Raisa and Raises
USA Today and the Washington Post
lead with the sodden aftermath of Floyd, which President Clinton spent
yesterday inspecting. The New York
Times fronts that, but leads instead with the tremendous earthquake
(magnitude 7.6) that hit Taiwan early today, killing thousands, and trapping
perhaps just as many in toppled-over and collapsed buildings. Everybody else
fronts the quake. The Los Angeles
Times , however, leads with the day's dollop of the city's metastasizing
police brutality and corruption scandal: that a police captain chose to ignore
officers' allegations of a stationhouse beating of a suspect.
USAT emphasizes Floyd's
nationwide toll, favoring numbers to do so: One million people in New Jersey
ordered by authorities to boil their tap water; total damages possibly as high
as Andrew's $26.5 billion, the U.S. record; 62 deaths in 12 states and one in
the Bahamas. The WP goes more for narrative, with
such passages as: "In county after county, meanwhile, people confronted
hardships that seemed almost biblical in scope: Coffins sent floating away from
low-lying cemeteries; portable incinerators being assembled to dispose of
100,000 dead hogs and a million drowned poultry; oceanfront homes being swept
away; and thousands of residents living without safe tap water, telephones or
mail service."
The insertion of the U.N.-supported peacekeeping force
into East Timor is going so uneventfully thus far that it's off everybody's
front save the NYT's.
Everybody but the NYT
(which runs it inside) fronts the death from leukemia of Raisa Gorbachev. The
WP and NYT especially
capture the sense in which she broke Soviet ground as a political wife: less
dowdy, more fashion-conscious, if not downright materialistic (with her own
American Express card, the Times reminds). But the
coverage fails to deliver a bit in its attempts to depict any further
contribution. USAT says she "drew criticism for
speaking out" and the Times says she emerged as
someone "who had her own mind," but neither describes any position she ever
took on anything.
The WP runs a long story
inside claiming to move the ball forward on the question of how George W. Bush
came to get a slot in the Texas Air National Guard. The then-speaker of the
Texas legislature had been saying that although he often received requests for
Guard placement, he never received such a request from anyone in the Bush
family, including GWB's father. But now, says the Post , the ex-speaker says he did intervene, at the request of a
good friend of the elder Bush.
The Wall Street
Journal reports that according to the latest government stats, labor
productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector rose 4.1 percent in 1998, the
same as the year before. Robert Kuttner, in his WP
op-ed advocating further raises in the minimum wage, observes that the past two
years have shown that raising the minimum wage doesn't detract from job
creation. The just-quoted statistic suggests that they've shown it also doesn't
detract from--maybe stimulates--productivity.
The WP fronts the third in
its well-reported series looking inside
the high echelons of the U.S. and NATO military during the Kosovo war. Today
the emphasis is on the war-long dispute between NATO commander Army Gen. Wesley
Clark and his subordinate, air warfare chief Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short.
Clark wanted to use his air assets to target tactical assets, such as tanks and
artillery pieces in the field, while Short wanted to hit strategic targets,
such as ministry buildings and power plants. In noting that, according to the
recently released bomb damage figures from the war, two-thirds of all Yugoslav
army assets in Kosovo survived intact, the Post
leaves the reader with the impression that it was the strategic
campaign--Short's target list--that made the difference.
Back to the LAT and the
police scandal for a beat. The paper reports that city officials are bracing
for a raft of legal claims likely to be brought against the city by suspects
who've been arrested or questioned by the policemen implicated thus far.
Question about that: Just as papers routinely appeal to citizens to provide
information they might have about unsolved crimes or fugitives, why doesn't the
LAT invite readers who think they've been
mistreated by the officers in question to come forward? Of course, this would
be easier if the public knew what the officers look like--which raises another
question: Why hasn't the LAT run their
pictures?
