Best Notable Quotables of 2007, The

The 20th Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting

Here are the winners of the Media Research Center's annual awards for this year's worst reporting, a compilation of the most outrageous and/or humorous news media quotes from 2007 (December 2006 through November 2007). To determine this year's winners, a panel of 52 radio talkshow hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers and media observers made their choices for the first-, second- and third-best quote from a slate of five to eight quotes in each category. Each judge was also asked to choose a "Quote of the Year" denoting the most outrageous quote of 2007. A listing of all the runners-up is available at the Media Research Center's website, www.MediaResearch.org.

Dynamic Duo Award for Idolizing Bill and Hillary

"When I watched him [former President Bill Clinton] at Mrs. King's funeral, I just have never seen anyming like it. ...There are times when he sounds like Jesus in die temple. I mean, amazing ability to transcend ethnicity-race, we call it, it's really ethnicity-in this country and, and speak to us all in this amazingly primordial way."

-Chris Matthews, MSNBC's "Hardball," February 28.

Runner-up

"Nobody can bask in applause with quite so much style-the gentle wave, the grin the shape of a sideways comma, the sense that he knows he deserves the accolades and yet is humbled by all the clapping, which makes people clap harder.... He still has this way of presenting his ideas for reforms as simple, elegant solutions.... Listening to the man think out loud again, it was hard not to pine for an era before bad news got really bad, before September 11 showed up on the calendar every year as Patriot Day."

-Washington Post staff writer David Segal on the launch of Bill Clinton's latest book, Style section, September 5.

America Makes Us Sick Award

"Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditiia, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform.... We pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of tiieir families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society? ... [T]he recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of die price we pay for a mercenary-oops, sorry, volunteer-force that dunks it is doing the dirty work."

-WashingtonPost.com military columnist William Arkin in a column reacting to a report by NBC reporter Richard Engel, January 30. (Arkin later apologized for using the word "mercenary.")

Runner-up:

"I think a draft produces a better Army than the one we would have with all volunteers, because I think you get average Americans if you have a draft. And if it's an all-volunteer Army, you get people who join up because of some problem in their own lives. They don't have anything else to do, tiiey don't have a job, or they can't find what they want to do, so they join the Army. And it doesn't produce the best Army."

-CBS's Andy Rooney, MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning," March 14.

Damn Those Conservatives Award

"I'm just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That's a fact."

-Host Bill Maher on his HBO show "Real Time," discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed, March 2.

Runner-up

"When doctors pronounced the Rev. Jerry Laymon Falwell, Sr., dead at 12:40 p.m. EST Tuesday ... my first thoughts were not of what to say or write. In fact, my very first thought upon hearing of the Rev. Falwell's passing was: Good. And I didn't mean 'good' in a oh-good-he's-gone-home-to-bewith-the-Lord kind of way. I meant 'good' as in 'Ding-dong, the witch is dead.'"

-Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani in her piece, "Sigh of Relief Over Falwell Death," May 18.

Blue State Brigade Award for Campaign Reporting

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D.-ILL): "Let's roll back the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans, let's make certain that those resources go to the people who need it.... We're not going to solve it by pretending that issues of poverty and struggle among working families are just going to go away magically because the stock market is going up."

MODERATOR CHRIS MATTHEWS: "So much of what you say just grabs people like me, because it sounds like Bobby Kennedy. It sounds like the '60s at its absolute best."

-Exchange at AFSCME Democratic candidates forum shown live on MSNBC, June 19.

Runner-up

ABC'S SAM DONALDSON:- "[Sen. Barack Obama is] an African-American. Is the country ready? Well, I think it is. And he said he thinks it is. He said he thinks he'll lose some votes because of that, and so the question is, what does the word 'some' mean?"

MODERATOR GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: "Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm naive, but, Sam, I guess I think that anyone who's not going to vote for Barack Obama because he is black isn't going to vote for a Democrat anyway."