• by John Gaffney , April 4, 2003

My Late Version Of Riff Awards For The Week:

Best Acceptance Speech: Tina Brown, who was supposed start a new show on MSNBC. "Oh, well," she wrote in The Times of London. "Being pre-emptively struck off the air is a more honourable way to go than the bum's rush administered to other cable-news types such as poor tonto Peter Arnett or the world-class swaggerer Geraldo Rivera, of Fox News, who was booted by the Pentagon. Less justified in the build-up to war was aborting the comebacks of the liberal talk host Phil Donahue on MSNBC and the much-vilified Connie Chung Tonight on CNN. Perhaps cancelling shows before they start will be the wave of the future. As usual, I'm there."

Best Ramble By A Conservative: Bill O'Reilly's Weekly column, "If the Hollywood crowd could pass my quiz and answer my rather boorish questions, I'd apologize and listen intently as they told me that chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix should have had more time to find anthrax in an uncooperative country the size of California. I would sit enraptured as Sean Penn explained the benefits of living under Saddam, Uday and Qusay Hussein. I would pin the dove on Meryl Streep's gown as she regaled me with her vision of peace and understanding in the age of Al Qaeda."

Best Flame of The Week: From syndicated reviewer Tom Shales: "USA Network takes a few steps backward -- from low class to no class -- with "Rudy," a pointlessly nasty film biography of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Despicably enough, the producers use actual footage of the 9/11 disaster in the most coldhearted, specious and exploitative way anyone has done thus far. Film of the World Trade Center towers burning, smoking and collapsing is used as bait to keep people watching a movie in which very little else happens that could hold anyone's attention. Earlier this week, the network announced it was removing a shot from early in the film of a man jumping to his death from one of the tower windows. It's actually surprising, considering the callousness of the rest of the movie, that anybody had the decency to do even that."