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The Best Notable Quotables of 1991:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Which Way Is It? Gulf War |
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First
Place
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Peter Arnett: "While we were there [at a bombing site], a distraught woman shouted insults at the press and vented anger at the West."
Woman: "Mea culpa! Mea culpa! All of you are responsible, all of you! Bombing the people for the sake of oil! Hunted as if we are Iranian! We are human beings! Who made this area like this? The flames in the area, it's the West! Mea culpa, the blood, she is on your head!"
-- CNN live from Baghdad, February 1.
vs.
"Iraq has been polishing up its propaganda game for years. A woman wailing in TV-perfect English about civilian casualties turned out, as CNN later reported, to be an Iraqi official [aide to the Foreign Affairs Under- secretary]. She also showed up on French TV wailing in French."
-- Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, Feb. 25.
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Runners-up: |
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"I saw various plans that the manufacturers had left behind talking about its use as a shelter and I can tell you that I saw no sign of military equipment on that lower level and I looked into all the main rooms."
-- BBC reporter Jeremy Bowen on the "shelter" bombed by the U.S., February 14
NBC Nightly News.
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"Intelligence sources told Newsweek that only the top two levels sheltered senior military commanders and Baath officials, along with their families. Beneath them was a secret basement filled with equipment for communicating with Army leaders at the front. Last week the Iraqis flooded the secret basement to prevent reporters from seeing it after the bombing."
-- Newsweek defense reporter John Barry, February 25.
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"The message that came from them very strongly in Baghdad was that they're pretty sick of Saddam Hussein. They don't like the man, they don't like what he's done to their country, and they'd like to be rid of him."
-- BBC Baghdad reporter Jeremy Bowen on NBC News at Sunrise after reporters were kicked out of Baghdad, March 8.
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"But the air war itself, as it goes on, has shown no sign of diminishing Saddam's support here....all the people that we talk to with the television cameras say that the continuing air attacks have in fact strengthened their desire, their will to resist the Allied coalition."
-- Bowen on the NBC Nightly News, Feb. 16.
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Media Hero Award
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First
Place |
"And then there was Anita Hill, the poised daughter of so many generations of black women who have been burned carrying torches into the battle for principle. The cause of civil rights and social justice has so often fallen to them to defend. Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament. Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who shoved history forward by refusing to give up her seat on the bus....The latest to claim her place in line is Anita Hill, a private, professional woman unwilling to relinquish her dignity without a fight."
-- Time Associate Editor Nancy Gibbs, October 21 issue. |
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Runners-up: |
"Once, long ago, he was the Prince Hal of American politics: high-spirited, youthful, heedless. He never evolved, like Prince Hal, into the ideal king. Instead he did something that was in its way just as impressive. He became one of the great lawmakers of the century, a Senate leader whose liberal mark upon American government has been prominent and permanent. The tabloid version does not do him justice. The public that knows Kennedy by his misadventures alone may vastly underrate him."
-- Time's Lance Morrow, Apr. 29. |
"And finally President Carter, you are now considered one of the world's foremost statesmen. You've been called the best ex-President this country has ever had. Your reputation has been bolstered tremendously since you left office. How does that make you feel?"
-- Today co-host Katie Couric to Carter, Nov.13.
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"Elizabeth, his wife of 56 years, applauds him as a good family man. Indeed, how can anyone think ill of Hall when he beams so about cooking pancakes for his grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, or shares his secret for making tasty beef stew. (It's the apples.)"
-- Time reporter Michael Riley in September 9 profile of Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall.
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Willie Horton Award
(for Sophisticated Political Analysis)
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First
Place |
"Demagogues don't yell `nigger' or `Jew boy' anymore. They've learned better...[Duke] traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative politicians."
-- Time Washington reporter Dan Goodgame, November 25 news story.
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Runners-up:
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"[Lee Atwater] was a scoundrel, one of the darkest figures to dominate our recent politics, a man with a comprehensively cynical view of his fellow creatures....He made it in the most improbable way, learning to dress at Brooks Brothers and keep his funky white trash wickedness too....In running campaigns that played on racial divisions, he was something worse than a bigot; he was a man who pretended to be a bigot in hope that it would sell."
-- Washington Post op-ed by reporter Marjorie Williams, March 30. |
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"I think that he [Thomas] had the advantage of prime time on Friday night. He had everything going for him. The Democrats did not ask him tough questions about the facts of her charge and they did, the Republicans did a great job of hammering her. It's basically what happened in the '88 campaign. The Republicans know how to fight dirty."
-- NBC congressional reporter Andrea Mitchell, October 15 Today.
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