Russians to Judgment
The Washington Post , New York Times and Los Angeles
Times lead with the early returns from Russia's parliamentary
elections, surprising because they show that centrist and reform parties,
including a brand-new Kremlin-based bloc, the Unity party, have made gains that
significantly cut into the power long wielded in the legislature by the
communists. The Wall Street Journal runs the Russian election at the top of
its world-wide news box. USA Today puts it deep inside, leading instead with the
U.S. government's search for one to three accomplices of an alleged Algerian
terrorist caught on Friday trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada with a
bomb-kit in his car. The story describes a federal law enforcement
establishment both practicing and urging heightened anti-terrorist awareness
heading into the new year, a topic that is fronted by the LAT , reefered
at the NYT and carried inside at the WP .
Both the WP and NYT say high up that the election results
figure to be a boost to the presidential ambitions of Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin. The LAT doesn't mention Putin until the 17th paragraph. Everybody
agrees that the election is something of a referendum on the Yeltsin-Putin
aggressive stance against Chechen rebels--the parties that strongly support it
did best. The LAT reminds of the volatility of Russian politics when it
points out that all this comes seven months after Yeltsin was nearly impeached
by parliament for starting a war in Chechnya.
The WP , LAT and USAT front the death toll in Venezuela
from flooding and mudslides. The high estimate: 5,000 killed and 150,000 left
homeless.
The NYT , WP and USAT front the biggest news from
yesterday's televised joint appearance of Bill Bradley and Al Gore:
Gore's challenge to Bradley to agree to stop all television and radio
commercials and debate regularly instead. Bradley turned Gore down, refusing to
shake Gore's extended hand, the papers say, calling the idea "ridiculous." (The
debate was also covered in
Slate
's "Pundit
Central," "Ballot
Box," and "Chatterbox.")
USAT 's "Money" section front points to a Y2K-related panic point few
have discussed before now: a possible year-end-driven gas
crunch that could, in the paper's words, "make lines at ATM machines and
supermarket checkouts seem tame by comparison." People can stock up on water,
food, batteries, and cash over weeks, the story notes, but most people cannot
store gasoline except in their cars, which means any rush to pump will take
place mostly on Dec. 30th and 31st.
The WP inside serves up two dispatches from the bureaucracy front: 1)
The government has ruled that the 1988 CIA budget--that's right the 19 88
budget, a budget spent almost entirely on combating a country that no longer
exists--should remain secret; 2) The chairman of Exxon Mobil says that for the
recent merger that created his company, government regulators required the
production of more than 31.2 million pieces of paper.
The NYT business section cites a fact that puts much Internet hype
into perspective while powerfully explaining the rationale of the recent spate
of "clicks and mortar" business deals: Wal-Mart is expected to report nearly
$143 billion in domestic revenue for fiscal 1999, roughly 7 percent of the
United States retail market and seven times all Internet sales combined.
The WSJ reports that foreign investors now own about 40 percent of
U.S. debt. This is double the percentage, says the paper, of five years ago.
The reason: the flight of capital from slumping economies like Japan's combined
with the drawdown of the U.S. debt. The USAT front-page "Snapshot"
presents a simple comparison between the cost of the federal debt per person in
1900:$16 and now:$20,800. Interesting, but a little too simple: It's not
(apparently) adjusted for inflation.
The LAT weighs in with its story on the paper's Staples Center
fiasco. The piece, by the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning media writer David
Shaw, will fill 14 pages, complete with sidebars and graphics. In the
preparation of the piece, Shaw had his own computer account that was not
accessible by even senior executives and editors at the paper. And when the
piece was completed, the negatives of it, ordinarily faxed to the printing
plant several blocks away in downtown L.A., were hand-carried there instead.
The result of all this security is that even LAT editor Michael Parks
will have to wait for the thud in his driveway this morning before he can read
Shaw's opus de oops. (It will become available at the paper's web site as of 6
a.m. PT.) Hmmm...wasn't this whole imbroglio about the paper's tendency to keep
too many staffers in the dark?
