[1336] in peace2
[RNRC] I only wish these quotations were not true!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Felix F AuYeung)
Sat Dec 15 22:12:58 2001
To: peace-list@mit.edu, thistle@mit.edu
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 22:13:10 -0500
Message-ID: <20011215.221312.-223273.1.FelixAuYeung@juno.com>
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From: Felix F AuYeung <felixauyeung@juno.com>
we can try, but we can't make up stuff half as politically perverse as
these actual quotes from the media... -F
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ling-chi Wang <lcwang@uclink4.berkeley.edu>
To: RNRC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [RNRC] I only wish these quotations were not true!
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 17:23:01 -0800
ANNOUNCING THE P.U.-LITZER PRIZES FOR 2001
By Norman Solomon
The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established a decade ago to give recognition
to the stinkiest media performances of the year.
As each winter arrives, I confer with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group
FAIR <http://www.fair.org> to sift through the large volume of entries.
This year, the competition was especially fierce. We regret that only a
few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer.
And now, the tenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media
performances of 2001:
"LOVE A MAN IN A UNIFORM" AWARD -- Cokie Roberts of ABC News "This Week"
On David Letterman's show in October, Roberts gushed: "I am, I will just
confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the
ribbons on and stuff, and they say it's true and I'm ready to believe it.
We had General Shelton on the show the last day he was chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and I couldn't lift that jacket with all the
ribbons and medals. And so when they say stuff, I tend to believe it."
PROTECTING VIEWERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE -- CNN Chair Walter Isaacson
"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan," said Isaacson, in a memo ordering his staff to accompany
any images of Afghan civilian suffering with rhetoric that U.S. bombing
is retaliation for the Taliban harboring terrorists. As if the American
public may be too feeble-minded to remember Sept. 11, the CNN chief
explained: "You want to make sure that when they see civilian suffering
there, it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous
suffering in the United States."
PROTECTING READERS FROM THE NEWS PRIZE -- Panama City News Herald
An October internal memo from the daily in Panama City, Florida, warned
its editors: "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties
from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Our sister paper ... has done so and
received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails... DO NOT USE wire
stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on
Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the
story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT."
BEST EMBRACE OF TERRORIST MINDSET AWARD -- columnist Ann Coulter
This category had many candidates -- pundits apparently trying to sound
as fanatical as the terrorists they were denouncing -- but it was won by
Coulter, who wrote in September: "We know who the homicidal maniacs are.
They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Runner-up: Thomas Woodrow and The Washington Times, for a column
headlined "Time to Use the Nuclear Option," which asserted: "At a bare
minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin
Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly
seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice."
TORTUOUS PUNDITRY PRIZE -- Jonathan Alter of Newsweek
In the Nov. 5 edition, under the headline "Time to Think About Torture,"
Newsweek's Alter wrote: "In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find
his thoughts turning to ... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber
hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to
jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American
history.... Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our
old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly 'Sept. 10'
-- living in a country that no longer exists."
CHILD WARNOGRAPHY AWARD -- Bob Edwards, NPR News
On a Nov. 26 broadcast, the longtime anchor of "Morning Edition"
interviewed a 12-year-old boy about a new line of trading cards marketed
"to teach children about the war on terrorism" by "featuring photographs
and information about the war effort." The elder male was enthusiastic as
he compared cards. "I've got an Air Force F-16," Edwards said. "The
picture's taken from the bottom so you can see the whole payload there,
all the bombs lined up." After the boy replied with a bland "yeah,"
Edwards went on: "That's pretty cool."
"WILD ABOUT THAT MADMAN" AWARD -- Thomas Friedman of The New York Times
"I was a critic of Rumsfeld before, but there's one thing ... that I do
like about Rumsfeld," columnist Friedman declared on Oct. 13 during a
CNBC appearance. "He's just a little bit crazy, OK? He's just a little
bit crazy, and in this kind of war, they always count on being able to
out-crazy us, and I'm glad we got some guy on our bench that our
quarterback -- who's just a little bit crazy, not totally, but you never
know what that guy's going to do, and I say that's my guy."
"HISTORY IS FOR WIMPS" PRIZE -- Newsweek
When Newsweek published a Dec. 3 cover story on George W. and Laura Bush,
it was a paean to "the First Team" more akin to worship than journalism.
Along the way, the magazine explained that the president doesn't read
many books: "He's busy making history, but doesn't look back at his own,
or the world's.... Bush would rather look forward than backward. It's the
way he's built, and the result is a president who operates without
evident remorse or second-guessing."
BLAME CERTAIN AMERICANS FIRST PRIZE -- televangelist/pundits Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson
On the national "700 Club" TV show, with host Robertson expressing his
agreement, Falwell blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on various Americans who
had allegedly irritated God: "I really believe that the pagans, and the
abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are
actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People
for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I
point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"
AMERICA UNITED EXCEPT FOR THOSE DECADENT TRAITORS AWARD -- Andrew
Sullivan of The New Republic and Sunday Times of London
Columnist Sullivan, as if trying to prove that a gay rights advocate can
be as hysterically right-wing as a Falwell, wrote in mid-September: "The
middle part of the country -- the great red zone that voted for Bush --
is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts
is not dead -- and may well mount a fifth column."
SHEER O'REILLYNESS AWARD -- Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly and
Catherine Seipp of MediaWeek
A February profile of O'Reilly in MediaWeek quoted the TV host's claim
that the Los Angeles Times had never named the woman who'd accused Bill
Clinton of raping her in 1978: "They never mentioned Juanita Broaddrick's
name, ever. The whole area out here has no idea what's going on, unless
you watch my show." After it was pointed out that O'Reilly was wrong and
that Broaddrick had been repeatedly mentioned in the L.A. Times, the
writer of the MediaWeek profile, Catherine Seipp, commented that she
would likely have caught the error "if I hadn't been so mesmerized by
O'Reilly's sheer O'Reillyness. There's just something about a man who's
always sure he's right even when he's wrong."
____________________________________________________
Norman Solomon's weekly syndicated column -- archived at
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/ -- focuses on media and politics. His
latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."
L. Ling-chi Wang, Director
Asian American Studies Program
Department of Ethnic Studies
506 Barrows Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2570 U.S.A.
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ethnicst/
