Internet: Lots of Balls
The Washington Post leads with Washington, D.C., officials'
decision to reopen two homicide cases and their pledge to revamp the city's
supervision of 150 group homes for the mentally disabled, all in response to a
Sunday Post story revealing that in the nation's capital, officials
routinely don't investigate the suspicious deaths of retarded people. The
Los Angeles
Times lead is what the Post went with yesterday: the decision by
AT&T to give competing Internet service providers access to its high-speed
cable network. The New York Times
runs this inside, leading instead with the trend in many states to aggressively
enforce truancy laws that threaten parents with fines and jail time. The story
stuns early with this statistic: Last year, more than one-third of Detroit's
public school students missed more than a month of classes. USA Today ,
which also runs AT&T inside, leads with the claim that the Federal Election
Commission will have increasing trouble doing its job of enforcing federal
election laws because of the upsurge of work brought about by the most
expensive election cycle ever.
The Post lead points out the limits of good journalism when it
reminds the reader that Washington, D.C., still hasn't implemented the reforms
it promised in response to a Post series done earlier this year on abuse
in those group homes. Obviously, the city needs to bring in people with more
investigative talent and a better sense of the bureaucracy than those calling
the shots now. How about hiring (in jobs with real power) some of the
Post reporters who keep nailing these stories?
The USAT FEC lead raises more questions than it answers: Why exactly
is this election cycle producing more work for the agency? The story mentions
the rise of complaints about "issue ads," but is that the sole cause? And what
do independent experts think? The only people quoted by name in the story are
FEC personnel, which is less than convincing since it's in the interest of
every government agency to cry being underbudgeted and understaffed.
The WP and LAT front, and the NYT reefers, word that at
the moment, the Mars Polar Lander is still MIA. The papers report that there is
growing concern among project scientists that the craft will not complete its
$165 million mission. One question: Why don't the stories mention the
manufacturer of the craft? When an airliner crashes, the papers quickly
announce that it's a Boeing or an Airbus--why should this be different?
For the second time in a week, a NYT front-pager about Congress'
performance this year is brutally frank, appearing under the headline "HEALTH
INDUSTRY SEES WISH LIST MADE INTO LAW."
A pair of WP front-pagers emphasize that taxes are looming large in
the Gore vs. Bradley battle. Gore, says the paper, is charging that Bradley
will have to raise taxes in order to finance his health-care plan, and Bradley
has chosen not to rule out an increase. The Bradley story serves up a memorable
line from Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who
calls Bradley "Dukakis with a jump shot."
In its "Heard on the Street" column, the Wall Street Journal makes a great observation about
AT&T's likely announcement today of an IPO of a tracking stock tied to its
wireless business: underwriters of such deals tend to be firms that have in the
past given good ratings to the issuing company. Which of course means those
ratings aren't exactly reliable for the rest of us.
The LAT 's "Column One" details a corollary of Russia's constitutional
provision that no member of its parliament can be prosecuted for a crime while
in office: One hundred and five of this year's candidates are convicts and four
others are wanted by police. It would have been nice if the story had mentioned
what sort of immunity is enjoyed by members of the U.S. Congress and indeed how
many, if any, are convicted felons.
The LAT business front reports that that Disney Internet executive
who was arrested a few months ago by the FBI on charges of using the Internet
to solicit sex from a minor has a defense ready to go for his trial this week.
He will claim that the Web is a massive masquerade ball and that he never
expected that anybody portraying themselves as a minor there would actually be
one.
Sunday's NYT was more than a little fascinated with the topic of
whether or not companies with "20th Century" in their names would change with
the times. So fascinated that it ran not one, but two stories on the apparently
bottomless topic, one in the "Money and Business" section and one in the "Week
in Review."
