Timorous Reporting
The Washington Post and Los Angeles
Times lead with at-long-last independence elections in East Timor. The
New York Times puts that inside and
leads instead with the apparent readiness of the White House and Senate
Democrats to fight for a treaty banning all nuclear testing. USA Today
goes with Hurricane Dennis hitting the Carolinas and Florida.
The WP gives the clearest, highest account of the context of the
East Timor election, starting right off with mention of 300
years of Portuguese rule of the region followed by the past 25 years under
Indonesian military occupation. (The LAT doesn't mention the Indonesian
invasion until five paragraphs from the end.) The Post is also alone in
mentioning that the U.S. winked at the Indonesian invasion in 1975. But the
paper squanders a bit of this edge when it writes that the situation in East
Timor "has for two decades remained a largely invisible problem closed off to
journalists, and the scene of some of the world's worst reported human rights
abuses," thus falsely suggesting that poor coverage of the topic was somehow
mostly caused by something other than press inattention.
The gist of the Post and LAT pieces is of a long-oppressed
people finally getting their say, while the NYT goes rather more
postmodern, noting that "though the anti-independence militias have clearly had
the upper hand in terror, the pro-independence forces, with 24 years of
experience in both war and propaganda, have seized the role of well-intentioned
victims."
Everybody mentions that a much-violated nonviolence pact between pro- and
anti-Indonesian forces seems, at the very last minute, to be finally holding
up. The WP says that if violence is avoided, "most analysts" say the
residents will choose independence.
The NYT lead says that, armed with polls and the support of many
scientists and military leaders, the Democrats are threatening to bring the
Senate to a standstill unless Republicans agree to hold hearings on the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which 152 other nations have already signed and
which President Clinton signed and sent on to the Senate in 1996. The biggest
obstacle, says the Times , is Jesse Helms, whose main interest in the
area of nuclear weaponry is not traditional arms control, but enhanced
anti-missile defenses.
A LAT front-pager distills scientists' early thoughts about what the
Turkey earthquake portends for California's seismic future. The main findings:
The overriding explanation for devastation is bad building practices, soft and
loose soil (as opposed to rocky soil) amplifies a quake's effects, as do
valleys. Biggest new puzzle: Previously, it was thought that a quake couldn't
jump a large body of water to activate a fault line on the other side, but in
Turkey, this seems to be precisely what happened--across three miles of lake.
Which could mean that several areas of California functionally have much larger
fault lines than had been thought.
The papers all note Sunday chat show calls by Sen. Charles Schumer, a
Democrat, and other lawmakers, for a full-bore outside investigation of federal
agents' use of incendiary devices at Waco. None of these stories note that
these calls come right after Congress let the independent counsel law
lapse.
The WP runs a story inside reporting that a new study shows that the
pay gap between average workers and top corporate executives has exploded
during the 1990s, going from a ratio of 42 to 1 in 1980 to 419 to 1 last year.
Why didn't the Post assign this at least the same priority as such
front-pagers as organic school lunches and a summer camp for women?
Another Post mystery: A brief inside item says that in defiance of
State Department objections, five U.S. congressional staff members have visited
Iraq on a fact-finding mission, the first such since the Gulf War. Why doesn't
the paper identify the staffers, or more importantly, their bosses?
Even though handgun deaths are actually down a bit from the early '90s, says
a piece in Sunday's NYT "Week in Review," recent well-publicized
shootings tend to stimulate lawful gun purchases for household protection,
which may be bad news for those households, since according to one quoted
expert, "the odds that a home will be the scene of a homicide are substantially
greater if there is a gun in the home."
A Wall Street Journal front-page feature points to an
interesting reason why established large corporations haven't exactly reaped
the Internet's rewards: The large corps are used to insular, if not paranoid,
decision-making, and Internet operations force them into all sorts of relations
with outsiders they can't really control.
The WP reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has weighed
in on Fox's proposal to devise a television special of an airplane purposely
crashed into the desert with a resounding, "NO WAY!" But in a separate story
the paper also notes that a recent study shows that surviving a plane crash can
profoundly improve one's mental health. Let's hope Rupert doesn't connect the
dots and pitch his show as psychiatric social work.
