Suckers for a Story
USA
Today leads with the angry reaction from many in business to the
government's just-proposed guidelines for fighting workplace repetitive stress
injuries. The Los Angeles Times lead covers essentially the same ground,
while also explaining the difference between the new rules and current
California law. Both stories report that the rules, which mandate various
corrective actions at the first sign of injury, will cost companies an
aggregate $4.2 billion per year. The Washington Post leads with the imminent release of the
largest Pentagon study ever of racial attitudes within the uniformed military.
The results are somewhat bracing for an institution that portrays itself as
remarkably colorblind: some three-quarters of minority service members
responding say they've experienced racism, and more than half doubted that
discrimination complaints are thoroughly investigated. And the survey shows
that military whites have a drastically more positive view. The paper quotes
one defense official as saying the study was actually concluded two years ago,
but release was delayed while the brass debated how to portray the results. The
New York Times fronts the
survey--adding that a second DOD report shows that black personnel get promoted
at a much lower rate than whites--but leads instead with the news that the City
University of New York has approved a plan that would bar remedial
students.
Both the USAT and LAT leads include criticisms from a vice
president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who apparently was once told to give
every reporter something unique. He tells the former that trying to implement
the new workplace safety regs will be like getting your arms around a
"marshmallow," and he tells the latter it will be like getting your arms around
a bowl of "Jell-O." But the coverage itself suggests the squishiness of the
subject matter. The number of relevant workplace injuries mentioned (by the
NYT ) in yesterday's coverage was 600,000, but today's USAT and
Wall Street Journal (in an inside story) up the ante
to 1.8 million. The LAT lead's headline--"OSHA Scales Back Its New
Workplace Safety Plan"--and its first paragraph suggest that the government has
quickly caved in to the protesting business world, whereas the story itself
explains that the rules were softened last February, not yesterday.
A front-page WP story and one flagged in the WSJ front-page
business news box report that the judge in the Microsoft trial was motivated to
bring in an outside mediator by his worries about a rift over possible remedies developing between DOJ lawyers and
those representing 19 states. The rift--with the state lawyers favoring more
aggressive actions against Microsoft, such as carving the company up or forcing
it to share its operating system code--has been previously reported on in the
NYT .
The NYT fronts and the WP carries inside Bill Bradley's speech
Monday in which he charged that Al Gore had little interest in campaign-finance
reform because the current money-raising system favors incumbents. The
Times calls the speech one of Bradley's strongest efforts yet to portray
himself as an outsider and reformer, but also notes that with it, Bradley risks
offending many Democrats in that he is mirroring Republican criticisms raised
against the Clinton White House fund-raising apparatus a few years back.
An inside NYT story by veteran reporter Francis X. Clines tells of a
new growth industry--companies specializing in cleaning up the messes left by
homicides and suicides. More than 200 such outfits have started up in recent
years, creating concern that the government should establish public health
standards for the field, like it has already for funeral parlors.
Quick Quiz: Today's WSJ front page features a 1,140-word article
about Bill Bradley's a) criticism of Al Gore's campaign-finance stance; b)
health-care plan; c) Web site as a voter outreach tool; or d) lozenges. The
answer is d). This kind of drivel is the direct result of a presidential
campaign that started about a year too early. Candidates aren't saying much of
substance yet but are still out there working the rooms and the press feels
they still have to cover them.
A reader query prompts Today's Papers to wonder about last Sunday's
obituaries for longtime Italian politician Amintore Fanfani. Turns out that
there's a virtually identical 54-word passage appearing in both the NYT
obit, running over the byline of Alessandra Stanley, and in the WP obit,
credited to "News Services." Who took from whom? And does this smidgeon of
theft still count as full-blown plagiarism?
