Unfriendly Skies
All the papers lead with the crash of an EgyptAir flight carrying 217
passengers from New York City to Cairo. The plane plummeted into the Atlantic
shortly after takeoff. No one holds much hope for survivors, though only the
Los
Angeles Times actually declares "217 killed" in its headline. Graphics
illustrating the jet's final moments and articles detailing the grief the
passengers' friends and family accompany most of the stories. It is believed
that the majority of the passengers were Americans. The cause of the crash
remains unknown.
Bill Clinton was one of many government officials who stressed that there
was no evidence to suggest sabotage. Only one body and some debris have been
found, none of it marked with signs of fire or explosion. Most of the papers
mention and dismiss a threat to bomb a New York- or Los Angeles-based flight
made to the Federal Aviation Administration in September. Only the Washington Post and the LAT explain why so little
is made of the threat: The person behind it is being held on a homicide charge
in Italy and has made such claims falsely in the past.
The WP and the LAT both hint at a manufacturing defect as
a potential cause. Another 767, produced at the same plant only two weeks
later, crashed in Thailand in 1991, killing 217. A faulty braking device was
blamed, and Boeing issued retrofitting kits to 767 owners after the accident. A
Boeing spokeswoman said it was "way too early" to look for a causal link
between the two tragedies. The New York Times emphasizes the
10-year-old plane's clean bill of health and calls the Boeing 767 "a workhorse
of trans-Atlantic travel." The WP points out a macabre, ironic
wrinkle to the story: the one passenger who disembarked in New York works as a
"grief consultant."
A WP front-pager puts Portland, Ore., in the center of "a national
battle over the future of the Internet." City officials decreed that customers
who use AT&T's cable network must be allowed to choose their Internet
service providers, effectively forcing the company to share its wires with
competitors. AT&T is suing the city, arguing (along with the FCC chairman)
that government intervention will ultimately hurt consumer freedom more than
AT&T's potential dominance in the cable Internet market.
The NYT front page reports that the popular RealJukebox computer
program surreptitiously sends its creator, RealNetworks, information about a
user's computer, including the title of the CD in its CD-ROM drive.
RealNetworks doesn't mention this disclosure in its privacy agreement, and the
company could be in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Executives
give conflicting explanations about the purpose of the information collected:
One claims that RealNetworks is only recording aggregate information, while
another maintains that the data is used to identify "sophisticated" users and
steer them toward the program's advanced features.
A NYT story explores a crisis in China's educational system. Only
40 percent of boys and 20 percent of girls in China go to school, and the
dropouts rate is climbing. The government has undertaken a campaign for
universal enrollment with some success, but no one's sure how much, because the
campaign has also caused eager-to-please administrators to fudge statistics. A
lack of funding has also caused many schools, theoretically free, to charge
education fees that low-income families are increasingly unable or unwilling to
afford. Now that Chinese universities are no longer free, and graduates are no
longer assured a comfortable government job (the public sector is shrinking),
more and more families are deciding that educating their children doesn't make
financial sense. What's missing from the article is context: What's the
enrollment rate in the United States, or other comparable countries?
The WP fronts Al Gore's confirmation that writer Naomi Wolf
consults for his campaign. Previously, the Gore campaign had funneled money
through other consulting firms to conceal Wolf's involvement. Wolf was also an
unpaid adviser during President Clinton's 1996 campaign, and had earned as much
as $15,000 a month working for Gore. Wolf has engendered controversy with her
claims that teaching kids "sexual gradualism" techniques like masturbation and
oral sex is "as sensible as teaching them how to drive." Clinton, at least,
seemed to take the advice to heart.
None of the above: A NYT /CBS News poll shows Hillary
Clinton and New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani in a dead heat in the 2000 New
York Senate race, with only 8 percent of those responding indicating no
preference. Analysts believe that the election belongs to the candidate who can
identify and woo this mysterious swing group. The poll also has some alarming
news for the would-be candidates: Even though neither has declared their
candidacy, voters are already sick of them--over 40 percent wish they had more
candidates from which to choose.
