Arafat's Chance
The post-bombing developments in the Middle East provide the day's most
important stories. "Netanyahu Puts Onus on Arafat" is the Washington Post 's lead, and both the New York Times ,
the Los
Angeles Times and USA Today have front-page stories covering the
various diplomatic, military and financial pressures Israel is now bringing to
bear on the Palestinian Authority. But after that, diversity breaks out: The
NYT leads with the news that Clinton administration officials now doubt
they will reach an agreement this year to admit China to the World Trade
Organization because they have failed to convince President Jiang Zemin to
meaningfully open his country's markets to foreign competition. The LAT
leads with the most ambitious plan yet to use court ordered injunctions against
ordinarily legal behavior (such as using cell phones, and gathering in groups
of three or more) to control L.A. gang activity. And USAT 's lead is that
the National Institutes of Medicine is going to try to determine whether
fallout from Cold War atomic tests may have caused some 75,000 cases of thyroid
cancer.
The Post piece on Middle East repercussions depicts Netanyahu
attributing the current situation to Arafat, quoting him saying that "Arafat
must make a choice" about whether he wants his country to "behave like a
terror-sponsoring entity." The story adds that there is a good deal of support
for this view in Washington: "...Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, President Clinton's
national security adviser, put the onus on the Palestinians. In comments to
CBS, Berger said Arafat needed to do more to share intelligence with Israel
about suspected terrorists.
The Wall Street Journal 's front-page "Outlook" column addresses
the likelihood that the FCC will try to push free political ad time on the TV
networks, and that the broadcasters will fight back hard. Already, notes the
Journal , they've tried to remove Norman Ornstein of the American
Enterprise Institute, a free-ad advocate, from an FCC advisory panel. "I can
really understand why a poor, defenseless little organization like the National
Association of Broadcasters would feel threatened by a big powerful academic
like me," says Ornstein.
The NYT takes a lot of top-front-page space to detail the plight of
those taxpayers who will, under the new provisions about to be signed into law,
pay more tax when they sell their homes. The article even takes several
paragraphs to explain how to legally beat this new tax. Who are these, as the
Times puts it, "losers"? Struggling single working mothers? Young,
heavily mortgaged first-time homebuyers? No--they are the "extremely rich, who
sell homes for millions of dollars" and their downmarket cousins, "those who
have spent many years trading up from one home to another and now have homes
worth more than $500,000."
WP media reporter Howard Kurtz comments today on "the story that
every New York reporter believes but few have dared to hint at in print,"
namely that, "Donna Hanover, the city's first lady, has not only abandoned the
reelection campaign of her husband, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but also is said to
be on the verge of leaving him--largely because of the mayor's close
relationship with his 32-year-old communications director." Kurtz notes a
non-prurient justification for doing the story: Hanover has a "four-person
staff that costs the state's taxpayers $165,000 a year, yet she has all but
stopped being first lady or making appearances with her husband."
