Notable Quotables - 06/25/2001
Moment of Truth
"We launder our views through, quote, 'objective critics.' And certainly the press is pretty green, the press is pretty pro-environment and I don't think there's any question that they, as a body, feel that Bush is wrong on the environment, with varying degrees of willingness to give him credit and I'm excluding the conservative press, the Weekly Standard and so forth. But generally the rank and file press is pretty green and they're going to use the Europeans to take the Bushies to task."
-Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas appearing on CNN's
Reliable Sources, June 16.
Speaking of Using Europeans...
"President Bush was an easy target for protesters at the EU summit today, his defiant stance on the global warming treaty the wedge issue of a building rift between the U.S. and Europe....European leaders delivered a sharp rebuke, proclaiming that they would move forward without America. The move brought cheers from demonstrators who took to the streets by the thousands today."
-John Roberts, June 14 CBS Evening News.
"Europe is still smarting from his [President Bush's] unilateral withdrawal from the Kyoto climate control treaty, and discussions here did nothing to bring the sides closer together....President Bush reiterated his promise of more money for more research....But most Europeans insist the science is in and any delay amounts to fiddling while the planet burns."
-Christiane Amanpour, CNN's Inside Politics, June 14.
vs.
"Not a single European Union nation has ratified the Kyoto treaty which was signed when many of your counterparts were in office, yet you've been criticized by these same leaders for rejecting it. Why do you suppose their actions have not been as forceful as their rhetoric? And President Prodi, why haven't any EU nations ratified the treaty?"
-Associated Press correspondent Ron Fournier's questions to President Bush and European Union President Romano Prodi at a news conference covered live on CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, but only reported later in the day by FNC, June 14.
See Newsweek Condescend
"See George. See George Learn Foreign Policy."
-Headline over Newsweek's June 18 feature article on President Bush's upcoming European trip.
Networks Deliver Hot Air
"Global warming is real, the new report declares, and humans are helping to cause it."
-ABC's Terry Moran, June 7 World News Tonight.
"An expert assessment requested by President Bush found global warming is real and getting worse and air pollution caused by humans is a factor."
-Dan Rather on the June 7 CBS Evening News.
"Along the Gulf Coast today, Allison becomes the earliest tropical storm to dump this much rain. In Florida, the worst drought in a hundred years has cracked the land. In Europe, a record winter of rain and flood. More evidence of global warming, say environmentalists who plan to meet President Bush with a storm of protest in Europe."
-John Roberts on the June 7 CBS Evening News.
"Extreme weather is just one of the dire predictions contained in a report out this week from the National Academy of Sciences which was requested by the Bush White House. It says that global warming is real."
-NBCs Tom Brokaw on the June 8 Nightly News.
"This week's report shows the dramatic climate change caused by the emission of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide from cars and industrial sites is worsening, and scientists conclude humans are playing a large role. The potential effects daunting, including more severe weather from excessive rain and flooding to severe drought, which could affect agricultural production and food prices."
-NBC's David Gregory, Nightly News, June 8.
"Frankly, this notion that there isn't enough science, I mean that's right up there with does smoking cause lung cancer."
-Newsweek's Eleanor Clift discussing global warming on the McLaughlin
Group, June 16.
Reality Check:
"We are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future....A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty - far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to."
-MIT Professor Richard Lindzen, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) expert panel which authored the report cited in each of the network reports quoted above, in a June 11
Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Impatient to Eviscerate Tax Cut
"There's a lot of talk that Democrats are going to revisit this tax cut at some unspecified point in the future. What are you waiting for? Why not do it now?"
-Question from CBS's Gloria Borger to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle on
Face the Nation, June 10.
Controversial and Unworkable
"Good evening. President Bush is on a crusade in Europe tonight to change the character and the direction of the most deadly form of warfare in history, nuclear war. He's selling hard the idea of a controversial missile defense system to shoot down an incoming nuclear attack. Now, there is no defensive system by design. The operating theory is that the best defense is an overwhelming offense. So far no missile defense system has worked well in tests."
-Tom Brokaw on the June 13 NBC Nightly News.
Independent = Ultraliberal
"[Rutgers University professor Benjamin] Barber charged that [CBS correspondent Mike] Wallace and his network news colleagues were little more than establishment spokesmen for grand entertainment empires, corporations that are easily co-opted by the powers that be. Wallace countered that 60 Minutes had done several pieces over the years that had caused advertisers to boycott the network. 'We don't cave in to commercial pressures,' he said. Later, perhaps needing to prove to the assembled that he was no establishment stooge, he revealed that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader got his vote in the 2000 election. 'I'm basically an independent,' Wallace says to TV Guide."
-Item by Max Robins in the June 16-22 issue of TV Guide, recounting an exchange at a May 25 "Future of Journalism" forum in New York City.
"Uncle Cheney" Really In Charge
Dan Rather: "I think by any reasonable analysis that George Bush is off to a pretty good start with his presidency."
David Letterman: "You were pleased with how he handled the situation in China? You thought that went alright?"
Rather: "I'm pausing only because you said the way he handled it. Im not sure he handled it because, remember you have Uncle Cheney who runs an awful lot of things around there. No, I think that was handled very steadily. He pulled some good people around him. But now comes the difficult part: the stands he's taken on the environment; his tax program, the details of which we do not yet know all of these things have gotten him a reputation, justifiably or not, of running an administration that's further to the right than most people expected."
-Exchange on CBS's Late Show, June 7.
"Stolen" Election Not Disturbing, But Conservative Policies Are
"I'm not a liberal or a conservative, I don't cotton to either side. And I don't hold in disdain the people I disagree with, I just disagree with them. And I think one of the big disappointments to me is, I thought that George Bush may have stolen the election, but it didn't worry me because I figured there wasn't much of a choice anyway. So, what are the other, what's the difference? The only good thing that came out of the election for me was that Pat Buchanan got one half of one percent of the vote. But, it didn't disturb me. I'm beginning to wonder if the guy who campaigned is the same guy who's in the White House. There are things that I don't understand. I don't understand why conservatives are against conservation. That seems not to make any sense to me, that's what conservatism is all about, conservation."
-CBS 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt on NPR's Washington-based
Diane Rehm Show, May 21.
Proving Goldberg's Point
"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 Journals editorial page may be considered to the left of it. But to call The New York Times left wing is absurd."
-Time-Warner magazines Editor-in-Chief Norman Pearlstine on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on May 24, responding to former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg''s point that Dan Rathers belief that the Times editorial page was not liberal but merely "middle of the road" showed Rather''s cluelessness on the issue of media bias.
"If you endorse every major liberal position of the 20th and early 21st century; if youre against the death penalty, and I know some conservatives are against the death penalty; if you're for abortion rights, including late-term abortion; if you're for affirmative action; if you're for, if you're against big tax cuts - these are liberal positions. And, and, if Norman doesn't see these as liberal positions...this makes my case. I mean, I'm tempted to say, I rest my case, your honor. If The New York Times isn't a liberal editorial page, I'm totally confused."
-Goldberg responding to Pearlstine on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, June 8.
Desiring a Clinton Dynasty?
"She's cool. She just is."
-ABC's Diane Sawyer after showing video of Chelsea Clinton's Stanford graduation on the June 18
Good Morning America.
