Dialing for Deals
USA
Today , the Washington Post , and the New York Times
all lead with the latest developments in the investigation of President
Clinton's fund-raising. The Los Angeles Times can't even find room for that on
its front page and leads instead with the historic Belfast meeting of British
Prime Minister Tony Blair and Irish Republican political leader Gerry
Adams.
USAT says that the Justice Department task force investigating
Clinton's phone calls is recommending that Janet Reno take no action in that
matter. Reno's spokesman, the paper reports, says his boss hasn't made a
decision yet. (She could, besides ending the investigation, also continue
looking into it, or ask a court to name an independent counsel.) USAT
quotes Clinton as saying that "I have gone out of my way to have no
conversation with her about this or, frankly, anything else." In their lead
stories, both the WP and NYT have Clinton adding, "...which I'm
not sure is so good." The additional observation seems right and newsworthy.
Wonder why USAT left it out.
The WP leads with the news that Clinton is willing to be interviewed
by Justice for this investigation. And the paper quotes Clinton in reaction to
Reno's recent statement that she was 'mad' about the White House's lag on the
coffee tapes: "You should have been there when I heard about it." (The
NYT has this too.)
The NYT goes further, saying the White House and the Justice
Department are in fact negotiating an agreement under which President Clinton
would answer questions about his knowledge of Democratic re-election
fund-raising efforts. The interviews would not, says the Times , be
conducted by Reno, but by lower-level prosecutors. This deal is being worked
out, because, the NYT says, citing "law enforcement officials" and
disagreeing with USAT , the phone calls investigation will probably go
forward.
The Post story includes this explanation for why the White House
Communications Agency, "a military unit that provides the president with secure
communications," originally didn't produce the coffee tapes: the WHCA's chief
of staff got the full memo requesting any such videos, but when he put it into
an e-mail format to send it to his boss, the agency's director, he accidentally
omitted the first two pages. The paper quotes Clinton saying he doesn't blame
the WHCA. But why isn't Clinton or the WP at all concerned that the
office responsible for providing the president with "secure communications"
can't email a memo without losing the first two pages?
The LAT leads with a "gesture of peace so fraught with controversy
that it was made behind closed doors," namely, the handshake yesterday in
Belfast between Blair and Adams. The meeting lasted but ten minutes, and was,
the LAT reports, immediately assailed by Protestant hard-liners as an
insult to the victims of IRA terrorism. The paper reports that Blair later
would not confirm that the handshake occurred, and that he had arranged that no
pictures were taken of it. The history of such handshakes suggests that such
caution is not crazy. Think Gandhi. Think Sadat. Think Rabin.
The NYT states and powerfully describes a new division among people
with AIDS--that between those who can afford the powerful new medications like
protease inhibitors that promise to transform AIDS from a fatal to a merely
chronic disease, and those who cannot. The story reports that the federal-state
partnership that pays for AIDS drugs for the indigent is broke in 26 states. As
a result, poor people with AIDS often simply go without.
The Wall Street Journal 's "Work Week" column notes that for
employees who like to surf the Internet at work, Tripod Inc.'s Web site has a
"panic button" for use when the boss shows up. Press it and the screen suddenly
switches to a nominating form for "Boss of the Year." Through much arduous
research, this column has discovered a more subtle variant: A Triple-X site
operating from Los Angeles has a panic button that instantly kicks over to the
CNN Web site.
