THE BEST NOTABLE QUOTABLES OF 1993
The Sixth Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting
The I Am Woman Award (for Hillary Rodham Hero Worshipping)
"As
the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium through which the
remaining anxieties over feminism are being played out....Perhaps in
addition to the other items on her agenda, Hillary Rodham Clinton will
define for women that magical spot where the important work of the world
and love and children and an inner life all come together. Like Ginger
Rogers, she will do everything her partner does, only backward and in
high heels, and with what was missing in [Lee] Atwater – a lot of
heart.”
– Time White House correspondent Margaret Carlson, May 10.
Runners-up:
“I
saw a Hillary Clinton that I’d never seen before. She was funny,
charming, sexy – yes, gang, sexy. We are both Scorpios, which tells you a
lot. She’s informal – called me ‘Larry’ and told me to call her by her
first name...Meanwhile, she’s earned the respect of everyone (except
the wackos) with her handling of the health care issue. Indeed, she has
gotten everyone (except the wackos) to agree that we need health care
for everyone. This is a very formidable idea, ladies and gentlemen.”
–
CNN/Mutual Broadcasting talk show host Larry King on his October 2
interview with the First Lady. October 4 USA Today column.
“She’s
ecumenical but prefers Italian and Mexican. The President fixes her
eggs with jalapeño peppers on the weekends. One Christmas she served
black beans and chili as part of a buffet. She carries Tabasco sauce
wherever she goes....Valentine’s Day at the Red Sage restaurant. Even at
a romantic outing, the President can be the date from hell, talking to
everyone but the girl he brung....Finally alone, they have ‘painted
soup’ and the lamb baked in herbed bread. They exchange gifts and touch
each other more in two hours than the Bushes did in four years.”
–
Time reporter Margaret Carlson in the June Vanity Fair.
“In the
midst of redesigning America’s health care system and replacing Madonna
as our leading cult figure, the new First Lady has already begun
working on her next project, far more metaphysical and uplifting... She
is both impersonal and poignant, with much more depth, intellect and
spirituality than we are used to in a politician...She has goals, but
they appear to be so huge and far off – grand and noble things twinkling
in the distance – that it’s hard to see what she sees.”
– Washington
Post’s Martha Sherrill, May 4.
“You’ve been working hard already
to introduce this plan to people, sell this plan to people. Are you
having any fun with this or is it all just hard work? It looks to be
very hard work.”
“I hear you talking, and as I have before on this
subject, I don’t know of anybody, friend or foe, who isn’t impressed by
your grasp of the details of this plan. I’m not surprised because you
have been working on it so long and listened to so many people...”
– Dan Rather to Hillary Clinton, after Sept. 22 health speech.
Courage to Change Award (for Presidential Puffery)
“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...Thank you very much and tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and
we’re pulling for her.”
– Dan Rather at a May 27 CBS affiliates meeting talking via satellite to President Clinton about his new on-air partnership with Connie Chung.
Runners-up:
“Clinton’s
campaign, conducted with dignity, with earnest attention to issues and
with an impressive display of self-possession under fire, served to
rehabilitate and restore the legitimacy of American politics and thus,
prospectively, of government itself. He vindicated (at least for a
while) the honor of a system that has been sinking fast. A victory by
George Bush would, among other things, have given a two-victory
presidential validation (1988 and 1992) to hot-button, mad-dog politics –
campaigning on irrelevant or inflammatory issues (Willie Horton, the
flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, Murphy Brown’s out-of-wedlock
nonexistent child) or dirty tricks and innuendo (searching passport
files, implying that Clinton was tied up with the KGB as a student).”
–
Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow in Man of the Year cover story, Jan. 4
issue.
“There’s no doubting that the nation is about to be led
by its first sensitive male chief executive. He’s the first President
to have attended both Lamaze classes and family therapy (as part of his
brother’s drug rehabilitation). He can speak in the rhythms and
rhetoric of pop psychology and self-actualization. He can search for
the inner self while seeking connectedness with the greater whole.”
–
Newsweek Washington reporter Howard Fineman, January 25 news story.
“Without
running the risk of being considered ‘touchy-feely,’ Clinton is known
as a hugger of men and women. Simple handshakes aren’t enough for this
man whose theme song easily could be borrowed from the cotton
industry’s ‘the touch, the feel, the fabric of our lives’....What one
does with hands, lips, arms, trunks, and legs carries far more weight
that a barrage of insults, eloquent speeches, or sweet poetry whispered
in the ear. The problem is that many of us, unlike Clinton, have lost
touch with touch.”
– “Style Plus” article in the December 14, 1992
Washington Post.
“[Clinton] pointed out the Andrew Jackson
magnolia tree. He’s a very good historian. Harry, I think if you had
been in the room, any viewer-listener who had been in that room, would
have been impressed with the breadth of his knowledge. I mean he talked
about the Oscars. He talked very knowingly about Clint Eastwood and
his new movie Unforgiven, Jack Nicholson’s role in A Few Good Men, and
then switched very quickly to a knowledgeable analysis of Arkansas’s
chances against North Carolina in the big basketball game tomorrow
night.”
– Dan Rather to CBS This Morning’s Harry Smith, after March 25
Clinton interview.
The Gordon Gekko Greed is Good Award (for ‘80s Hate)
“In
the plague years of the 1980s – that low decade of denial,
indifference, hostility, opportunism, and idiocy – government fiddled,
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 Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard, Sept. 5.
Runners-up:
"Florio will win substantially.
Whitman’s offer of a 30 percent tax cut, she lost all credibility. Last
year’s hustle doesn’t work. Supply-side economics is dead.”
–
Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, Oct.16 McLaughlin Group.
“In the
greedy excesses of the Reagan years, the mean income of the average
physician nearly doubled, from $88,000 to $170,000. Was that
warranted?”
– Bryant Gumbel to Dr. Richard Corlin of the American
Medical Association, March 31 Today.
“[Christie] Whitman tried a
Ronald Reagan rerun and proposed a 30 percent tax cut. The lost
revenue could be made up by cost-saving devices, such as no longer
giving free Adidas sneakers to prison inmates. A decade after Reagan,
New Jersey’s voters aren’t buying government by apocryphal anecdote.”
–
Eleanor Clift before Whitman won New Jersey gubernatorial race,
October 25 Newsweek story.
Damn Those Conservatives Award
“Then
you’ve got Bill Bennett out there, who is kind of a Torquemada...Bill
Bennett is basically a schismatic heretic practicing his own contrived
lunatic version of the Latin Mass in the basement. That’s what Buchanan
is doing, only with Confederate flags flying. You have Phil Gramm from
Texas, an incredibly mean-spirited right-wing character backed by
big-oil money. He is the kind of perverse version of Lyndon Johnson
whittled down to his vices and exaggerated. Then you have Bob Dole: when
he’s most sardonic and cruel is when he’s most sincere. I think that’s
the Republican Party right now.”
– New Yorker Washington reporter and former Washington Post reporter Sidney Blumenthal in The Boston Phoenix, April 16.
Runners-up:
“The President permitted
Buchanan, the man who tried to destroy him, to speak at the Houston
convention during prime time. Buchanan delivered a snarling, bigoted
attack on minorities, gays and his other enemies in what he called the
‘cultural war’ and ‘religious war’ in America. Buchanan’s ugly speech,
along with another narrow, sectarian performance by Pat Robertson, set
the tone of right-wing intolerance that drove moderate Republicans and
Reagan Democrats away from the President’s cause in November. If
Houston represented the Republican Party, many voters said, they wanted
out.”
– Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow in the Man of the Year cover
story, January 4.
“Bob Michel is a great guy but his time was
up. He was a moderate, and it’s the unmoderates who control the House
Republicans, that is, the Newt Gingriches of the world, the firebomb
throwers: burn this village in order to save it, destroy the House in
order to try to elect Republicans, have term limitations....Bomb
throwers don’t believe in civility, bomb throwers believe in throwing
bombs...opposing every principle of the other party simply for partisan
opposition.”
– Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, October
10.
“If you look at the people who served on that [Republican]
platform committee, they were a group of the most intolerant human
beings that could ever be collected.”
– Newsweek Washington reporter
Eleanor Clift on the 1992 GOP platform, at a University of Pennsylvania
forum broadcast by C-SPAN, Dec. 4, 1992.
Good Morning Morons Award
“Harry,
I don’t want to take away from the severity of what you two were
talking about, but please pass along to Dan he looks great in his jeans
today.”
– CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn to Dan Rather as he reported live from Wilmington, NC as Hurricane Emily approached, August 30.
Runners-up:
“You claim the debt problem actually began
with Lyndon Johnson...But he was fighting the Vietnam War and that was
most of his problem?...So he had a good reason.”
“...I’m not sure
there’s a grade low enough for this next one: Ronald Reagan. He spoke
regularly of balancing the budget, but he broke the bank. In return for
his own personal popularity he spent eight years in office and ran up
$1.34 trillion in deficits....It’s early yet, but for at least trying
to address the deficit in a more serious fashion than anybody in 12
years, what kind of early marks do you give Bill Clinton?”
– Bryant
Gumbel’s interview with Bankruptcy 1995 co-author Dr. Gerald Swanson,
March 17 Today.
“The Reagan Administration used to boast they
created a lot of jobs. Most of those were menial jobs that were quickly
dissipated by a quadrupled budget deficit. How do you suggest we make
more high-paying jobs?”
– Bryant Gumbel to economist Irwin Kellner,
June 2 Today.
“Is the problem that the laws are ineffective, or
the laws can’t be carried out because the bureau, like every other, is
understaffed, underfunded, a victim of the Reagan cutbacks?”
– Bryant
Gumbel to Tom Brokaw about the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
March 26 Today.
“As we have seen in the past, during Reagan-Bush
administration days, when huge slashes went through, when entire
programs were dismantled, and what ends up being left sometimes in its
wake is this sort of vacuum and chaos and even more problems than were
there to begin with.”
– CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith responding
to Pat Buchanan’s criticism of the “Reinventing Government” report,
September 8.
I Still Hate Ronald Reagan Award
“I
don’t shield my politics in this book, as I do in much of my
journalism, as I’ve been disciplined to do. The Reagan years oppressed
me because of the callousness and the greed and the hard-hearted
attitude toward people who have very little in this society, so all of
that came together at around age 40 for me.”
– New York Times editorial page editor and former Washington bureau chief Howell Raines in an interview discussing his book Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, on the PBS talk show Charlie Rose, November 17.
Runners-up:
“Reagan
got his taxation program through, which was to cut taxes to the bone.
Mr. Clinton’s going to get his program through, which is to raise taxes
to the sky. And let us hope, Cokie, that it doesn’t turn out to have a
similar fate. What Reagan did was destroy the economy!”
– Sam
Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, March 28.
“For
members of Ronald Reagan’s Administration, the metamorphosis has been
traumatic. Just a few years ago, they commanded Washington. They were
privy and powerful, setting the country’s intellectual and moral
compass. Their mission was called noble. But after they left, their
crusade was rejected, their ideology repudiated much as the Russians
have repudiated communism. They were accused of making greed into the
country’s unofficial religion. Their fall was far and fast and the
crash was painful.”
– Opening of New York Times reporter Lindsey
Gruson’s news story on conference of former Reagan officials, April 25.
What’s the Frequency Award (for Ratherisms)
Dan
Rather: “Some days I say ‘Why is he [Clinton] doing that?’ or ‘Gosh,
can he do it a little better?’ But it may be time to, sort of as you
say, chill. We know when it comes to politics and governing, whatever
you think of this President, whether you voted for him or not, he can
hang – which is to say he can do it....”
Arsenio Hall: “See! See! Dan
is deep, ain’t he? Dan in the Hood!...I thank you for being here.
You’re a special guy. And I hope whatever you have is contagious.”
– Exchange from The Arsenio Hall Show, January 28.
Runners-up:
“Mr.
Clinton was about as relaxed as a pound of liver.”
– Dan Rather
referring to his earlier interview with Clinton, January 20 CBS This
Morning.
“Well, in Texas they have a saying: ‘That’s a good way
for Momma to drive a Cadillac,’ which is a way of saying that if you
play with one of these things, particularly if you are in a low-water
area. I would say, Harry, this morning there must be lot of people who
are in that let’s-have-another-cup-of-coffee-and-not-worry-about-it
stage. And I agree with that. That’s the stage to be in.”
– Dan Rather
with CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith, as Hurricane Emily approached
on August 30.
“If an American inauguration can’t bring a lump
to your throat and a tear to your eye, if you don’t feel as corny as
Kansas in August, maybe you need a jump-start and some vitamins.”
– Dan
Rather during inauguration coverage, January 20.
The White Men Can Go Jump Award (for Victimology)
“If
I’m a young black man in South Central L.A., where poverty is rampant
and unemployment is skyrocketing, I see that Washington’s promises of a
year ago have gone unfulfilled, I see that perhaps for a second time,
the court’s inability to mete out justice in a blind fashion, why
shouldn’t I vent my anger?”
– Bryant Gumbel to Rep. Maxine Waters, April 15 Today.
Runners-up:
“One of the fires was started by a
homeless man trying to keep warm. It represents the strains in our
society, from neglect to the nihilism, the ‘burn, baby’ nihilism of
people who actually go and start fires like this.”
– Newsweek reporter
Eleanor Clift on who started the California fires, October 30 McLaughlin
Group.
“Like the country club that bars women from the golf
course, where many deals are made, the game of softball can act as
another barrier, another means of excluding women from the corporate
inner circle.”
– USA Today reporter Julia Lawlor, June 1 “Life” section
story.
“When rioting, looting, and arson erupted last spring, it
wasn’t just anger over the Rodney King verdict, it was an explosion of
rage over years of social and economic neglect, poor schools, violent
streets, joblessness, poverty, and no hope. Has anything changed? Quite
honestly, very little has.”
– CNN reporter Greg Lamotte, March 22
World News news story.
The Henry Luce Would Roll Over In His Grave Award
“The
real story is the proposed gas tax is far too low...There’s only one
problem with the 4.3 cents-per-gal. gas tax the Senate has proposed:
it’s too little...Where it says 4.3 cents, they should add two words: a
year. And maybe a third word: forever. For decades, we’d still be
paying vastly less for gas than our competitors (in Europe and Asia,
gas goes for nearly $4 per gal.). For decades, the hike in the tax
would be more or less canceled out by available improvements in fuel
efficiency – so it would cost no more to drive a mile.”
– Time “Money Angles” columnist Andrew Tobias, July 26 issue. (Italics his)
Runners-up:
“So
Clinton is right to back off his plan for a middle-class tax cut and
right again to ‘revisit’ the proposal to increase gasoline taxes,
regressive levies he routinely dismissed as unfair during the campaign.”
– Time Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, January 25.
“We
need to raise taxes...As for gasoline – which costs about $3.75 per
gal. throughout Europe – Ross Perot was right. Phase in a 50-cent tax
over five years, and you raise $50 billion a year.”
– Time “Money
Angles” columnist Andrew Tobias, January 25.
“When Clinton’s
‘Climate Change Action Plan’ finally debuted last week,
environmentalists could muster only faint praise....There are two major
omissions: the plan does nothing to raise auto fuel-economy standards,
and it contains no energy-tax hikes to boost conservation.”
– Time
Associate Editor Michael D. Lemonick, November 1.
Media Hero Award
“What
do you do for an encore after ending the Cold War and reversing the
arms race? How about saving the planet? That’s the latest assignment for
Mikhail Gorbachev, having assumed the presidency of the International
Green Cross, a new environmental organization....”
– Time’s “The Week” section, May 3.
Runners-up:
“She restores a tradition of
excellence at the Department of Health and Human Services. That agency
has been headed by some of America’s truly great human beings: Joe
Califano, Pat Harris, and now Donna Shalala. She is an academic who is
connected with the real needs of people. When it comes to being an
effective advocate for those who have no voice, she has few equals,
perhaps only one – the other half of the dynamic duo here in Washington,
that is the duo of Donna Shalala and Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
– ABC
health reporter George Strait introducing Shalala to the National
Minority AIDS Council on C-SPAN, Apr. 22.
“In that instant,
[Janet] Reno, who had already pretty much captivated Washington with one
gutsy performance after another, achieved full-fledged folk-hero
status....She was cheered on both sides of the aisle in Congress and in
her own Justice Department, where a succession of 25-watt,
responsibility-ducking Attorneys General had left morale lower than –
well, lower than an alligator’s belly.”
– Time contributing editor and
former Washington Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud, May 10.
“Just last
night on television I saw your opponent for Governor complaining about
your record, saying how you had raised taxes, how it had cost 300,000
jobs. Are you afraid your politically courageous moves are in fact going
to cost you the election?”
– Today co-host Katie Couric to N.J. Gov.
Jim Florio, May 24.
The “Enhanced Contribution” and “Investment” Award
“Forty-five
minutes into budget director Leon Panetta’s briefing on the economy,
it was clear that something was missing. After 12 years of Ronald
Reagan’s voodoo economics and George Bush’s low-fat, decaffeinated,
nondairy, sodium-free imitation voodoo economics, there was suddenly no
ideology in the federal budget. Panetta talked like a cheerful,
no-nonsense accountant trying to balance the books the hard way –
honestly.”
– New York Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Lars-Erik Nelson, March 15 column.
Runners-up:
“Doesn’t Clinton deserve
some credit here for beginning to tackle the problem of getting people
to pay taxes? I mean, for 12 years in this country, it’s become
patriotic not to pay taxes, to avoid paying taxes. And Clinton at least
is trying to turn that around. Why isn’t he getting more credit for
that?”
– Washington Post columnist and chief foreign correspondent Jim
Hoagland on Washington Week in Review, June 18.
“Clinton has at
least faced the facts squarely, which is more than his immediate
predecessors ever did, and he is forthrightly taking the heat for the
tax increases that serious deficit reduction demands. Simply to move
the debate from whether the deficit should be tackled to how the red
ink should be stemmed is the definition of courage in modern American
politics. So give him that....Clinton’s economic plan deserves to be
known as a new New Deal, and Congress should pass it quickly.”
– Time
Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer, March 1 issue.
“It’s
one for one [tax hikes to spending cuts] and it’s gutsier than any
Republican President has done in 12 years of feel-goodism. This is
going to be politically courageous and you’re going to hear a lot of
screaming.”
– Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group,
February 13.
“I think regardless of what you think of the
specifics of the program, the President deserved great, great credit
for having the courage to come forward with a plan to deal responsibly
with the deficit. Yes, there are flaws....But I think that Bill Clinton
really set the nation on a new course last night in trying to deal
responsibly with our problems, and make the tough choices.”
– NBC’s
Lisa Myers on Today, February 18.
The Bernie Sanders Socialist Disneyland Award (for Sweden Envy)
“The
free market. While the government helped build the trains and the
roads to help bring the United States into the 20th century, the
economic philosophy of this country has been laissez-faire. Germany and
Japan, on the other hand, give industry broad government support. The
Japanese government invests 58 percent more than the United States
[government] in civilian research and development, Germany 42 percent.
But American business has always fought a government-guided industrial
strategy. They called it socialism. Now many are calling it 21st
century economics.”
– Walter Cronkite on The Cronkite Report: Help Unwanted on The Discovery Channel, May 28.
Runners-up:
“There
is no mystery in how [the deficit] can be brought down...the U.S.
simply has to choose from a menu of unpalatable options that include
deeper cuts in defense spending, tougher controls on medical services,
higher taxes on federal pensions, and a broad-based tax on energy or
consumption, preferrably both. We know how to do this. Impose measures
already commonplace in other industrialized countries. The weapons are
there. It’s the will to use them that’s the problem.”
– NBC commentator
John Chancellor, February 16 Nightly News.
“Here in France,
they have created a child care system that would amaze most Americans.
Every child in this country, from the richest family down to the
poorest, gets a chance at the same high standard of day care,
preschool, and health care. Not only is it free, or at low cost to
everyone, but the quality is better than what most youngsters get in
the United States....Next fall, Benjamin will be able to leave the
[government nursery] and move on to the next stage of the French
government’s child care system, the école maternelle, or preschool,
which is totally free....There’s one in virtually every neighborhood in
the country, and almost every single three-to five-year-old French
child goes all day – for free.”
– CBS reporter Harold Dow on Street
Stories, July 2.
Award for the Silliest Analysis
“Add
to this visual pop lexicon the newest hip eye-opener: cross-dressing.
As if to punctuate the end of the socially stagnant Reagan era, a parade
of drag images is now crossing screens big and small, mostly men
bedecked in wigs, lipstick, and scarfs to hide their protruding Adam’s
apples....Along with symbolizing self-empowerment, cross-dressers also
can remind us that sex roles and costumes are fictional. Men wear pants
because American society tells them to.”
– Boston Globe writer Matthew Gilbert, March 21 “Focus” section story.
Runners-up:
“Many
GIs recognized homosexual leanings for the first time in the all-male
surroundings.... There is, in fact, an undercurrent of homoerotic
tension in the shared latrines, shower rooms, and sleeping quarters of
barracks life....The military exalts masculinity in ways that are
frankly or implicitly sexual. A form-fitting dress uniform can make a
leatherneck look like a peacock.”
– Newsweek Senior Writer David
Gelman, July 26.
“For infant mortality, America couldn’t do much
worse. Excluding white newborns, America ranks 70th in the world,
roughly the same as Mongolia.”
– CBS health reporter Dr. Bob Arnot,
April 13 Evening News.
“All I can tell you is that the football
coach at the University of Wisconsin didn’t want her to leave – I don’t
think she’s any lefty.”
– Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief
Al Hunt defending HHS nominee Donna Shalala on CNN’s Capital Gang,
December 12.
Dr. Kevorkian Award for Health Reporting
“But
Hillary was smart to rip their heads off....After all, she’s right
substantively: the [health insurance] industry has ‘brought us to the
brink of bankruptcy,’ it does ‘like being able to exclude people from
coverage, because the more they exclude, the more money they can make.’
No other industrialized country puts up with useless paper shufflers
taking such a large cut of their health budgets...And she’s right
tactically: if health-care reform is to live, the companies backing
Harry and Louise must die. If 90 percent of those 1,500 insurers don’t
die – if someone lifts the DO NOT RESUSCITATE sign off them – then the
entire reform contraption will collapse.”
– Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter on insurance industry’s “Harry & Louise” ads, Nov. 15.
Runners-up:
“The Clinton plan is surprisingly persuasive
in supporting the longtime claim of the Clintons, and their top health
care strategist, Ira Magaziner, that reform can be almost entirely from
savings, without broad-based new taxes and with enough left over to
reduce the federal budget deficit.”
– Time Washington Bureau Chief Dan
Goodgame, September 20.
“White House officials said today the
plan will require almost no new taxes. Most of the funding will come
from employers who will be required to pay into a state system.”
– CBS
reporter Linda Douglass, September 1 Evening News.
“Woven through
the 1,300-page health plan is a liberal’s passion to help the needy, a
conservative’s faith in free markets, and a politician’s focus on the
middle class.”
– Washington Post reporters Steven Pearlstein and Dana
Priest, October 28.
Which Way Is It?
U.S. Captive Says He’s Well Treated
Somalis Provide Daily Medical Care
– Washington Post, October 9
vs.
US captive tells of being dragged through streets
– Boston Globe, same day
Bush Makes Public Iran-Contra Diary
Entries Suggest He Did Not Know Details of Scandal
– New York Times, January 16
vs.
Diary Says Bush Knew ‘Details’ of Iran Arms Deal
– Washington Post, same day
Dumbest Quote of the Year
“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, February 1 news story.
Runners-up:
“Clinton is giving the
best evidence yet of his approach to leadership. It’s about
understanding, not threats; accommodation, not confrontation; about
getting people (or at least Democrats) to sing the same song. The style
is reminiscent of another patient, nonjudgmental figure given to
hugging in public: Barney the Dinosaur.”
– Newsweek reporters Howard
Fineman and Eleanor Clift, August 9.
“If either of the two
[Madonna or Michael Jackson] is the logical heir to Marilyn Monroe, it
is clearly Michael Jackson, who is the more bruised and authentically
vulnerable of the two....Not only is he black and white, male and
female, but also young and old, hip and square, the crotch-grabbing
self-appointed guardian of the world’s children.”
– MacNeil-Lehrer
NewsHour essayist Anne Taylor Fleming, April 7.
“Roger
[Clinton]’s life is in some ways the story of any younger sibling
clobbered by the spectacular success of the one who came before. The
presidential brother syndrome. If your brother is Christ, you have a
choice: become a disciple, or become an anti-christ, or find yourself
caught somewhere between the two.”
– Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld, January 24 “Style” section story.
Post-Balloting Entry for Dumbest Question of the Year
Reporter Nina Totenberg: “Have you ever cried over these cases?”
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun: “Have I ever what?”
Totenberg: “Have you ever cried over them?”
Blackmun: “No.”
– Exchange about capital punishment cases on ABC’s Nightline, November 18.
– Andrew Gabron, Mark Honig, Kristin Johnson, Steve Kaminski, Mark Rogers; Media Analysts
1993 Award Judges
Ray Archer, Arizona Republic editorial writer
Brent Baker, Editor of MediaWatch & Notable Quotables
Mark Belling, talk show host, WISN Radio, Milwaukee
Tom Bethell, Washington Editor of The American Spectator
L. Brent Bozell III, Chairman, the Media Research Center
David Brudnoy, talk show host, WBZ Radio and commentator for WBZ-TV in Boston
Priscilla Buckley, Senior Editor of National Review
John Corry, former New York Times television critic; American Spectator “Presswatch” columnist
Sandy Crawford, Editor of TV, etc.
Mark Davis, talk show host, WWRC Radio, Washington, DC
Midge Decter, author
Jim Eason, talk show host, KGO in San Francisco
Don Feder, Boston Herald writer and syndicated columnist
Tim Graham, Editor of Notable Quotables
Charlton Heston, actor
Les Jameson, talk show host, WLAC in Nashville
Cliff Kincaid, columnist and commentator
John Leonard, talk show host, WWCN Radio, N. Ft. Myers
Marlin Maddoux, talk show host, USA Radio Network
Bob Madigan, talk show host, WWRC Radio, Washington, DC
Patrick McGuigan, Chief editorial writer, Daily Oklahoman
William Murchison, Dallas Morning News & syndicated columnist
Kate O’Beirne, Heritage Foundation Vice President for government relations & panelist, PBS’ To the Contrary
Marvin Olasky, Associate Professor of Journalism, U. of Texas
Joseph Perkins, San Diego Union-Tribune and syndicated columnist
Burton Yale Pines, Senior Fellow, MRC’s Free Enterprise & the Media Institute; VP of National Empowerment Television
Mike Pintek, talk show host, KDKA in Pittsburgh
Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Managing Editor of The American Spectator
Mike Rosen, talk show host, KOA Denver Post columnist
William Rusher, Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute and syndicated columnist
Marc Ryan, editorial writer, Waterbury [CT] Republican-American
Ted J. Smith III, Associate professor of Mass Communication at Virginia Commonwealth U.
Philip Terzian, Associate Editor & columnist, Providence Journal
Cal Thomas, syndicated columnist
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Editor-in-Chief of The American Spectator
Dick Williams, Atlanta Journal columnist
Walter Williams, Economic professor, George Mason U. and syndicated columnist
Brian Wilson, talk show host, WWRC Radio, Washington D.C.
Thomas Winter, Editor of Human Events