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The Best Notable Quotables of 1998:
The Eleventh Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Corporal Cueball Carville Cadet Award
(for Hating Ken Starr)
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First
Place
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"Can Ken Starr ignore the apparent breadth of the sympathetic response to the President’s speech? Facially, it finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses. If he now pursues the President of the United States, who, however flawed his apology was, came out and invoked God, family, his daughter, a political conspiracy and everything but the kitchen sink, would not there be some sort of comparison to a persecutor as opposed to a prosecutor for Mr. Starr?"
— Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Big Show, to Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau Chief James Warren, August 18. [91 points] |
Runners-up: |
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"Scott, as you and I both know, a popular move these days is to make a titillating charge and then have the media create the frenzy. Given Kenneth Starr’s track record, should we suspect that he’s trying to do with innuendo that which he has been unable to do with evidence?"
— Bryant Gumbel to CBS News reporter Scott Pelley, January 21
Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel. [53]
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"The best defense it seems somehow is going on the offense now. While seedy stories in the media seem to be getting ever seedier. Each reporter in his turn sounds more and more like Howard Stern. A great investigative boom reporting who did what to whom. We see so many different styles of accusations and denials. When so much mud around you flies, you are bound to get some in your eyes. When such a war has been declared, everyone’s in, nobody’s spared. The jokes, the snickers, and the flippery. The slope we’re on is long and slippery. And there is something in the air which this country best beware: for there is danger in the dirt and lots of people could get hurt. And what we sow, we someday reap. Last night as I laid down to sleep I dreamed an apparition swarthy, the unshaved ghost of Joe McCarthy."
— Charles Osgood, CBS Saturday Morning, February 28. [46]
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"Anyone of us could be investigated like this and we would be able to keep no secrets about love or sex or money — no secrets about anything. If this reminds you of George Orwell’s novel, 1984, it should. The government in that book poked and pried everywhere. Its slogan was ‘Big Brother Is Watching You.’ And with the aid of the thought police, he was. Welcome to Orwell’s world."
— CNN’s Bruce Morton on Late Edition, October 11. [45]
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"Already, some of the more thoughtful members of the House and Senate have admitted, yes, they expect to be overwhelmed. There’s very little they can do about this, when someone drives, as one House Judiciary Committee member put this some weeks ago, a truck bomb up to the steps of the Capitol and just dumps it on them. Now this is probably not the most advisable comparison when you consider what happened on these very steps not so many weeks ago, but it is in some ways, politically, a very violent action for Ken Starr to leave this on them weeks before an election when they’re trying to decide how to deal with it."
— NBC’s Gwen Ifill during live MSNBC coverage of the report being unloaded from the vans, September 9. [31]
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Steve Brill Media Masochism Award
(for Bemoaning Monicagate’s
Impact on Clinton)
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First
Place |
"I think we can now safely conclude that this whole notion that the liberal media elite is coddling Bill Clinton and always plays to the Democrats is absurd. I mean the fact is who’s been the undoing of Bill Clinton: Newsweek and The Washington Post, those raging conservative publications..."
— Former New York Times and U.S. News reporter Steve Roberts on CNN’s
Late Edition, February 1. [82 points] |
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Runners-up: |
"We know from just answering the phone around here that the amount of attention we are giving this story is, at the very least, debatable. We in the news, as you can see [video of TV broadcasts], are devoting major time and resources to these events, but have we been carried away, are we doing too much and are we not being fair?"
— Peter Jennings on the January 23 World News Tonight, two days after the Lewinsky story broke. [47]
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"I think, not to underestimate the American public. If you just look at one story where the press really almost entirely went one way and the public went the other way, was the whole episode of Monica Lewinsky. I mean there you had a story where the press was so consistently hostile on this story, and the public stood back and said ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, we’re not going to go along with it until we’re a lot further down the road.’ The public is a lot more sophisticated because they’ve been exposed to too many stories that turned out not to be true."
— U.S. News & World Report Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman on the July 7
Good Morning America. [45]
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"There is something about this story, this presidency, that has led the media to almost obliterate the standards of decency that were built up for so many years."
— Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz on CNN’s January 28 special
Media Madness? [43]
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Media McCarthyism Award
(for Tying Conservatives to Murder)
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First
Place |
"The Christian Right per se and some particular members on Capitol Hill have helped inflame the air so that the air that these bad people breathed that night was filled, filled with the idea that somehow gays are different, and not only are they different in that difference, they’re bad and not only are they bad, they are evil and therefore evil can be destroyed. The next step to that to me, it’s a three-step process, and that ends in destruction. I don’t say that they were told to do that, they certainly weren’t part of any plan to do that, but again, what air are they breathing now? It’s the air filled with that hate....I mentioned Trent Lott, Jesse Helms and Dick Armey particularly. The Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council and the Concerned Women for America."
— Deborah Mathis of Gannett News Service on who inspired the murder of Matthew Shepard, October 17
Inside Washington. [88 points]
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Runners-up:
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"When Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by the extremist who was opposed to the peace talks, many commentators at the time blamed Bibi Netanyahu who was Mr. Rabin’s opponent at the time, for his political rhetoric, saying that by saying that people who were making peace with the Palestinians were in effect, countenancing terrorism, he in effect set up Rabin. Don’t you feel some of that same heat? Doesn’t anti-abortion rhetoric at some point verge on almost a back-handed pat on the back to those people?"
— Geraldo Rivera to Jerry Falwell after the shooting of an abortion doctor, October 26
Upfront Tonight on CNBC. [51] |
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"My concern with this guy, Weston, is he’s a guy talking up this business about the evils of big government and he’s a nut case, but this is his rant and I wonder if, you know, in some way the Republicans in this town haven’t gone too far with this kind of logic."
— FNC analyst and Washington Post reporter Juan Williams on the Capitol Hill shooting, July 26 Fox News Sunday. [45]
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"Then the fallout from the death of Matthew Shepard. The tragic beating of the college student in Wyoming has some activists in this country saying there is a climate of anti-gay hate that’s been fostered by a provocative advertising campaign by the political right in this country. We’re going to get into that debate after news and weather."
— Today co-host Katie Couric opening the October 13 show. [38]
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