Media Research Center -- DisHonors Awards

Politics of Meaninglessness Award for the Wackiest Analysis

Runners-up:

"It’s a morbid observation, but if everyone on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem."
-- Newsweek Senior Writer Jerry Adler, Dec. 31, 1990 issue.

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"It’s short of soap, so there are lice in the hospitals. It’s short of pantyhose, so women’s legs go bare. It’s short of snowsuits, so babies stay home in the winter. Sometimes it’s short of cigarettes so millions of people stop smoking, involuntarily. It drives everybody crazy. The problem isn’t communism; nobody even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages."
-- NBC Nightly News commentator John Chancellor on the Soviet Union, Aug. 21, 1991.

And the winner is:

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Time’s Elaine Shannon: "He [Ted Kaczynski] wasn’t a hypocrite. He lived as he wrote. His manifesto, and there are a lot of things in it that I would agree with and a lot of other people would, that industrialization and pollution all are terrible things, but he carried it to an extreme, and obviously murder is something that is far beyond any political philosophy, but he had a bike. He didn’t have any plumbing, he didn’t have any electricity."
-- Time Washington reporter Elaine Shannon talking about the Unabomber, April 7, 1996 C-SPAN Sunday Journal.

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