ALEXANDRIA, VA – To commemorate its 20th Anniversary, the Media Research Center has compiled the most outrageous liberal media quotes of the past two decades in a special edition of “Notable Quotables,” the MRC’s bi-weekly compilation of the latest outrageous, often humorous quotes from the liberal media. The Top Ten “Notable Quotables” of the past 20 years are provided below, and the full special edition containing more than 100 quotes – many accompanied by audio and video clips – is available online at www.mrc.org.

“This collection shows the scope of the very problem the MRC was founded to combat,” stated Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center, “and the extent to which the liberal media have smeared conservatives and cheered liberals over the years.

“While the public increasingly abandons the liberal media, reporters continue to be immune to the fact that their bias is a problem,” Bozell concluded.

MRC’s Top Ten Outrageous Quotes

Reviling Ronald Reagan
“In the plague years of the 1980s — that low decade of denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism and idiocy — government fiddled and medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn’t need the ghettos and he didn’t want the gays.”
— CBS’s John Leonard on Sunday Morning, September 5, 1993.

Damn Those Conservatives
“Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.”
— Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf in a February 1, 1993 news story.

Typical Liberal Compassion
“I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease....He is an absolutely reprehensible person.”
— USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS’s To the Contrary.

Fawning Over Bill & Hillary
“If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we’d take it right now and walk away winners....Tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we’re pulling for her.”
— Dan Rather to Bill Clinton at a May 27, 1993 CBS affiliates meeting, talking about anchoring with Connie Chung.

Three Cheers for Liberalism
“It is liberalism, whether people like it or not, which has animated all the years of my life. What on Earth did conservatism ever accomplish for our country?”
— Charles Kuralt talking with Morley Safer on the CBS special, One for the Road with Charles Kuralt, May 4, 1994.

Talk Radio Terrorists
“The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men....Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: detail a problem, blame the government or a group, and invite invective from like-minded people....Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden or encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.”
— Today’s Bryant Gumbel, April 25, 1995.

Dan’s Salute to “Honest” Bill
Host Bill O’Reilly: “Do you think President Clinton’s an honest man?”
Dan Rather: “Yes, I think he’s an honest man....I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”
— Exchange on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, May 15, 2001.

Extolling Virtues of Fidel’s Prison
“For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. The literacy rate is 96 percent.”
— Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20, October 11, 2002.

Apologizing for Awful America
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, whether it’s the rights of immigrants to start a new life, or the rights of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drove policy and environmentalists have to fight relentlessly for every gain. You weren’t. But you are. And for that, I’m sorry.”
— From New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s May 21 graduation address at the State University of New York at New Paltz, shown on C-SPAN May 27, 2006.

Rosie vs. “Radical Christianity”
“As a result of the [9/11] attack and the killing of nearly 3,000 innocent people, we invaded two countries and killed innocent people in their countries....Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America.”
— Rosie O’Donnell on ABC’s The View, September 12, 2006.