Your Media At Work

The Media Research Center is out with its annual “Best Notable Quotables” awards, a gorgeous display of the media’s liberal bias, all-around pomposity and laughable ignorance. For the full list, visit the MRC website (www.mrc.org). The Monitor found the following selection particularly illuminating:

* “In politics, self-made men seen to fall into two categories: sunny and dark….In the 2004 election, Dick Cheney projects the bleakness of a Wyoming winter, while John Edwards always appears to be strolling in the Carolina sunshine.” – Story by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, Susannah Meadows and Arian Campo-Flores, July 19.

* “Somewhere along the way, the redneck son of a mill worker from rural North Carolina morphed into an almost perfect candidate….The America that [John] Edwards dreams of is a place where there’s no crime, no poverty and no pushing. That place, of course, just happens to be John Kerry’s America….It’s as if Edwards’s main message is his positivity. He loves the crowd, and the crowd loves him. He smiles at the crowd, and they smile at him. He speaks to the crowd, and they speak to him.” – Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe in a Web-exclusive commentary posted on July 14.

* Even if Mr. Bush wins reelection this November, he, too, will eventually be dragged down by the powerful undertow that inevitably accompanies public deception. The public will grow intolerant of partisan predators and crony capitalists indulging in a frenzy of feeding at the troughs in Baghdad and Washington. And there will come a time when the president will have no one to rely on except his most rabid allies in the right-wing media. He will discover too late that you cannot win the hearts and minds of the public at large in a nation polarized and pulverized by endless propaganda in defiance of reality….” – PBS’s Bill Moyers on his weekly newsmagazine “Now,” March 26.

* “The story is true. The story is true….I appreciate the sources who took risks to authenticate our story. So, one, there is no internal investigation. Two, somebody may be shell-shocked, but it is not I, and it is not anybody at CBS News. Now, you can tell who is shell-shocked by the ferocity of the people who are spreading these rumors.” – Dan Rather in a Sept. 10 sidewalk exchange with reporters, denying rumors that CBS would investigate whether or not the “memos” in the “60 Minutes” story on President Bush’s National Guard service were forged.

* “I have a feeling that it [bin Laden’s new videotape] could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing….” – Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Walter Cronkite on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Oct. 29.

* Matt Lauer: “Let me talk about this idea that a rag-tag group – not well-fed, not well-clothed, completely under-equipped as compared to this great British army and the Hessians – could accomplish this. And let me ask you to think about what is going on in Iraq today, where the insurgents – not well-equipped, smaller in numbers – the greatest army in the world is their opposition. What’s the lesson here?”

Lynne Cheney: “Well, the difference, of course, is who’s fighting on the side of freedom.” – Exchange on the Nov. 9 “Today” show, where Mrs. Cheney was promoting her new children’s book on General George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.

* “What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.” – Dan Rather teasing a report on the “CBS Evening News” on March 31, the day four American civilians were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, Iraq.

* “I don’t think history has any reason to be kind to him.” – CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer recalling Ronald Reagan on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” June 14.