Arafat Chance
The Albright mission to the Middle East continues to get big play, leading
at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles
Times , and topping the Wall Street Journal worldwide news-digest box. The release
of official Army studies revealing widespread sexual harassment in the service
leads at the New York Times .
And USA
Today leads with the Senate's passage of a national educational testing
plan.
What's most interesting about today's coverage of the Albright story is the
amount of story-shaping on display. The same picture of Albright shaking hands
with Arafat accompanies the WP and NYT stories. It shows Arafat
beaming and Albright anything but. Which raises the question, was this really
the best picture they had or were the editors trying to "say" something with
it? And although these papers and the LAT all communicate the same basic
facts about yesterday's events--that Arafat responded to Albright's demands by
promising full cooperation in the fight against anti-Israeli terrorism and that
Netanyahu was very cool toward her entreaties to him to cease land
confiscations, home demolitions, settlement building, confiscation of IDs and
the embargoing of tax revenues belonging to the Palestinian authority--their
headlines differ in what they emphasize. The LAT runs its story under
"Arafat Promises Albright a Steady Anti-Terror Effort," while the WP
uses "Albright Urges Israeli Restraint" and the NYT runs it under
"Albright Asks Israel To Take a 'Timeout' on Settlements."
The NYT 's lead reports that the Army's largest-ever investigation of
sexual misconduct in the ranks found that it was very widespread and that the
service leadership was to blame. Also, investigators concluded that most female
troops were unwilling to report instances of sexual misconduct out of a
well-founded fear that they, and not their harassers, would be punished. Both
the Times and WP stories quote statistics from the studies about
how soldiers perceive the atmosphere they serve in, such as "47 percent of the
female troops polled reported that they had experienced 'unwanted sexual
attention,' " or "22 percent of the women and 7 percent of the men said they
had been sexually harassed in the last year." These are good examples of a
chronic newspaper gaffe: the uncontextual stat. The reader doesn't know what
such claims say about the Army because he or she doesn't know the corresponding
numbers for the same claims in other lines of work. And the papers fail here
(as they often do) to provide them.
The Post treats this as purely a story about workplace gender bias.
For the most part, the NYT does the same until late in its piece when it
observes that the problems unearthed are "evidence of a larger breakdown of
trust between soldiers." It's USAT that recognizes this as the most
damaging detail, emphasizing it above all else in its headline--"Soldiers Lack
Confidence in Their Officers"--and lead: "Soldiers have deep misgivings about
their commanders and don't feel confident about following them into combat, a
harsh Army report said Thursday."
Perhap's today's biggest story is nobody's lead--another in the WP 's
series of investigative pieces on campaign fund raising. This morning's effort
by Brian Duffy and Bob Woodward reports that Janet Reno and the directors of
the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Agency yesterday told members of
the Thompson committee that they had credible intelligence indicating that Ted
Sioeng, a prominent Los Angeles-based businessman, acted on behalf of China to
influence 1996 election races via illegal campaign contributions.
The fronts of USAT , the WP , and the NYT bring news of a
government report saying that AIDS deaths dropped 26 percent last year and that
the disease is no longer the No. 1 cause of death among Americans ages 25-44,
as it had been for the previous two years.
The WSJ "Washington Wire" reports that the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration "advises its staff not to comment on inquiries about
whether Princess Diana could have survived her car crash if she had worn a seat
belt."
