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The Best Notable Quotables of 1995:
The Eighth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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...But It's OK For Us to Hate Them Award
(for Hypocritical Media Hatemongering)
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First
Place
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"Most of the KKK has joined the Republican Party. They don't have to be there [marching]."
-- Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page on the October 15
McLaughlin Group, in a Million Man March discussion. |
Runners-up: |
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"For urban dwellers, and especially the poor, the Republican Party as currently constituted is the enemy -- the source of endless destructive, mean-spirited and racist initiatives....The unspoken question on Kelly Street [in the Bronx] was how, in good conscience, General Powell could serve as the standard-bearer of a party that is waging all-out war against the poor and racial and ethnic minorities (and which is hostile to the interests of the middle class as well)....For years, the insidious and blatantly racist strategy of the Republican Party has been to pit the middle classes against the lower classes, while sucking money from both groups up the economic pyramid to the smiling faces at the top."
-- Former NBC reporter Bob Herbert in his New York Times column, September 22.
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"From the pronunciamentos out of Washington, you'd think the new Congress were a slash-and-burn Khmer Rouge, determined to rid Phnom Penh of every member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, every painter who ever got a dime out of the National Endowment for the Arts, every child who was ever difficult, and other inconvenient co-dependents who ought instead to be growing rice and eating fishpaste in the boondocks."
-- CBS Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard, January 8.
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"Too bad he didn't say a word or two on behalf of public broadcasting, currently under attack by a crowd of power-drunk crackpots in Congress who want to exterminate it. Kermit the Frog will wind up in the kitchen of a French restaurant if they get their way."
-- Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales reviewing the State of the Union address, January 25.
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Eleanor Clift Award
(for Clinton Worshipping)
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First
Place |
"It's nice, of course, if we have a President we like. But there's more to governing than likability. We learned that from the likable Ronald Reagan, who charmed us with stories as he amassed huge deficits and spent billions on goofy defense plans. No, the record is more important. And Bill Clinton's record is just short of terrific."
-- Former NBC News President Michael Gartner in his USA Today column, October 17. |
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Runners-up: |
"I'd like to start, if I may, with what I think you may think is a puzzlement. You've reduced the deficit. You've created jobs. Haiti hasn't been an enormous problem. You've got a crime bill with your assault weapon ban in it. You got NAFTA, you got GATT, and 50 percent of the people don't want you to run again. Where's the disconnect there?"
"...Here's another one. In our poll today, the absolute critical items for Congress to address. Number one, cutting the deficit. Number two, health care reform. The two issues which were absolute priorities for two years, and you don't get any credit for them?"
-- Two questions from Peter Jennings interviewing President Clinton, January 5
World News Tonight. |
"So perhaps the weekend of World War II commemoration was somewhat of an epiphany for Clinton, and for the nation. Maybe the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was a time when he came to the realization that his reluctance to answer his country's call was a mistake, and those who answered without a second thought forgave him. How else do we explain aging World War II veterans, as giddy as children, jockeying to get their pictures taken with the President, and camouflaged young soldiers with shaven heads shouting out `Four more years!'"
-- USA Today reporter Richard Benedetto in Honolulu, September 5. |
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Politics of Meaninglessness Award
(for the Silliest Analysis)
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First
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"But aren't most medical procedures, when you describe them in detail, pretty disgusting? Isn't, for example, the production of veal, when you describe it in detail, and how people eat meat, when they crunch down on the flesh of living beings, formerly living beings with their teeth. Isn't that pretty gruesome, too?"
-- Mutual/NBC reporter Bonnie Erbe discussing partial-birth abortions, November 3
PBS To the Contrary.
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Runners-up:
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"The good news for Russians? They no longer have to worry about being shipped to Siberia for defying the old communist state. The bad news? They may have to come to Moscow, where the chances of dying in a car crash are greater than expiring in Siberia. This city is one large wreck 'em derby....Isn't capitalism grand?"
-- Tom Brokaw, May 8 NBC Nightly News. |
"In the post-Oklahoma City debate over the links between violent rhetoric and violent action, some social critics have begun looking beyond talk radio, focusing instead on the metaphors and imagery that have helped to define America from the earliest days of the Republic. What they conclude is that the disturbed and disgruntled -- who have already made up their minds to kill or terrorize -- can lean on a slew of cultural icons to legitimize their feelings of aggression. After all, these theorists say, the United States is a nation founded in rebellion and riddled with mottos, slogans and images grounded in battle and aggression. `Live free or die,' says the New Hampshire license plate. `With the sword we seek peace, but under liberty,' goes the less-known Massachusetts state motto. And what schoolchild cannot recite Patrick Henry's stirring words, `Give me liberty or give me death'? Whether consciously or not, a growing number of academics say, some homegrown terrorists and killers may warm themselves in the rhetorical glow of the rocket's red glare."
-- Boston Globe reporter Anthony Flint beginning a front page story, June 1. |
"One of the interesting things about Newt Gingrich is to become Speaker without running in a national election. This is almost like a parliamentary system where he ran in one small borough, and then because his party won the majority, he becomes a national figure. So it's an oddity that we're not used to in this system."
-- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer Steven Roberts on
Washington Week in Review, January 6. |
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