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The Best Notable Quotables of 1999:
The Twelfth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Politics of Meaninglessness Award
for the Silliest Analysis
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First
Place
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Rudy Giuliani joking on CBS’s Late Show about going to Arkansas to run
for the Senate: "I’ve never lived here. I’ve never worked here. I
ain’t never been here. But I think it would be cool to be your Senator."
Jeralyn Merritt, MSNBC legal analyst: "That’s just so unfair."
MSNBC anchor Gregg Jarrett: "It’s ugly."
Merritt: "It’s ugly and it’s unfair because she has spent a lot of
time in New York and she has the desire to help and she is bright. She’s the best of
the group."
-- Exchange during MSNBC InterNight discussion of the New York Senate campaign,
June 25. [53]
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Runners-up: |
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"If you take that penny, for instance, out of the National Institutes
of Health grants, that may be the penny that cures cancer. Are you willing to do
that?"
-- ABC’s Sam Donaldson to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay on the proposed 1.4
percent across-the-board non-entitlement spending reduction, October 24 This Week. [43]
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"What-if department...What if President Clinton announced a cure for cancer developed
by the National Institutes of Health? What would critics say? Would Bob Barr want him
impeached for failing to tell us the study was going on? Would Rush Limbaugh decry the
President taking credit while admitting getting rid of cancer wasn’t a bad thing?
Would Pat Buchanan insist that no nation other than America be given it? Would The Wall
Street Journal worry about its effect on pharmaceutical stock prices? And so it
goes...."
-- CNN’s Larry King in his USA Today column, February 15. [37]
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"If there was any doubt that by virtue of his position, Clinton occupied as lofty a
plane as the Pope on Tuesday -- or that the Pope, by virtue of being human, had some of
the same needs as Clinton -- it was erased by the sign marking a restroom near their
meeting room: ‘President or Holy Father Only,’ it read."
-- Last sentence of a January 27 New York Times story by reporter James Bennet
on Clinton’s St. Louis visit with the Pope. [34]
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Co-host Bill Press: "Why is it that you are the epitome of the left-wing liberal
media in the mind of every conservative I’ve ever talked to? What did you do to get
that reputation?"
CBS News anchor Dan Rather: "I remained an independent reporter who would not
report the news the way they wanted it or – from the left or the right. I’m a
lifetime reporter. All I ever dreamed of was being a journalist, and the definition of
journalist to me was the guy who’s an honest broker of information....I do subscribe
to the idea of: ‘Play no favorites and pull no punches.’"
-- Exchange on CNN’s Crossfire, June 24. [26]
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"Quite simply, for many workers around the world, the oppression of the unchecked
commissars has been replaced by the oppression of the unregulated capitalists, who move
their manufacturing from country to country, constantly in search of those who will work
for the lowest wages and lowest standards. To some, the Nike swoosh is now as scary as the
hammer and sickle."
-- New York Times columnist and former reporter Thomas Friedman, July 30 column.
[22]
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"Some people dream about being naked, and you dream about being...?"
-- One of Time magazine Washington Bureau Chief Michael Duffy’s questions
to Monica Lewinsky, March 15 cover story. [22]
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See No Evil Award
(for Burying the Juanita Broaddrick
Rape Charge)
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First
Place |
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Cliff May of the Republican National Committee: "We have
right now a credible allegation by Juanita Broaddrick that while Attorney General, Bill
Clinton sexually assaulted her and he won’t answer."
MSNBC host David Gregory: "Now hold on. You know what, Cliff? I’m not
going to let you go there. We are not talking about this today. We’re not going to
turn that into this. I want to go around the horn a little bit. Cliff, wait a minute.
Cliff, I’m going to stop you. I’m hosting the program. It is not a double
standard. We have a clear focus today. I’m asking the questions."
-- MSNBC afternoon discussion of allegations about past illegal drug use by Republican
presidential candidate George W. Bush, August 19. [53] |
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Runners-up: |
"I don’t believe it at all. Anybody who waits 21 years to
surface a charge like this, and has no evidence to back it up, other than very
circumstantial, what she may or may not have told some of her friends at the time, has
sworn in the deposition that it never happened, and now all of a sudden comes forth with
this story, the story doesn’t deserve to be dignified by being broadcast and
displayed. What I find fascinating about this case is that we’ve sunk so low now that
a charge of this magnitude can be leveled against the President of the United States with
next to no evidence at all. I think that’s outrageous."
-- Time national correspondent Jack E. White, February 27 Inside Washington.
[46] |
"These allegations go back more than 20 years. This woman made no charges at the
time. It’s my understanding that she couldn’t even recall initially the year.
Investigative reporters for major publications have looked at it since 1991. Ken Starr
passed on it. You know, where is this going to go except among all the Clinton haters and
the right-wing conspiratorialists? It’s great fodder, but you know, you proved the
guy’s a cad, you’re not going to prove he’s a violent criminal."
-- Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, February 20 McLaughlin Group. [43]
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CBS News anchor Dan Rather: "They are nervous about, number one, whether
this information is accurate, whether it’s really true or not. And then number two,
even if it does turn out to be true, it happened a long time ago and number three,
they’ve gotta be figuring maybe, just maybe the American public has heard all they
want to hear about this and are saying ‘you know, next. Let’s move on to the
next thing.’"
Don Imus: "I was reading in either Time or Newsweek that even
the woman herself, Juanita Broaddrick, said that she hopes that this thing went away this
week and even she was sick about hearing about it and it’s her story."
Rather: "Well, let’s hope she gets her way with that."
-- February 23 Imus in the Morning radio show simulcast on MSNBC. [41]
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Politics of Personal Destruction Award
(for Geraldo Rivera’s Hatemongering)
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First
Place |
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"Don’t you think 13 guys, all of whom, you know, are not noted for any
contribution to civil rights. I’m talking about the House managers. All of whom are
born-again, all of whom are right-to-lifers, all of whom are you know, anti-immigration,
pro-English Only, etc, etc, don’t you think that when that face is presented,
isn’t that one of the reasons the majority, the vast majority of the American people
support the President? When they look at the people prosecuting, some say persecuting him,
and say, wait a second, those people wouldn’t even let me into their home or their
neighborhood or to work alongside them?"
-- Geraldo Rivera, Feb. 2 Rivera Live on CNBC. [79]
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Runners-up:
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"Today’s Washington Post [editorial] says...‘Mr.
Starr should be remembered as a man who, hampered alike by intensely adverse conditions
and by his own missteps, managed to perform a significant public service,’ end quote.
Missteps? What would The Washington Post call the Lincoln assassination?
Missteps?"
-- Rivera on CNBC’s Rivera Live, October 20. [51]
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"Do you believe that they had, at least indirectly, something to do with your
ex-husband, Jim McDougal’s, ultimate demise?...Did they help speed your
husband’s sickness and his ultimate death?"
-- Rivera referring to Ken Starr’s prosecutors in a question to Susan
McDougal,
April 14 Upfront Tonight. [31]
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"[Susan McDougal] has been hounded for 15 years by investigators and for the last
five by the investigative terrorist, Ken Starr."
-- Geraldo Rivera, March 8 Rivera Live. [28]
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"That was the party with the slender majority and two weeks to live that impeached
the man because they could. It was a spiteful action, an action that they performed
absolutely in violation of the framers’ intent. It was a legislative coup
d’etat, and it has been rejected utterly by the American people, 73 percent of whom
now say they approve of the President’s performance in office..."
-- Geraldo Rivera, with "NBC News" under his name as his identifier, December
22, 1998 Today. [19]
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