Best of NQ 2000 Contents
  Aiding & Abetting in an Election Theft Award
  Kiss Me, Too, Al Award
  Kosher Kiss-Up Award
  I Am Woman Award
  Carve Clinton Into Mount Rushmore Award
  Media Hero Award
  The Real Reagan Legacy Award
  Flirting with Disaster Award
  The Galloping Ghost of Gingrich Award
  W is for Woeful Award
  If He Didn't Sink, Send Him Back to the Clink Award
  Little Havana Banana Republic Award
  Semper Fidel Award
  Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award
  Damn Those Conservatives Award
  Good Morning Morons Award
  Politics of Meaninglessness Award
  Too Late for the Ballot
  Quote of the Year
  2000 Award Judges
  Press Coverage

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The Best Notable Quotables of 2000:

The Thirteenth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting



Semper Fidel Award (for Jim Avila’s Admiration of Fidel Castro)

First Place

Jim Avila



"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]
Runners-up:


Jim Avila


"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]

 


Jim Avila

 

 


"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]

 

Bring Back the Iron Curtain Award (for Admiring Communism)

First Place

Eleanor Clift

"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]

 

Runners-up:
Christiane Amanpour "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]

Peter Jennings



"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]

 

Damn Those Conservatives Award

First Place

Bryant Gumbel "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]


Runners-up:


Bryant Gumbel
"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]

Brian Williams

"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]

"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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