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The Best Notable Quotables of 1995:
The Eighth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Media Hero Award
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First
Place
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"Despite her soaring popularity and role as queen of the Democratic Party, she was ousted from office in the nation's sweep to the right. Today more than half a year since her surprising defeat, she remains as popular as ever....Six months after her defeat, the light of this Lone Star legend doesn't seem to have dimmed one bit."
-- NBC weekend Today co-host Giselle Fernandez in a June 18 profile of former Texas Governor Ann Richards who was so popular that she lost her re-election bid. |
Runners-up: |
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"A lot has been written about you in the last couple of weeks. Much of it has a sense that Mario Cuomo is a man full of promise and now that your 12 years in Albany is done, much of that promise is unfulfilled. Do you disagree with that?....The sense of the promise that you may have been able to deliver to people, your eloquence, your intelligence, that did not translate, for lack of a better term, into dynamic governance?....How are you going to use this? Are you, will you continue to use this passion, will you continue to use this eloquence? Some people have suggested you should become a counterbalance to Rush Limbaugh."
-- CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith's questions to Mario Cuomo, December 30, 1994.
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The 100 Percent Absolutely
Not Guilty of Bias Award
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First
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"It's one of the great political myths, about press bias. Most reporters are interested in a story. Most reporters don't know whether they're Republican or Democrat, and vote every which way. Now, a lot of politicians would like you to believe otherwise, but that's the truth of the matter. I've worked around journalism all of my life, Tom Snyder has as well, and I think he'll agree with this, that most reporters, when you get to know them, would fall in the general category of kind of common-sense moderates. And also, let me say that I don't think that `liberal' or `conservative' means very much any more, except to those kind of inside-the-Beltway people who want to use it for their own partisan political advantage. I don't think it holds up."
-- Dan Rather answering a caller about liberal bias, February 8 CBS's
Late Late Show with Tom Snyder. |
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Runners-up: |
"I don't think the coverage of Gingrich and the GOP Congress has been liberally biased."
-- ABC News reporter Cokie Roberts on the CNBC special Meet the
Media, October 23. |
Question: "...The liberal bias of your network is obvious."
ABC News Washington anchor and reporter Carole Simpson: "I challenge you to give me examples of that. I disagree wholeheartedly. I think it's again, an example of the mean-spiritedness that is these days also directed at the media."
-- Exchange during January 5 America Online session. |
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We'll Decide Who's a Mean-Spirited
Republican Award...
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First
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"The Republican jihad against the poor, the young and the helpless rolls on. So far no legislative assault has been too cruel, no budget cut too loathsome for the party that took control of Congress at the beginning of the year and has spent all its time since then stomping on the last dying embers of idealism and compassion in government....If anything is funny in this dismal period, it's that the Republicans are touchy about being called heartless and cold. That's a riot. Has anyone listened to Newt Gingrich lately? To Dick Armey? To Phil Gramm? This is the coldest crew to come down the pike since the Ice Age."
-- Former NBC News reporter Bob Herbert in his February 25 New York Times column.
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Runners-up:
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"[Clinton] can get in high dudgeon about mean-spiritedness, and when the Republicans get feverish and clammy and speak in tongues and handle snakes, he can go out to Omaha and Houston and be charming and graceful....The Republicans are going to be the Party That Canceled the Clean Air Act and Took Hot Lunches from Children, the Orphanage Party of Large White Men Who Feel Uneasy Around Gals."
-- Time commentary by public radio omnipresence Garrison Keillor, March 13. |
"I fear that the Contract with America, if enacted, may be detrimental to the family, especially those of single women and their children....But my fear is that Mr. Gingrich, given his history, may increase what I see as a new mean-spiritedness in this country....I would like to think that the American people care about poor people, about sick people, about homeless people, and about poor children. I am shocked by the new mean-spiritedness."
-- ABC News Washington anchor Carole Simpson in January 5 America Online session. |
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