Gore Tech
USA
Today leads with the Senate's passage of a huge transportation-funding
plan, 38 percent larger than the one currently in effect. The New York Times
and Los
Angeles Times lead with the announcement that U.S. cancer rates have
declined in the past five years, reversing the trend of the previous twenty.
The Washington Post goes with the revelation that last
fall, just weeks after gaining China's pledge to halt assistance to Iran's
nuclear programs (elicited in return for allowing American firms to sell
nuclear reactors to China), the Clinton administration discovered and protested
China's secret negotiations with Iran regarding shipping it material used to
make weapons-grade uranium.
The coverage of the transportation bill, which includes an LAT
front-pager and a piece inside the WP , generally stresses that its rich
provisions could be a budget buster. But the NYT front-page piece emphasizes a "little-noticed
provision" (noticed, however, also by USAT ) that would let employers
give workers up to $65 a month in tax-free mass-transit benefits (in the form,
for instance, of subway tokens and bus passes). This could, says the
Times , sharply cut the cost of train, bus and subway travel in New York
and elsewhere.
The NYT notes that experts attribute the decline in new cancer cases
to changes in behavior, most notably a drop in smoking, and the decline in
deaths to increased screening and better therapies, but the paper also observes
that these positive trends are not equally benefiting all Americans.
"Minorities and women," says the Times , "remain particularly at risk."
While the USAT and WP front-page cancer pieces mention this, the
LAT cancer lead doesn't mention it before the "jump" to the inside.
Also, according to the graphic accompanying the NYT story, the biggest
increase seen in the most recent data is for melanoma of the skin, yet this
type of cancer isn't mentioned at all in the Times story proper.
A piece on the WP front reports on an organized protest campaign of thousands of angry phone
calls, letters and e-mails directed at Merriam-Webster because of its current
dictionary's definition of "nigger" as "a black person--usually taken to be
offensive." The campaign was started by two Michigan women and has now been
joined by NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, who warns that if the company doesn't
bend, his organization will urge colleges and school systems not to buy its
dictionaries. The WP , historically very skittish in its treatment of
race, doesn't complicate the story with the inconvenient but true observation
that since most whites know better than to use the N-word epithet, and since it
has become a common phrase of salutation and even endearment among blacks, a
high proportion of its current usage is in fact as a synonym for "black
person."
There's a lot of Al Gore's quote brilliance unquote suspiciously on display
today. The WP reports on its front that he literally dreamt of the idea
of making a live video image of the Earth as seen from space continuously
available on the Internet, and that after conducting twenty minutes of
Internet research, he quickly assembled a NASA team to make his dream a
reality. What's involved is launching a spacecraft that can be stationed 1
million miles from Earth. The WP reports that Gore suggests calling it
Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, who Gore apparently knows to be, without
benefit of flashcards, the lookout on Columbus's ship who first sighted the New
World. Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal , Gore is depicted wowing the nation's
top computer executives with his fluent references to Immanuel Kant and Thomas
Kuhn. What controlling mental authority!
