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The Best Notable Quotables of 1992:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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The
Real Reagan Legacy Award |
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First
Place
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"You place responsibility for the death of your daughter squarely at the feet of the Reagan Administration. Do you believe they're responsible for that?
-- NBC reporter Maria Shriver interviewing AIDS sufferer Elizabeth Glaser, July 14 Democratic convention coverage. |
Runners-up: |
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"The boom years following World War II saw the U.S. economy take off, giving rise to the growth of the great American middle class. The rising standard of living meant homes, cars, TVs, college for the kids -- all in all, a piece of the American dream. But in the Reagan years, economic erosion set in, so much so that the middle class now finds itself in ever-deepening trouble."
-- Bryant Gumbel on Today, January 22.
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"[Reagan's] good-natured pre- and post-surgical quips so endeared him to the nation that practically nothing, including the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines in a Beirut barracks, stuck to the Reagan presidency. As a result, the nation smiled benignly when....He burdened the working poor and middle class by raising Social Security taxes while calling for cuts in the capital gains tax. Such policies widened the gap between rich and poor and contributed to the psychological chasm between haves and have-nots. In this atmosphere, Wall Street stock manipulator Michael Milken earned $550 million in 1987, and ghetto teens unable to find jobs joined gangs instead."
-- Houston Chronicle reporter Steven Reed, August 16 news story.
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"The amazing thing is most people seem content to believe that almost everybody had a good time in the '80s, a real shot at the dream. But the fact is, they didn't. Did we wear blinders? Did we think the '80s just left behind the homeless? The fact is that almost nine in ten Americans actually saw their lifestyle decline."
-- NBC reporter Keith Morrison, February 7 Nightly News.
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"We are seeing a public recoil from formal politics, from the active, reasoned exercise of citizenship. It comes because we don't trust anyone. It is part of the cafard the '80s induced: Wall Street robbery, the savings and loan scandal, the wholesale plunder of the economy, an orgy released by Reaganomics that went on for years with hardly a peep from Congress -- events whose numbers were so huge as to be beyond the comprehension of most people."
-- Time art critic Robert Hughes in his cover essay "The Fraying of America," February 3.
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James
Carville Award
(for Mean & Nasty Campaign Reporting)
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First
Place |
"Ever since the Clarence Thomas hearings last fall, the Republican Party has been struggling to overcome the perception that its regard for women is only a notch or two higher than that of the Navy Tailhook Association."
-- Time reporter Michael Duffy, August 24 issue. |
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Runners-up: |
"Al Gore won it for taking the high road with his cool command of the facts, and Jim Stockdale gets the runner-up trophy for the best one-liners. Dan Quayle lost for the hate-mongering that turned off much of the nation at his party's convention in Houston. It wasn't that he made any gaffes. He looked poised and spoke with great energy. But he played dirty while the other two candidates played clean."
-- Boston Globe columnist and former Washington bureau reporter Susan Trausch, October 14. |
"Fred [Barnes], you've said time and again that character is an important issue in the campaign. Clearly, that red-baiting junk didn't work for the President last night. What's he going to try next?"
-- CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith, October 12.
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"What are your expectations? How nasty do you expect George Bush to try to be?"
-- Bryant Gumbel to John Chancellor on NBC's Today, October 9.
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"Are Democrats willing, even anxious, to be as nasty as the President is going to be?"
-- Bryant Gumbel to Clinton consultant Bob Squier, August 10 Today.
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Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award
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A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity
-- New York Times story on last Soviet political prisoners
being released, February 12.
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Runners-up:
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Connie Chung: "In formerly communist Bulgaria, the cost of freedom has been virtual economic disaster. Peter Van Sant reports." Van Sant: "Thousands of socialists rally in Sofia, Bulgaria. It may look like a rally from communism's glory years, but it's not. It's an expression of frustration, a longing for the bad old days when liberty was scarce but at least everybody had a job."
-- CBS Evening News, December 29, 1991. |
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"In the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these. The poor, the homeless, and the desperation of the Russian winter. Their numbers are growing. Tonight -- Is this what democracy does? A look at the Russia you haven't seen before....The people of Russia are learning this winter that the price of freedom can be painfully high." -- Barbara Walters opening Nightline, January 14. "The economic and political turmoil that has swept the former Communist East Bloc has hit women the hardest. There's been a strong backlash against the idea of women's equality...Under the communists, women in the workplace were glorified. And if they needed time off to give birth and raise families, they got it at full pay."
-- ABC reporter Jerry King, April 6 World News Tonight.
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