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The Best Notable Quotables of 1994:
The Seventh Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Good Morning Morons Award |
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First
Place
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"You're aligned to a party which owes many of its victories to the so-called religious right and other conservative extremists who are historically insensitive to minority concerns. That doesn't bother you?"
-- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel to black Republican U. S. Rep.-elect J.C. Watts, November 9. |
Runners-up: |
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"In the wake of the somewhat new hostilities bred in the Reagan '80s, how do you assess the state of race relations in this country today?"
-- Gumbel to National Urban League President Hugh Price, July 28.
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"Let's not debate his presidency, but his passing. As opposed to a man like Reagan, Nixon is, was highly regarded as a genuine statesman with a first-class mind."
-- Today co-host Bryant Gumbel, April 26.
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"What is it, do you think, government can do about this? If we declare that obesity is a disease, would that make any difference at all?"
-- CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn on a study marking one-third of Americans as obese, July 18.
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Damn Those Conservatives Award
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First
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"I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease....He is an absolutely reprehensible person."
-- USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4
PBS To the Contrary. |
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Runners-up: |
"I think there's a big difference when people told Father Aristide to sort of moderate his views, they were concerned about people being dragged through the streets, killed and necklaced. I don't think that is what Newt Gingrich has in mind. I think he's looking at a more scientific, a more civil way of lynching people."
-- National Public Radio reporter Sunni Khalid on C-SPAN's Journalists
Roundtable, October 14. |
"Gays and lesbians are beaten to death in the streets with increasing frequency -- in part due to irrational fear of AIDS but also because hatemongers, from comedians to the worst of the Christian right, send the message that homosexuals have no value in our society. Sometimes that message has a major-party affiliation and a request for a campaign contribution. In the post-cold war era, gays have been drafted to replace communists as the new menace to the American Way: We're told gays corrupt youth and commandeer art and entertainment to win converts."
-- Dan Rather in The Nation, April 11 edition. |
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Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award
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First
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"Back then [when it received Soviet subsidies], the island may have been a thorn in Washington's side but it was a beacon of success for much of Latin America and the Third World. For decades, Cuba's health care and education systems were touted as great achievements of the revolution....Some say the trade ban has never given Cuba a chance to see whether or not Castro's socialism might work."
-- CBS reporter Giselle Fernandez, September 4 Evening News.
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Runners-up:
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"Life has become so much worse for so many Russians under democratic pseudo capitalism...the first market reforms and the erosion of state authority have fostered a brutal cowboy capitalism. It is manifest in the emergence of a lavish lifestyle among a flamboyant and vulgar new class of businessmen, made up mostly of speculators, traders and outright criminals, all of whom are stealing the country blind...No freedom from fear and no freedom from want: Small wonder many Russians feel nostalgic for the days when there was bread and law and order."
-- U.S. News Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Zuckerman, March 7. |
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"For more than 70 years, Russia dreamed the Soviet dream: the dream of a classless society, the dream of a workers' paradise. The classless state is now a state with a growing population of haves and an exploding population of have-nots. For many, the workers' paradise has become a homeless hell."
-- ABC's Morton Dean, January 14 Good Morning America.
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