Best of NQ 2001 Contents
  Swiss Press Corps Award
  Media Hero Award
  Pushing Bush to the Left Award
  Poisoning the Planet Award
  Picking the Lockbox Award
  Carve Clinton Into Mount Rushmore Award
  Good Morning Morons Award
  Damn Those Conservatives Award
  Selected Not Elected Award
  Department of Injustice Award
  Politics of Meaninglessness Award
  Euro-Envy Award
  Nobody Here But Us Apolitical Observers Award
  Blame America First Award
  Glimpses of Patriotism Award
  Too Late for the Ballot
  2001 Award Judges
  Press Coverage

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The Best Notable Quotables of 2001:

The Fourteenth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting


 


Nobody Here But Us Apolitical Observers Award for Denying Liberal Bias

First Place

Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: "There is a perception, even among journalists, that the [New York] Times is going a little bit left, is getting more liberal, and that’s disquieting."
Time magazine’s Jack White: "That’s a lot of hokum, with all due respect to Evan. There is no liberal bias in the press in the whole. In fact, if there is a bias, it’s on the other side. It’s hard to find a person really, truly, of the liberal persuasion who are making any important decisions in any important media institutions in this country now. I’ve looked for them, I consider myself one, I have very few birds of a like feather around."
– Exchange on the September 1 Inside Washington. [56 points]
Runners-up:


Diane Sawyer:
"Watching you and watching you cover the news over the past year, you are so much about passion for politics, and it doesn’t matter to you, I mean – I really mean this."
George Stephanopoulos: "Thank you."
Sawyer: "You’ve been completely non-partisan in covering the news."
– Exchange on ABC’s Good Morning America, July 24. [54]

"The New York Times is middle of the road. There is no active, aggressive, important publication of the left in America. And so as a consequence, The New York Times when compared to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page may be considered to the left of it. But to call The New York Times left-wing is absurd."
– Norman Pearlstine, Editor-in-Chief of Time-Warner magazines, on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on May 24, responding to former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg’s point that Dan Rather’s belief that the Times’ editorial page was merely "middle of the road" showed Rather’s cluelessness on the issue of liberal media bias. [50]

"I think there is a mainstream media. CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it’s just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose."
– Peter Jennings, CNN’s Larry King Live, May 15. [40]

 

Blame America First Award

First Place

"Am I angry? You bet I am. I am an American citizen, and my leaders have taken my money to fund mass murder. And now my friends have paid the price with their lives.
"Keep crying, Mr. Bush. Keep running to Omaha or wherever it is you go while others die, just as you ran during Vietnam while claiming to be ‘on duty’ in the Air National Guard. Nine boys from my high school died in that miserable war. And now you are asking for ‘unity’ so you can start another one? Do not insult me or my country like this!
"Yes, I, too, will be in church at noon today, on this national day of mourning. I will pray for you, and us, and the children of New York, and the children of this sad and ugly world."
– Message posted by left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore on his Web site, September 14. [54 points]
Runners-up:


Bill Maher


"We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly."
– ABC’s Bill Maher on Politically Incorrect, Sept. 17. [52]

 


"My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong – the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we’re both right....[The flag] has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses."
The Nation’s Katha Pollitt in an Oct. 8 column. [43]

"I do not believe the memory of the 7,000 plus people who were killed in these most horrendous acts of terrorism are honored by going out and killing other civilians. We went alone, we went alone when we bombed Tripoli at night, a crowded city where old people and children were sleeping. 1986, Reagan. We killed Qaddafi’s kid, and lots of other children. One person said, well, several people, ‘well, he’s adopted’ they said of the kid. And we got Pan Am 103, Lockerbie. Tell those loved ones, it was December 21, my birthday."
– Phil Donahue on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, Sept. 25. [37]

"The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards."
– Novelist and playwright Susan Sontag writing for the "Talk of the Town" section of the Sept. 24 New Yorker. [28]

 

Glimpses of Patriotism Award

First Place

"For once, let’s have no ‘grief counselors’ standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better. For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing.’ Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous. There will be time later for the tears of sorrow. A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage....
"As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity....Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company....The worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."
– Lance Morrow in a special edition of Time published after the September 11 terrorist attacks. [67 points]

Runners-up:


"The United States had a spirit before it had a name – one of faith and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested dreamers – we are again today. We once were a nation under God – we are again today. Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another, for they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination and hope, we’ve summoned what’s best and noblest in us. We are again Americans."
– Tony Snow at the conclusion of the September 16 Fox News Sunday. [54]

"I have spent this week wiping my eyes and grinding my teeth and wondering why. I’ve drawn strength from a story about a man I knew, Father Mychal Judge. The chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Franciscan, he raced to the World Trade Center after the explosion to comfort the injured. While administering the last rites to a dying rescue worker, he, himself, was killed by flying debris. New York’s bravest physically carried Father Mike away....
Together, firemen, priests, and brothers wept and sang the prayer of St. Francis, `May the Lord bless and keep you and show his face to you and have mercy on you.’ That is the way of New York. That is the spirit of America."
– Tim Russert, moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, concluding the September 16 show. [30]

 

 


 

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