Chung Change
The Los
Angeles Times says today's top story is new revelations about White
House fundraising. The New York
Times says it's Medicare fraud. And the Washington Post says it's a proposed Iranian oil
pipeline.
It has previously been reported that in March 1995, in the First Lady's
office on the White House grounds, a California entrepreneur named Johnny
Chung, in order to gain presidential access for a delegation of Chinese
businessmen, gave a $50,000 check to Hillary Clinton's then-chief of staff. The
White House line is that this event did not violate federal law because the
$50K was not solicited, only passively accepted. But today, Chung--who has
refused to cooperate with investigators unless granted immunity from
prosecution--tells the LAT that yes it was. He says he wrote the check
after he was told that he could help defray some bills relating to White House
Christmas party costs that Ms. Clinton had run up with the Democratic National
Committee. And Chung says that afterwards he was told that the First Lady
definitely knew about his donation. Chung explains the transaction to the
LAT this way: "I see the White House is like a subway--you have to put
in coins to open the gates."
The NYT Medicare story is that the General Accounting Office has just
released a report uncovering widespread fraud, overcharges, and poor care in
Medicare-funded services for the homebound elderly. The Times points out
that whereas ten years ago, the government reviewed 60 percent of claims, last
year it looked into only 2 percent of them.
The Post oil story is that "the Clinton administration has decided
not to oppose a $1.6 billion pipeline that would carry huge quantities of
Central Asian natural gas across Iran, the first significant easing of the
economic isolation of the Tehran regime, according to U.S. officials and other
sources." The WP recently reported that a host of prominent former
foreign policy officials including Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft had
lobbied on behalf of various petroleum industry interests for just such an
outcome.
The NYT has an interesting front-page profile of Ward Connerly, the
millionaire black businessman who has emerged from the campus politics of the
University of California to become the nation's most active opponent of racial
preferences. The story describes a racially mixed and fractured family, "whose
secrets seem to leap from the pages of Faulkner." Also, Connerly tells the
reporter about an SAT study that shows that blacks from families earning more
than $60,000 a year were outscored by whites and Asian-Americans whose families
earned $20,000 or less. "You hear that black kids need a preference because
there's no one encouraging them to go to college," Connerly says. "Well, these
upper-income kids have parents who are doctors, lawyers, professors, so you
can't conclude the problem is at home."
It's hard to believe that an explosion that vented plutonium into the
atmosphere at the country's largest nuclear weapons storage facility doesn't
make anybody's front page, but in fact you have to go inside the LAT and
WP to read about the "near-complete breakdown in emergency response" at
the Hanford Nuclear Reservation two months ago after an accident there,
"exposing workers to a toxic plume and leaving outside authorities unaware of
the danger until hours after the event."
One explanation is that so many column-inches and so many reporters are
instead assigned to "hot" stories regardless of their real import. Today's
NYT has an 1800-word piece showing that Andrew Cunanan is still dead.
And that's paltry besides the WP 's 4,000-word front-page effort on the
same subject, to which the paper saw fit to assign 14 staffers.
