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The Best Notable Quotables of 1995:
The Eighth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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The Contract's Not Done Until
Every Child Is Dead Award
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First
Place
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"When you look at the reality of cutting people off, of saying you can't have more benefits if you have children while you are on welfare, you're talking about putting children on the street who are hungry and naked, and that's a sin."
-- Washington Post writer Juan Williams on CNN's Capital
Gang, March 25. |
Runners-up: |
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"Public antagonism toward government has been one of the principal themes of American political discourse for nearly two decades, growing in shrillness in the past year. This sentiment has been voiced and amplified by the new Republican House, which just this month completed its 100 days of action, much of it aimed at paring back the growth of the federal government. But now that an attack on a government building has left scores dead, including children, the allure is coming off the anti-government rhetoric."
-- Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief David Shribman in a front page "news analysis," April 25.
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"The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor."
-- Dan Rather, March 16 CBS Evening News.
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"This is some of the greatest
redistribution of income I've ever seen, from have-nots to the
haves...This is enough to put Robin Hood to shame."
-- Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt on CNN's Capital Gang,
March 18.
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"The Republican Congress, of course, is not likely to embrace raising taxes and cutting defense spending. It is beholden to three constituencies: The corporations, whose lobbyists finance politicians and then finagle billions in bizarre subsidies for clients. The rich, who write campaign checks and simply ask to be left alone. And many hard-working, middle-class men and women -- mostly white -- who resent handouts to the needy....About the best [the Democrats] can do is temper excesses of Republican plans -- excesses that could lead to class warfare or race warfare, excesses that will widen the already widening gap between rich and poor."
-- Former NBC News President Michael Gartner in his USA Today column, May 30.
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"In practice, personally, I think it will destroy the future competitiveness and security of the country, in terms of education, infrastructure, and medical practice as we know it today."
-- NPR reporter Nina Totenberg on the GOP budget proposal, May 13 Inside
Washington.
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Damn Those Conservatives Award
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First
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"These days Washington seems to be filled with white men who make black people uneasy, like Newt the slasher, Bill the waffler, and Jesse the crank -- Helms, that is, not Jackson. But the scariest of all the hobgoblins may well be a fellow African American, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the four years since George Bush chose him to fill the `black seat' vacated by Thurgood Marshall, Thomas has emerged as the high court's most aggressive advocate of rolling back the gains Marshall fought so hard for. The maddening irony is that Thomas owes his seat to precisely the kind of racial preference he goes to such lengths to excoriate."
-- Time National Correspondent Jack E. White in a June 26 column "Uncle Tom Justice." |
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Runners-up: |
"Even your sister concedes, although some supporters might like what you have to say about the economy and these very specific issues you just mentioned, they're very turned off by some of your social policies. And you know you've got political enemies out there calling you an isolationist, a bigot, you're anti-gay, and some even go as far as saying that your social stands are reminiscent of Nazi Germany. How are you to win them over?"
-- CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn to Pat Buchanan, July 5. |
"Its story line could be a Republican parable about 1995 America: A marvelous vessel loses its power and speeds toward extinction, until it's saved by a team of heroic white men. I can imagine the political commercials in which Hanks morphs into Phil
Gramm. Although the movie's publicity trumpets its historical accuracy, the movie itself celebrates the paradisiacal America invoked by Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan -- an America where men were men, women were subservient, and people of color kept out of the damn way."
-- John Powers writing about Apollo 13 in The Washington Post Arts section, July 9.
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"Unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say `Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?', you know we're going to have some more events. I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles...creates a climate of violence in America."
-- Columnist Carl Rowan, April 25 Washington Post story.
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"The conservatives' agenda, if it goes through, is going to depress the quality of cultural and educational life for everyone in America, young and old, black, brown, male or female. This is one of the most ill-conceived, profoundly anti-democratic ideas ever to get loose in Congress. Private philanthropy will never be able to restore what seems about to be taken away. Some will not notice it; others won't care; given the shortness of American social memory, perhaps the next generation won't know what happened. Partial lobotomies work that way. They favor Beavis and Butt-head. Is that the business of American government?"
-- Time art critic Robert Hughes, concluding August 7 story on plans to cut NEA and NEH funding.
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Republicans Make Us Sick Award
(for Irrational Fear of Less Regulation)
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First
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"Next week on ABC's World News Tonight, a series of reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years. Is this what the country wants?"
-- Peter Jennings in an ABC promo during the July 9 This Week with David
Brinkley.
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Runners-up:
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"This is deregulation madness! We're gonna have dirty water, dirty air. OSHA regulations are being rolled back. There's gonna be no competition in the telecommunications industry. And between local cable and local phone, there's not gonna be competition at the present time. It's gonna take awhile and there's gonna be no regulation in the meantime. And so no, he [Clinton] can't go along with this. And the people, the public isn't going to go along with this. They don't want E. coli bacteria in their drinking water."
-- Time columnist Margaret Carlson, August 5 CNN's Capital
Gang. |
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"Safe food, safe water, safe air, safe transportation. You have this protection now, but you might be about to lose it. Why? Watch a special In Depth report on NBC Nightly News tomorrow."
-- July 17 NBC promo.
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"There will be change, but most hope the original intent of the law will not be lost. Because if the plants and animals can't survive, what future is there for the human species?"
-- NBC reporter Roger O'Neil concluding a story on proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act, July 28
Nightly News.
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