Notable Quotables - 06/02/1997
Incongruous Comparisons Abound
"In the '80s, morning in America sounded
good but proved to be a false dawn. The expansion was fueled by 'high-yield'
junk bonds and government debt, and when interest rates soared and the market
crashed, the junk dealers on Wall Street began to look like perfect mirror
images of the crack entrepreneurs in the slums."
- Time Senior Writer
Eric Pooley in a May 19 story on the booming '90s.
"Earlier tonight, we reported the
President's apology for medical experiments that allowed black Americans to
die of syphilis. The President noted how badly this hurt public trust in
government, especially among minorities. The same criticism is being made
today on another score. As CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports,
it's the fallout from California's voter-approved ban on state affirmative
action programs."
- Dan Rather introducing May 16 CBS Evening News story
on drop in minority admissions.
Morning Boos for Paula, Sobs for Susan
"You said that you wanted to, if it went
to trial, explore the pattern of conduct on the part of the President. That
sounds to me like you're setting out simply to embarrass the White
House."
- Good Morning America co-host Charles Gibson to Paula Jones
attorney Joseph Cammarata, May 28.
"She also claims she's being held under
conditions that are inhuman, including solitary confinement, sexual harassment
from male prisoners, and being served oatmeal that is cold and gluey."
- NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski on Susan McDougal, held in a Los Angeles
prison for refusing to answer questions in court about Bill Clinton's
truthfulness, May 20 Today.
Capital Gains Tax Cuts: Just for the Wealthy?
"On Capitol Hill, the Senate voted
overwhelming approval today for the big balanced budget blueprint. Supporters
of the plan say it would balance the budget in five years, provide $85 billion
in tax breaks mostly for families with children, cut the capital gains tax
which would help immediately the wealthy, and save $321 billion out of
Medicare, defense and other spending."
- Dan Rather, May 23 CBS Evening News.
Reality Check:
"The explosion in stock ownership, especially through mutual funds, has
made capital gains taxes a middle class issue. Some 84 percent of taxpayers
reporting capital gains income earned less than $100,000."
- USA Today
reporter Anne Willette, May 5 story.
Republican Racists, Democratic Healers
"Well, Strom Thurmond did take, was the
first candidate to try to remove Dixie from the Democratic coalition over the
issue of civil rights. He was followed by George Wallace and there's still a
strain, a strong strain now, in his adopted party, the Republican Party, that
maintains this."
- PBS Washington Week in Review host Ken Bode, May 23.
Howard Fineman, Newsweek: "Jay, this
Tuskegee experiment has been known about in public for decades. Why did
Clinton do this now?"
James Carney, Time: "Well, for two reasons,
Howard. One is he's the President to do it. I mean, previously Presidents
didn't do it, in part because they didn't want to. Clinton - this is an issue
which Clinton has a fair amount of credibility on. He's always handled race
issues very well for a white politician. In fact, he's probably the best white
politician out there speaking on race issues."
- CNN's Capital Gang, May
18.
Conservatives Cripple and Kill
"Republicans got their tax cuts for
families and investors and some savings in domestic programs. But they dropped
the plans they had in 1995 and 1996 for crippling Medicare and Medicaid,
abolishing government departments and agencies, expanding the military, and
relaxing environmental protections."
- New York Times reporter David E.
Rosenbaum, May 3 "news analysis" on the budget deal.
"The mood of the Republican congressional
leadership is so ideologically obtuse as to doom even this modest first step
down the path of responsibility. They would rather kill people than raise
taxes."
- Former Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer in an April 22
column on the Kennedy-Hatch health for children bill.
Not Quite the Media Reaction to Al Gore's Convention Speech
"[Sen. Rick] Santorum's theatrics make me
gag. He may be sincere, but the show that he just put on, the clip we just saw
of him wringing his hands about babies, make me think that it is theater. That
my be unfair to him, but it seems excessive to me and a lot of this is just
showboating on the floor."
- Newsweek's former Washington Bureau Chief
Evan Thomas on the partial-birth abortion debate, May 17 Inside Washington.
If Nobody Will Believe Them, Why Demand the Report?
"If [the CIA's John] Deutch thinks anyone
in black America is going to take the word of those two organizations [the CIA
and the Justice Department], he's mistaken. Black Americans have been the
target of so much hostility that many of them would not put it past their own
government to finance the war against communism by addicting thousands of
people."
- Time correspondent Jack E. White, September 30, 1996.
vs.
"Last fall the CIA and the Justice
Department promised they would investigate the alleged link between coke
smugglers and the CIA. More than six months have passed, and so far neither
agency has delivered its report to Congress. That is a more urgent issue than
the missteps of the Mercury News."
- White after San Jose Mercury News
Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos admitted their "Dark Alliance"
CIA-crack series "fell short of my standards," May 26, 1997 Time.
American Isolationists and Russian Communists: Both Right-Wing
"You're going to find a lot of opposition
from a lot of different trends. The isolationists are going to say wait a
minute, we're not sending troops or our nuclear umbrella to defend Prague,
basically, that's going to be one line. Right-wing Republicans, maybe even led
by Henry Kissinger, are going to say you just gave away the store to the
Russians...You've got a basically, hardline, right-wing Duma, largely, not
largely but a strong communist, I'm not sure a majority but a
plurality..."
- New York Times columnist and former reporter Thomas
Friedman on U.S. and Russian parliament reaction to NATO expansion, May 16
Washington Week in Review.
Memorial Day Media Priorities
"Good evening. It has been a mostly quiet
Memorial Day across the country with people coming together to enjoy cookouts,
parades and the great outdoors. And, this holiday weekend, millions of
Americans have something new in common: dinosaurs, financially successful
dinosaurs. So successful, they opened this weekend in what is certain to
become the most profitable movie in history."
- ABC anchor Forrest Sawyer at the top of the May 26 World News Tonight.
vs.
"Finally this evening, remembering their
sacrifice. It is perhaps too easy on Memorial Day to think of the holiday as
just another long weekend. Easy to forget that a holiday which originated
after the Civil War now honors all those Americans who sacrificed their lives
in all the wars this nation has fought."
- Sawyer, 25 minutes later,
after ten stories, including pieces on a police department getting permission
to enter homes when parents are away if police suspect a teen drinking party,
and a look at the controversy over "adventure vacations" to see
natives battle in Papua New Guinea.
L. Brent Bozell, Publisher
Brent Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
Geoffrey Dickens, Gene Eliasen, Jim Forbes,
Steve Kaminski, Clay Waters; Media Analysts
Kristina Sewell, Research Associate
Carey Evans, Circulation Director
Jessica Anderson, Intern
