Havre de Grace.--It's hard to believe that a year has gone by, and that the coveted Janet Cooke awards are about to be bestowed on members of the national press corps once again. Time certainly flies when you're having fun.
The Media Research Center in Alexandria, Virginia, which undertakes the truly daunting task of selecting the dumbest quotes of the year from bigfoot celebrities of broadcast and print journalism, has circulated 17 pages of fatuities from which it intends to choose various winners. Its selections will be announced this weekend.
This department, however, sees no need to wait, and hereby hands out its own awards, culled from the Media Research Center list and other sources as well. Each winner deserves a Janet -- a little statue of Ms. Cooke, the famous former Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for a story it later turned out she'd made up out of whole cloth.
A Janet in the "Honey, I Shrunk the Democratic Party" category, for Hillary Rodham Clinton-worshiping, should certainly go to the redoubtable Margaret Carlson of Time magazine. On March 7, Ms. Carlson explained her fawning coverage of the First Lady to the Washington Post this way: "When you're covering someone like yourself, and your position in life is insecure, she's your mascot. Something in you roots for her. You're rooting for your team. I try to get that bias out, but for many of us it's there."
Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek is the runner-up in this category for writing on October 31 that "Hilary Rodham Clinton is as pious as she is political. . . . If the Kennedy era was Camelot and the Reagan White House a ranchero on the Potomac, the Clinton presidency -- in the figure of its formidable First Lady -- is Washington's Methodist Moment."
NBC's Tim Russert and Lisa Myers share a Janet for Up-Front Beltway Bias in their comments last May 25 on Congressman Dan Rostenkowski's indictment. "It's sad," Mr. Russert declared to Bryant Gumbel on the "Today" show. "It's not something people are gloating about."
Ms. Myers took the handoff and ran with it. "It's a big loss for the president, it's a big loss for the Congress, and I think it's a big loss for the country."
A special Janet for Blissful Ignorance goes to Linda Wertheimer of National Public Radio for her heated and rather supercilious on-air denial to a caller that tax dollars are used to support NPR's political prattle. (National Public Radio gets some $40 million a year from the tax-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)
There was fierce competition for the Redefining the Political Center award. First runner-up is Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, for denouncing Fred Barnes of The New Republic and Brit Hume of ABC as "right-wing journalists."
Second runner-up is Helen Thomas of UPI. "A liberal bias?" mused Ms. Thomas on C-SPAN last New Year's Eve. "I don't know what a liberal bias is."
But the Janet goes to Newsweek's loopy Eleanor Clift, who said on C-SPAN on February 18 that "in the great scale of politics, I am maybe, I am in the broad middle. I'm not a screaming way-out liberal who can't find a home in our political ideology. What bothers me is [those who use] the word 'liberal' as though it's some sort of epithet."
There are so many strong contenders for the Hail to the Chief award that this department found it impossible to single out any one piece of suckuppery for the Janet. Here are four sample nominees.
"In less than two years, Bill Clinton had already achieved more domestically than John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush combined." (Jonathan Alter, Newsweek, October 3.)
"He was there in the middle of the desert, I mean, it was Biblical!" (National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg, on the President's Middle East trip in October.)
"Well, it may seem the sheerest act of heresy to say so, but far from being pathologically dishonest, Bill Clinton has been more faithful to his word than any other chief executive in recent memory. He may have skirted the truth about the draft, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and so on. But Clinton has kept his contract with voters."(Jacob Weisberg, New York magazine, September 5.)
"In the 20th century, having an interesting sexual history is a leading indicator of success in the presidency." (Joe Klein of Newsweek on "Face the Nation," May 8.)
And finally, a special Janet for Detached Post-Election Analysis to Steven Roberts of U.S. News and World Report in an election-night appearance on CNBC's "Equal Time." Mr. Roberts' keen insight, made as the roof was falling in: "They are not voting Republican tonight, Mary. They are voting against a lot of unhappiness in their own lives. . . . This is not an anti-government vote tonight."
These pearls were cast before us this year by some of the great eminences of American journalism. Is this a great country we live in, or what?
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.