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The Best Notable Quotables of 1992:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Willie Horton Award
(for Sophisticated Political Analysis) |
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First
Place
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"The racial dimension flows naturally into the political, where the uglier side of Quayle's mission begins to become apparent. One of Quayle's amazing but unlikable feats last week was metaphorically to transform old Willie Horton into a beautiful blond fortyish WASP has-it-all knockout."
-- Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow on the Murphy Brown controversy, June 1. |
Runners-up: |
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"The Republicans, for 25 years, have seldom avoided the temptation to play the race card politically in this country. It goes back to the '60s, when Richard Nixon ran as a law-and-order President. In the '70s, Ronald Reagan, and the late '70s, he ran for President in 1980 talking about welfare queens, associating the Great Society programs with minorities, and with waste, and with crime in the streets. There has been a consistent impulse, Willie Horton was just a continuation of that, to use this issue to divide people."
-- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer Steven Roberts on
Washington Week in Review, May 8.
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"Senator, you told Tim that you thought the White House suggestion that the Great Society programs were to blame for what happened in Los Angeles was ludicrous. Was it also a racial code word -- a code word to appeal to racial fears? Is it the Willie Horton of the 1992 campaign?"
-- NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell interviewing Sen. Bill Bradley on Meet the
Press, May 10.
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"It would help, too, if the man who sanctioned the infamous Willie Horton ad during his 1988 run for the White House would admit his complicity in developing the images and code words that encourage whites to demonize blacks."
-- Time special correspondent Michael Kramer, May 11 issue.
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"Many are afraid the L.A. riots are going to be the Willie Horton of this campaign. Are you afraid they're going to have a very divisive effect? Does that concern you or are you playing that up?"
-- Today co-host Katie Couric interviewing Pat Buchanan, May 6.
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Award for the Silliest Analysis
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First
Place |
"NATURE HAS A CURE FOR EVERYTHING, EXCEPT THE SPREAD OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Until recently, cultural genocide has been a quietly accepted practice. But times change and so does TIME."
-- Time advertisement in the April 27 Sports Illustrated promoting their "Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge" issue. |
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Runners-up: |
"The [House] bank had no written standards; hopeless accounting procedures made it impossible to determine when overdrafts occurred except by painstaking check-by-check reconstruction of individual accounts....None of this was anyone's fault."
-- Washington Post reporter Guy Gugliotta, April 17. |
"After watching the first week of his new syndicated series, one must logically conclude that Limbaugh is the lead component of an insidious left-wing conspiracy to make conservatives look like clowns....Rushie tried to disguise his true liberal feelings by constantly referring to Bill Clinton as `Slick Willie.' Funny, wouldn't you say, that Mr. Conservative neglected to mention that `Willie' was also the nickname of William Shakespeare, whose plays were performed in the Globe Theatre by men who played the female roles. Thus, it's obvious that despite being a right-winger, Limbaugh endorses TRANSVESTITES!"
-- Los Angeles Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg, September 21.
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"There is an understandable reluctance on the part of many women to venture into a building already occupied by Jesse Helms or Bob Dornan, a building that was designed, for all we know, without a single ladies' room in the floor plan. Plus there has been the chilling effect of male politicos like former Republican Party chairman Clayton Yeutter, who reportedly addressed a high-powered donor as `little lady' and inquired as to whom she `belonged to' -- thus sending a generation of Republican women out to join militantly separatist rural communes."
-- Time essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, June 22.
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"Texas...another of the so-called big enchiladas, or if not an enchilada, at least a huge taco."
-- Dan Rather during CBS News election night coverage.
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Ross Perot Award
(for Sensitivity to Criticism)
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First
Place |
"My reaction to that button [`Rather Biased'] and others, in part, is a button I bought yesterday that says `Yeah, I'm In The Media, Screw You!'....I do understand why a lot of people are upset with us, why we rank somewhere between terrorists and bank robbers on the approval scale. We do criticize. That's part of our role. Our role is not just to parrot what people say, it's to make people think. I think that sometimes I want to say to the electorate `Grow up!'"
-- Newsweek reporter Ginny Carroll on C-SPAN's Journalists'
Roundtable, August 21.
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Runners-up:
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"I think there are reporters around Clinton who are baby boomers who are drawn to him. I think there are a lot of reporters in Washington who just wish for a new story. But I watch probably as many talk shows, and as many interview shows, what George Bush calls the professional talking heads on Sundays, as anybody else. I actually think the bias, in the overall system, is from the center to the right."
-- PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers on CNN's Larry King Live, November 2. |
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"I don't think there is [a bias] at all. I think anyone who accuses the press of bias is acting in desperation, I think. I think the press has been much more aggressive and fair, in being, in going after both sides, and looking, than ever before."
-- New York Times reporter Richard Berke on CNN's Larry King
Live, October 16.
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"I am shocked when people say that [the media were pro-Clinton], I really am. I mean, people forget January and February, when the media was on Clinton's case with Gennifer Flowers, all the draft stuff. I'm amazed at the public's selective memory."
-- ABC anchor Carole Simpson at Women of Washington forum shown by C-SPAN, November 10. |
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