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The Best Notable Quotables of 1994:
The Seventh Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Sore Losers Award
(for Midterm Election Reporting) |
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First
Place
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"Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It's clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It's the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week....Parenting and governing don't have to be dirty words: the nation can't be run by an angry two-year-old."
-- ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary, November 14. |
Runners-up: |
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"They are not voting Republican tonight, Mary. They are voting against a lot of unhappiness in their own lives....I think that it's very easy for the Republicans to make the same mistake that the Democrats made in thinking that somehow we've been given this great mandate....They have got to be practical. They have got to compromise. They have got to meet the real needs of people. This is not an anti-government vote tonight."
-- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer Steven Roberts on CNBC's
Equal Time, election night.
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"What this Contract [with America] says is you can have hot fudge sundae for every meal and still lose weight. It's a fraud and there's a whole lot of Republicans who already are starting to forget where they were September 27."
-- Wall Street Journal Executive Washington Editor Al Hunt on CNN's
Capital Gang, Oct. 1
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"This is a rotten time to be black. Blacks are just going to take it in the chops....Their programs are going to get eviscerated and affirmative action is going to go right down the tubes...Politics have moved right because a lot of middle-class people thought they were taking my money and giving it to poor black people, and they didn't like it and they want their money back."
-- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas on Inside
Washington, November 12.
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"The Republicans have resorted to demagoguery and transparent bribes (like lower taxes). The legislature they promise seems a blustery, selfish, self-righteous desert."
-- Newsweek Senior Editor Joe Klein, October 31 news story.
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Honey, I Shrunk the Democratic Party Award
(for Hillary Rodham Worshipping)
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First
Place |
"Hillary Clinton, like Eleanor Roosevelt, had already done a great service. Unlike Barbara Bush, she got involved. She has taken stands. She has been a leader. It's too bad, of course, that there is not health care legislation this year, but that is Congress' failure, not Hillary Clinton's. Her role has been a success. She awakened the nation. She educated the nation. She enlightened the nation....For when a nation gets two leaders for the price of one -- a Franklin and Eleanor, a Bill and Hillary -- it can tackle twice as many problems, find twice as many solutions, make twice as much progress."
-- Former NBC News President Michael Gartner in his USA Today column, September 27. |
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Runners-up: |
"Bill Clinton evoked sympathy and understanding by acknowledging marital problems on the famous 60 Minutes interview. His wife is too dignified for confessionals, but she could benefit from admitting that she, too, has occasionally yielded to temptation and made the wrong choices. The public might even be tickled to discover that the prim and preachy First Lady has a gambler's streak. Hillary's brief fling in commodities was possibly reckless, but it shows a glimmering of a more credible, if more flawed, human being."
-- Eleanor Clift and Mark Miller, April 11 Newsweek story. |
"There is a lot of gleeful sexist reaction to her difficulties, a lot of piling on, a lot of men who never stood up for a woman's right to do anything who would be completely content to have her whispering sweet nothings to him in bed and manipulating him that way, and are simply terrorized by the thought that she may have real, formal, out-front power."
-- NPR's Nina Totenberg on Inside Washington, March 12.
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"As much as we try to think otherwise, when you're covering someone like yourself, and your position in life is insecure, she's your mascot. Something in you roots for her. You're rooting for your team. I try to get that bias out, but for many of us it's there."
-- Time's Margaret Carlson quoted in March 7 Washington
Post.
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Oliver Stone Award
(for Liberal Conspiracy Mongering)
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First
Place |
"The American Spectator broke the story, as Gwen mentioned, because they're a very right-wing ideological publication....What really happened was there was a conspiracy, in my opinion, by right-wingers, including some right-wing journalists, to press this newspaper [the
Los Angeles Times] into running this story before it was ready to, trying to get it out, and so they spread the rumor all around town that I had threatened to resign if it did run...I know one of the guys who was spreading it: Brit Hume of ABC, who covers the White House, who writes for
The American Spectator. I know there's another conservative journalist who covers the White House, Fred Barnes, who's on the editorial board of
The American Spectator...So they were all promoting this story."
-- Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson on PBS'
Washington Week in Review, December 24, 1993.
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Runners-up:
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"She [Hillary] is really convinced that the right wing is incredibly well-organized, and there is kind of a hate campaign going on in this country that is, is deeply and well-organized, and it poses a real threat to government and the Clintons personally. And I mean, she may be right."
-- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas on Inside
Washington, August 13.
"Some of us were called in by Caspar Weinberger, when he was the Secretary of Defense. This was after Grenada, after the Grenada invasion, which again was not covered. We don't know the full story today. No reporters got in for three days. I don't know whether we really found a warehouse full of AK-47s there or not. Maybe we planted them there. I'm not saying we did, but we had three days to do it if we wanted to because we had no reporters get there at the beginning."
-- Walter Cronkite on CNBC's Dick Cavett, March 4.
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"Questions abound about how and why Republican Kenneth Starr suddenly came to be the new Independent Counsel in the Whitewater case replacing Republican Robert Fiske. New disclosures are fueling questions about whether or not Starr is an ambitious Republican partisan backed by ideologically-motivated, anti-Clinton activists and judges from the Reagan, Bush, and Nixon years. Correspondent Eric Engberg has tonight's CBS Evening News reality check."
-- Dan Rather, August 12 CBS Evening News.
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