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The Best Notable Quotables of 1994:
The Seventh Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Clinton Enemies List Award
(for Those Who Dare Stray
from the Media Pack) |
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First
Place
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"To his fans, David Brock, the writer who ruined the Clintons' Christmas, is a hard-hitting investigative reporter. To everyone else, he is a smear artist with a right-wing agenda. But a reading of Mr. Brock's oeuvre in the conservative journal The American Spectator suggests that his motives are at least as twisted as his facts. It's women, not liberals, who really get him going. The slightest sighting of female sexuality whips him into a frenzy of misogynist zeal. All women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying, gutter-tongued sexual omnivores."
-- New York Times columnist (and former theater critic) Frank Rich, January 6. |
Runners-up: |
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"There is very little in the press accounts to suggest that he is, above all, a sophisticated propagandist, an avatar of the politics of meanness and envy....Limbaugh is defending the successful against the impudent demands of the poor; by making all that funny, he gives the comfortable a way to think that greed and a cold-hearted wit comprise a cohesive ideology....his style is pure demagoguery. Just as Reagan talked of welfare queens in Cadillacs, Limbaugh seizes on the absurd detail, gives it an absurdist twist of his own, and sends it out into the world under the guise of analysis and principle.... It is not enough for him to oppose liberalism. He must, like all demagogues, scare his listeners, get them to believe in conspiracy, rumor....Like Reagan, Limbaugh is neither curious nor brave; he would rather tell his audiences fairy tales than have them face the world; he would rather sneer at the weak than trouble the strong."
-- Former Washington Post reporter David Remnick in the Post's Outlook section, February 20.
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"Why does anyone take Rush Limbaugh seriously?....He's entertaining. But, come on, he is to truthfulness as President Clinton is to faithfulness -- he has but a passing acquaintance with it. He's toying with you, folks, getting you all riled up with a stew of half-truths and non-truths. He's making fools of you, feeding you swill -- and you're taking it in....So keep listening if you want. But just remember that he's a charlatan."
-- Former NBC News President Michael Gartner in a USA Today column, July 12.
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"One of my losers of the year is David Brock, who wrote that slimy magazine article that revived all those charges about Bill Clinton's personal behavior, and I regarded that as journalism which is truly out of bounds."
-- PBS Washington Week in Review moderator Paul Duke, December 31, 1993.
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You're No Anita Hill Award
(for Hypocrisy in Sexual
Harassment Reporting)
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First
Place |
"Yes, the case is being fomented by right-wing nuts, and yes, she is not a very credible witness, and it's really not a law case at all...some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks...I think she's a dubious witness, I really do."
-- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas, May 7 Inside
Washington. |
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Runners-up: |
"We've got an awful lot to talk about this week, including the sexual harassment suit against the President. Of course, in that one, it's a little tough to figure out who's really being harassed."
-- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, May 10. |
"But [attorney Bob] Bennett says he has `people coming out of the woodwork' to discredit Jones and her story. He need look no further than Jones' brother-in-law, Mark Brown...`She went with one man and when she got there, she spotted another one. She goes right up to him, puts her leg between the legs of the other man and rubs herself up and down on him...Promiscuity? Good gosh. Her mother is fixing to get the shock of her life when Paula's life comes out...She went out and had herself a good time. I've seen her at the Red Lobster pinch men on the ass.'"
-- Newsweek Washington reporter Mark Hosenball, May 16 story. |
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No Money Down Award
(for Excusing the Clintons'
Financial Scandals)
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First
Place |
"What happened was a riveting hour and 12 minutes in which the First Lady appeared to be open, candid, but above all unflappable. While she provided little new information on the tangled Arkansas land deal or her controversial commodity trades, the real message was her attitude and her poise."
-- Time reporter Michael Duffy, May 2 news story on Hillary
Clinton's press conference on her commodities dealings.
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Runners-up:
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"She's been re-zoned back into the stratosphere. And when you watch that [commodities press conference], you just wonder why they waited so long. She's at least as good a communicator as her husband, and people have said about Clinton, `If you've got Elvis let him sing.' Well, I don't know what the analogy is, this was Streisand...For anybody except the Whitewater fanatics, this was an A-double-plus in both categories [style and substance]."
-- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, April 23. |
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"But Whitewater so far is a parody of a political scandal, full of sound and fury, signifying next to nothing. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a...turkey."
-- Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter, August 8 issue.
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"The beauty of the special counsel is that he or she has to prove criminal wrongdoing, and not only criminal wrongdoing, but criminal intent, and I think, you know, everyone is certain that doesn't exist with the Clintons."
-- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin
Group, January 15.
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