you believe violence solves problems, you overlook quite a lot of morality. You overlook what Gandhi said: `An eye for an eye and we all go blind.' So why celebrate that? Why honor these people?....Instead of celebrating, we ought to have a national month of mourning for what we did in that area of the world. We supplied them weapons endlessly and they used them. And then after we mourn, we ought to ask them to forgive us for what they did."
-- Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy on CNN's
Crossfire, April 19.
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War Highlights Shortcomings Of U.S. Forces
-- Washington Post headline, February 10.
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"Certainly a lot of Americans would die, an estimated 2,500 of them in just the first ten days of battle. American troops would do most of the fighting and thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of them would be casualties along with countless thousands of Iraqis, soldiers and civilians."
-- CBS News reporter Richard Threlkeld on war prospects, January 4 Evening
News.
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"And why do they do these unnatural, unhuman things, these soldiers? Not for God or country or freedom or even because they've been ordered to. They do them, finally, as James Jones, the author put it, because they don't want to appear unmanly in front of their friends."
-- CBS reporter Richard Threlkeld on U.S. soldiers, February 8 Evening
News.
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Peter Arnett Media First Award
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First
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Pat Buchanan: "If there was information you could have gotten out that could have saved scores, hundreds of American lives, you wouldn't have transmitted that information?"
Peter Arnett: "I wouldn't have transmitted that information. I would not have gotten that information in the first place. But I would not have transmitted it. I was in Baghdad because I was a correspondent for CNN, which has no political affiliations with the U.S. government, thank goodness."
-- CNN's Crossfire, August 2. |
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Runners-up: |
Reporter Arthur Kent: "Saddam Hussein is a cunning man and nowhere does he show that more clearly than on a battlefield when he's under attack."
Anchor Faith Daniels: "And that, Arthur, really seems to be this Administration's greatest miscalculation."
Arthur Kent: "That's right, Faith. He is ruthless, but more than ruthless. In the past 11 days, he's surprised us. He's shown us a capable military mind and he still seems to know exactly what he's doing."
-- Exchange from NBC special America: The Realities of War, January 27. |
"Allied military units are on the move. Their positions, movements, and plans must be carefully safeguarded. We must assume that the enemy is confused about what is happening on the battlefield and it is absolutely essential that we not do anything inadvertently ourselves to clarify the picture for him."
-- Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in a press conference at the start of the ground war, February 23.
vs.
"As part of our CBS News live coverage of the beginning of the ground war offensive, we're talking to Bob McKeown, a CBS News reporter who's one mile from the Kuwaiti border. Bob, any indication of how far up you the think the Allies are now?"
-- Dan Rather, 21 minutes later.
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Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award
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First
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"Ten months after the new Germany merged, women in the eastern sector are coming to the stunning realization that, in many ways, democracy has set them back 40 years."
-- Los Angeles Times staff writer Tamara Jones, August 6.
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Runners-up:
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"Inefficient as the old communist economy was, it did provide jobs of a sort for everybody and a steady, if meager, supply of basic goods at low, subsidized prices; Soviet citizens for more than 70 years were conditioned to expect that from their government. Says a Moscow worker: 'We had everything during [Leonid] Brezhnev's times. There was sausage in the stores. We could buy vodka. Things were normal.'"
-- Time Associate Editor George J. Church, September 23. |
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"Like many other women in what used to be the German Democratic Republic, she worries that political liberation has cost her social and economic freedom...The kindergartens that cared for their children are becoming too expensive, and West Germany's more restrictive abortion laws threaten to deny many Eastern women a popular method of birth control....East Germany's child-care system helped the state indoctrinate its young, but also assured women in the East the freedom to pursue a career while raising a family."
-- U.S. News & World Report special correspondent John Marks, July 1 news story.
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"But most of his fellow countrymen do not share John Paul's concept of morality...many here expect John Paul to use his authority to support Church efforts to ban abortion, perhaps the country's principal means of birth control. And this, they say, could deprive them of a freedom of choice the communists never tried to take away from them."
-- CBS News reporter Bert Quint on the June 1 Evening News. |
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