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The Best Notable Quotables of 1991:
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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"You big [expletive]....You are so full of [expletive]. You are an evil man....I don't have to listen to this [expletive]. You're a bitter and evil man and all your colleagues hate you."
-- NPR's Nina Totenberg to Senator Alan Simpson after Nightline, as Simpson told The
Washington Post, October 9. |
Runners-up: |
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"Twelve million American children who do not have enough to eat, who lack adequate health care, and who are behind in schools and being left behind in life. Much of our broadcast will be dedicated to that. Which makes the major news in Washington today seem even more of a contrast. The President's Chief of Staff, John Sununu, is at the center of attention again having to do with his use of limousines and corporate jets."
-- ABC's Peter Jennings opening the June 18 World News
Tonight.
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Hays Gorey, Senior Correspondent: "Well, (Republican Sen. John) McCain has got this ad hoc group of superpatriots that he's organizing."
Jerome Cramer, NASA & Technology Correspondent: "They wear brown shirts and march around. Small potatoes."
-- Exchange from February 8 Time Washington bureau meeting aired on C-SPAN.
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Armand Hammer Memorial Award
(for Foreign Reporting)
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First
Place |
"It's short of soap, so there are lice in hospitals. It's short of pantyhose, so women's legs go bare. It's short snowsuits, so babies stay home in winter....The problem isn't communism; nobody even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages."
-- NBC's John Chancellor on the Soviet Union, Aug. 21. |
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Runners-up: |
"If nothing else, the Cuban revolution has eliminated abject need. The cost may be generalized poverty and zero political pluralism, but, even with shortages, there is no starvation here. Education and medical care are assured for all. And, unlike in most of Latin America, you don't see naked or even shoeless children in the streets. When Castro speaks of the need to defend the gains of revolution, he means a level of social welfare rare in the underdeveloped world."
-- Washington Post Asst. Foreign Editor Don Podesta, April 28 "Outlook" article. |
"Young Cubans increasingly see themselves as the last idealists in a world that cares only about money....Ninety miles away in Miami, Cuban emigres wish for Fidel's imminent collapse, but the island's university students who volunteer to take a two-week 'vacation' in the fields don't see trouble brewing in Paradise."
-- Time reporter Cathy Booth, August 12 issue.
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The Real Reagan Legacy Award
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First
Place |
"In the 1980s, a time when wealth accumulated and men decayed, the superpatriots entered Gloryland. They were the anointed Moral Majority. They stood foursquare for God, Reagan, and the bombing of abortion clinics....We could only wince when the President called the Contras 'freedom fighters,' when Oliver North became a national hero, when the pledge of allegiance became -- with sinister embellishments -- a campaign issue...We winced -- and some of us wept in shame -- when George Bush, wearing the white flower of a blameless life, won the 1988 election with tactics only a Mafia don could admire."
-- Los Angeles Times Syndicate television critic Harriet Van Horne in
The Nation's "patriotism" issue, July 15/22.
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Runners-up:
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"Tonight, the NBC News program Expose looks at incidences of sexual harassment in [federal low-income] housing. It's reported by correspondent Michele Gillen....Well, I guess that's where the problem began. Actually, it was when the budget was taken out of the affordable housing market during the Reagan years and thus, the problem came about."
-- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, September 20. |
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"Cannon starts off by proclaiming that Reagan is not a dunce, a point that can be questioned by the very fact that it has to be made, a point we all want to believe but a point that Cannon tends to undercut every few pages....Acting might be all right if you're a king, but it just won't work for a President...the nation needed more than inspiration in the 1980s. It needed leadership -- moral leadership, intellectual leadership, political leadership. It needed a manager, not a cheerleader. It needed a statesman, not a star. It needed answers, not anecdotes. It needed ideas as well as ideals. And Ronald Reagan wasn't up to that task."
-- NBC News President Michael Gartner reviewing Lou Cannon's book on Reagan, April 21
Washington Post.
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Reporter Lea Thompson: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission can stop manufacturing; it can fine; it can even seize clothes right off the rack if PJs don't meet flammability standards. None of that's happened. So far the agency has only hoped a manufacturer will take its advice. So you can't depend on government to police this for you. We did find this flammable sleepwear everywhere we went."
Bryant Gumbel: "Lea, Lea, real quick. Why is the government abdicating its responsibility on this? Is this another holdover from the Reagan years and the cutbacks?"
Thompson: "Absolutely. And somebody's gotta do something."
-- Exchange on Today, November 13. |
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