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The Best Notable Quotables of 2000:
The Thirteenth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Semper Fidel Award (for Jim Avila’s Admiration of Fidel Castro)
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First
Place
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"What is deprogramming? What is
reeducation? The young man [Elian] will go back into the, into the school
system in Cuba. The school system in Cuba teaches that communism is the way
to succeed in life and it is the best system. Is that deprogramming or is
that national heritage? That’s certainly what he’ll be learning. He’ll
also be living in a different kind of society, a society that many people
here in Cuba like. The CIA, in fact, says that if the borders were open that
most, 90 percent of the population here in Cuba would stay in Cuba because
they like it."
--
NBC News reporter Jim Avila from Cuba on CNBC’s Upfront Tonight,
June 27. [66 points]
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Runners-up: |
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"The one thing that most, that I’ve
learned about Cubans in the many times that I have visited here in the last
few years, is that it is mostly a nationalistic country, not primarily a
communist country."
--
NBC News reporter Jim Avila on MSNBC’s simulcast of Imus in the Morning,
April 26. [65]
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"Why did she [Elian’s mother, a maid]
do it? What was she escaping? By all accounts this quiet, serious young
woman, who loved to dance the salsa, was living the good life, as good as it
gets for a citizen in Cuba....In today’s Cuba a maid, where dollar tips
are to be had, is a prestigious job. Elian’s life relatively easy by Cuban
standards, living with Mom and maternal grandparents half of the week, in
Dad’s well-furnished home the rest of the time. Both Mom and Dad friendly
to each other and caring towards their only child....An extended family
destroyed by a mother’s decision to start a new life in a new country, a
decision that now leaves a little boy estranged from his father and forever
separated from her."
--
Jim Avila from Havana on NBC Nightly News, April 8. [59]
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Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award (for Admiring Communism)
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First
Place |
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"To be a poor child in Cuba may in many
instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I’m not going to
condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."
-- Newsweek’s
Eleanor Clift on the McLaughlin Group, April 8. [62 points]
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Runners-up: |
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"Like these young dancers, Carlos
[Acosta] benefited from Cuba’s communist system because it not only
recognizes physical talent, it nurtures it, whether it’s baseball, boxing,
or ballet."
--
CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Christiane Amanpour on a star of London’s
Royal Ballet, May 21. [44]
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"We missed the death of a notable
American this week, so we want to catch up. Gus Hall actually died on
Friday. The son of a Minnesota miner became head of the U.S. Communist Party
at the height of anti-communist McCarthyism in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.
He spent eight years in prison and a lifetime in the political wilderness
for his views here, but he was a dignitory, dignitary in the Soviet Union.
Even after his friends there abandoned the cause, Hall never wavered and he
was 90."
--
ABC’s Peter Jennings, October 17 World News Tonight. [40]
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Damn Those Conservatives Award
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First
Place |
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"What a f--king idiot."
--
Bryant Gumbel caught on camera after he threw the show to a weather segment
seconds after wrapping up a hostile interview with Robert Knight of the
Family Research Council, June 29 The Early Show. [91 points]
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Runners-up:
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"George W. is one thing, but as long as
the Republican Party -- you noted some of them -- is populated by the Pat
Buchanans, the Jesse Helmses, the Jerry Falwells, the Bob Barrs, don’t
blacks have a right to be suspicious?"
--
CBS’s Bryant Gumbel to a panel of black men, August 2 The Early Show. [33]
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"Howard, who are the Republicans who are
not happy with the way this event looked tonight and similar groupings of
these six, meaning, and it’s red meat for conservatives, the positions
rather strident tonight: anti-gay, pro-Jesus, and anti-abortion and no gray
matter in between?"
--
Brian Williams, after a debate amongst Republican presidential candidates,
to Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, Jan. 6 MSNBC’s The News with
Brian Williams. [32]
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"No matter what George Curry
accomplishes during the remainder of his journalistic career, he will be
remembered for one thing: he was the editor who slapped a portrait of
Clarence Thomas wearing an Aunt Jemima-style handkerchief on a 1993 cover of
Emerge magazine. That shocking image outraged Thomas supporters, of
course, but it crystallized the disgust that many African-Americans had
begun to feel about the ultraconservative legal philosophy of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s only black member....That’s the uncompromising voice
that made Emerge the nation’s best black news magazine for the past
seven years."
-- Time
national correspondent Jack E. White’s "Dividing Line" column on
what will be lost with the demise of the liberal black magazine Emerge,
June 12 Time. [31]
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