The Best of Notable Quotables; December 28, 1998
Table of Contents:
- The Best of Notable Quotables; December 28, 1998
- Presidential Kneepad Award
- Wired Wicked Witch
- Hallucinating Hillary
- Corporal Cueball Carville
- Steve Brill Media Masochism
- Media McCarthyism
- Everybody But Us Shut Up Award
- Starr Behind Bars
- Good Morning Morons
- Move over Buddy Award
- Damn Conservatives
- Politics of Meaninglessness
- Carve Clinton into Mt. Rushmore
- Too Late For Our Judging
- Quote of the Year
- 1998 Award Judges
Steve Brill Media Masochism Award (for Bemoaning Monicagate’s Impact on Clinton)
“I
think we can now safely conclude that this whole notion that the
liberal media elite iscoddling Bill Clinton and always plays to the
Democrats is absurd. I mean the fact is who’s been the undoing of Bill
Clinton: Newsweek and The Washington Post, those raging conservative
publications..."
– Former New York Times and U.S. News reporter Steve Roberts on CNN’s Late Edition, February 1. [82 points]
Runners-up:
“We
know from just answering the phone around here that the amount of
attention we are giving this story is, at the very least, debatable. We
in the news, as you can see [video of TV broadcasts], are devoting major
time and resources to these events, but have we been carried away, are
we doing too much and are we not being fair?”
– Peter Jennings on the
January 23 World News Tonight, two days after the Lewinsky story broke.
[47]
“I think, not to underestimate the American public. If you
just look at one story where the press really almost entirely went one
way and the public went the other way, was the whole episode of Monica
Lewinsky. I mean there you had a story where the press was so
consistently hostile on this story, and the public stood back and said
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, we’re not going to go
along with it until we’re a lot further down the road.’ The public is a
lot more sophisticated because they’ve been exposed to too many stories
that turned out not to be true.”
– U.S. News & World Report
Publisher Mortimer Zuckerman on the July 7 Good Morning America. [45]
“There
is something about this story, this presidency, that has led the media
to almost obliterate the standards of decency that were built up for so
many years.”
– Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz on CNN’s January 28
special Media Madness? [43]
