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The Best Notable Quotables of 1993:
The Sixth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Award for the Silliest Analysis |
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First
Place
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"Add to this visual pop lexicon the newest hip eye-opener: cross-dressing. As if to punctuate the end of the socially stagnant Reagan era, a parade of drag images is now crossing screens big and small, mostly men bedecked in wigs, lipstick, and scarfs to hide their protruding Adam's apples....Along with symbolizing self-empowerment, cross-dressers also can remind us that sex roles and costumes are fictional. Men wear pants because American society tells them to."
-- Boston Globe writer Matthew Gilbert, March 21 "Focus" section story. |
Runners-up: |
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"Many GIs recognized homosexual leanings for the first time in the all-male surroundings....There is, in fact, an undercurrent of homoerotic tension in the shared latrines, shower rooms, and sleeping quarters of barracks life....The military exalts masculinity in ways that are frankly or implicitly sexual. A form-fitting dress uniform can make a leatherneck look like a peacock."
-- Newsweek Senior Writer David Gelman, July 26.
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"For infant mortality, America couldn't do much worse. Excluding white newborns, America ranks 70th in the world, roughly the same as Mongolia."
-- CBS health reporter Dr. Bob Arnot, April 13 Evening News.
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"All I can tell you is that the football coach at the University of Wisconsin didn't want her to leave -- I don't think she's any lefty."
-- Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief Al Hunt defending HHS nominee Donna Shalala on CNN's
Capital Gang, December 12.
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Dr. Kevorkian Award for Health Reporting
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First
Place |
"But Hillary was smart to rip their heads off....After all, she's right substantively: the [health insurance] industry has `brought us to the brink of bankruptcy,' it does `like being able to exclude people from coverage, because the more they exclude, the more money they can make.' No other industrialized country puts up with useless paper shufflers taking such a large cut of their health budgets...And she's right tactically: if health-care reform is to live, the companies backing Harry and Louise must die. If 90 percent of those 1,500 insurers don't die -- if someone lifts the DO NOT RESUSCITATE sign off them -- then the entire reform contraption will collapse."
-- Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter on insurance industry's "Harry & Louise" ads, Nov. 15. |
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Runners-up: |
"The Clinton plan is surprisingly persuasive in supporting the longtime claim of the Clintons, and their top health care strategist, Ira Magaziner, that reform can be almost entirely from savings, without broad-based new taxes and with enough left over to reduce the federal budget deficit."
-- Time Washington Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame, September 20. |
"White House officials said today the plan will require almost no new taxes. Most of the funding will come from employers who will be required to pay into a state system."
-- CBS reporter Linda Douglass, September 1 Evening News.
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"Woven through the 1,300-page health plan is a liberal's passion to help the needy, a conservative's faith in free markets, and a politician's focus on the middle class."
-- Washington Post reporters Steven Pearlstein and Dana Priest, October 28.
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Which Way Is It?
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U.S. Captive Says He's Well
Treated
Somalis Provide Daily Medical Care
-- Washington Post, October 9
US captive tells of being dragged
through streets
-- Boston Globe, same day
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Bush Makes Public Iran-Contra Diary
Entries Suggest He Did Not Know Details of Scandal
-- New York Times, January 16
Diary Says Bush Knew 'Details' of Iran
Arms Deal
-- Washington Post, same day
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