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The Best Notable Quotables of 1992:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Rodney King 100 Meter Dash While
Carrying a VCR Award*
(for rationalizing the LA riots) |
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First
Place
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"It's not a big surprise that the jury in suburban Simi Valley sided with the white policemen. Just as it's no surprise that the blacks in downtown Los Angeles rioted and people died....Politicians have fanned these flames with code words about `welfare queens,' `equal opportunity,' and `quotas.' Language designed to turn whites against blacks. With two-party politics that favored the rich and hurt everyone else."
-- NBC commentator John Chancellor, April 30 Nightly News. |
Runners-up: |
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"We hold accountable Republicans who have savaged our urban schools, our housing, our health care, our social services. We hold accountable Democrats who have collaborated in this butchery....We hold accountable those who waste our billions on a military with no enemy to fight."
-- Osborn Elliott, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief from 1961-76, in his speech as co-chairman of the "Save Our Cities" rally, May 16.
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"We should avoid focusing exclusively on the rage and inappropriate behavior of oppressed and frustrated people who started these riots."
-- Hugh Downs on ABC's 20/20, May 1.
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"Increasingly, people are saying that all of the violence had very little to do with Rodney King. Instead, it was the desperate call of a community fighting for change."
-- ABC reporter Tom Foreman, May 3 World News Sunday.
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*inspired by
P.J. O'Rourke
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Damn Those Conservatives Award
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First
Place |
"On the road I travel to the mall in Wheaton, Md., two white men severely beat two black women Tuesday. One was doused with lighter fluid, and her attacker tried to set her afire. Both men cursed the women for being black. I couldn't help but shudder: That could have been me. This heinous act happened only hours after Pat Buchanan voters gave him 30 percent of the vote in the Maryland GOP presidential primary."
-- USA Today columnist and former "Inquiry" page Editor Barbara Reynolds, March 6. |
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Runners-up: |
"[Bush] is about to make matters worse by hauling out Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention. Reagan has become a symbol of what went wrong in the '80s. It's like bringing the Music Man back to River City, a big mistake."
-- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin
Group, August 1. |
Anchor Lisa McRee: "What's the difference between your message and the message of David Duke?....In terms of fairness, you've said things that have angered Jews, that have angered gays, that have angered women, that have angered minorities. In fact, just the other day, you said that there are certain groups that assimilate more easily into what is basically an American society which is of European derivation. As a woman, if I was a minority, why shouldn't I be scared of you?"
Buchanan: "....No nation of God's Earth has done more to fight discrimination, or has made greater progress in doing so, than the United States of America."
McRee: "But you want to turn that around!"
-- Exchange on ABC's World News Now, February 26.
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"For three decades, it was an aggressive guardian of individual liberties. But the Supreme Court's new conservative majority is demolishing that legacy, beating an ideological retreat from its activist role in deciding critical social issues."
-- From Newsweek's table of contents, July 6 issue.
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Festival of Hate Award
(for Republican Convention Coverage)
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First
Place |
"The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly...the Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week...[Bush] is in campaign mode now, which means mendacity doesn't matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall ugly is the order of battle for the duration."
-- Senior Editor Joe Klein on the Republican convention, August 31 Newsweek.
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Runners-up:
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"The only excited, demonstrative delegates any of us could find were the ones from the religious right, Pat Robertson's God and Country rally. They remind me of those Goldwater delegates of 28 years ago, far more interested in imposing ideological purity on this party than they are on winning the election. They were happy today. They got the platform they want. No room for a pregnant woman to make any decision at all, even if she was raped. It's a platform tough on welfare, tough on taxes and guns and gays and pornography, tough even on public radio and public television. They cheered Dan Quayle this afternoon and they will cheer Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan tonight, but will they help elect George Bush? It's almost as if they haven't thought of that, Dan."
-- Charles Kuralt during August 17 CBS Republican convention coverage. |
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"Very frankly, I am very puzzled by one paragraph, one sentence in the Vice President's speech on page six. In a very petulant voice, and listen to the words: he said, `To Governor Clinton I say this: America is the greatest nation in the world and that's one thing you're not going to change.' Implying that Clinton is some kind of guerrilla, saboteur, or what have you. That's my reaction to that line Ken Bode, I don't know about you. It implies something that, it seems that he's saying you're not as American as I am, your blood is not as red as mine."
-- CNN's Bernard Shaw after Vice President Quayle's speech, August 20.
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"Bush, the exponent of a `kinder, gentler' approach to government at the 1988 convention, was presented with a 1992 platform loaded with puritanical, punitive language that not only forbade abortions but attacked public television, gun control, homosexual rights, birth control clinics and the distribution of clean needles for drug users."
-- Boston Globe reporter Curtis Wilkie, August 18 news story. |
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