McCain and Bradley Won't Go Soft
The New York Times ' top non-local
story is a U.N.-commissioned report that holds the U.N. and leading member
nations, primarily the U.S., responsible for failing to prevent or curtail the
1994 Rwanda genocide of 800,000. Everybody else stuffs the story. (The
NYT lead is the change of venue to upstate ordered in the trial of four
NYPD cops accused of murdering an unarmed man.) The Los Angeles
Times goes with the first round of the Israel-Syria talks, which
wrapped yesterday on an encouraging note--an agreement to a new round in the
Washington, D.C., area early in the new year (possibly at a CIA safe house,
says the LAT ). The NYT fronts the talks, while the remaining
majors put them inside. The Washington Post leads with the DOJ's first-ever lawsuit
against a hotel chain for racial discrimination. USA Today
leads with the newest trend among online operations--striking alliances with
traditional retailers. The latest example is Thursday's deal between AOL and
Wal-Mart: AOL will provide a low-cost Internet-access service carrying the
Wal-Mart brand, and will at its own site promote Wal-Mart's online store, while
in return Wal-Mart will promote AOL in its stores. The paper ticks off the
spate of other similar arrangements struck recently--Best Buy and Microsoft,
Circuit City and AOL, Kmart and Yahoo, Radio Shack and Microsoft--and nutshells
the point: giving online concerns access to the still-huge number of offline
homes while jumpstarting the struggling Web presences of traditional retailers.
The Wall Street Journal , in its story on the trend,
coins a wonderful name for it: "bricks and clicks."
The NYT depicts the U.N. report as striking in its institutional candor: Although
commissioned by the current Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, the report
criticizes him and his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for failing to take
decisive action as the peacekeeping troops on the ground in Rwanda reported
back about the Hutu militia's plans for ethnic attacks against Tutsis and about
their accumulating weapons caches towards that end. The report also criticizes
the U.N. Security Council--managed, points out the Times , by the world's
major powers and not the U.N. bureaucracy--for extracting most of the
peacekeepers at the time when even more of them were most crucially needed.
According to the Times , the report's principal investigator said he got
scant help from the U.S. A U.S. State Department spokesman is quoted denying
this.
The DOJ's hotel suit, the WP says, was announced by Janet Reno and
charges that the St. Louis-based but nationwide Adam's Mark chain forced blacks
to pay more than whites for rooms and kept blacks out of hotel restaurants and
lounges. The paper quotes a source saying that the chain's hotels in
Philadelphia, Winston-Salem, Denver, and Indianapolis are among those
implicated.
The NYT , WP , and LAT fronts cover the joint appearance
in New Hampshire of John McCain and Bill Bradley at which they signed a pledge
stating that if they won their nominations, they would not accept their
parties' soft money. But as the NYT points out, the agreement only goes
so far: Bradley supports public financing of congressional elections, while
McCain does not. Also, McCain admitted at the pledge event that he had in the
past been influenced by donations, while Bradley said he had not.
Monica Lewinsky returns today to the place that made her famous. No, not the
Oval Office carpet, but the front page of the WP , which covers her
testimony yesterday at an evidentiary hearing for the upcoming Linda Tripp
wiretapping trial. The point of Lewinsky's testimony was to try to establish
that one of her conversations was taped by Tripp after Tripp was warned that
doing so would be illegal, and also that Lewinsky became aware of this taping
from her own knowledge of what she had said and therefore her knowledge of it
was not dependent on an immunized source--what the prosecutors told her based
on what Tripp told them--and hence is not inadmissible.
The WP goes inside with a new nationwide study of high-school disciplinary practices,
which, it says, shows that in the two years since "zero tolerance"
anti-violence policies were popularized, black students at the schools surveyed
have been expelled or suspended at a rate disproportionate to their numbers.
The story quotes Jesse Jackson's reaction: that zero-tolerance policies are
"arbitrary and capricious," resulting in wide racial disparities in discipline.
The only problem here, which the Post doesn't notice, is that mere
racial disproportionality shows nothing of the sort. You would need to show
that the racial breakouts of punishments are disproportionate, not to the
racial composition of the student bodies, but to the racial composition of the
rule breakers .
And strong letters to follow from the American Cinder Block Assn., Daisy
BB guns, and General Motors. Yesterday's NYT contained this
"Editors' Note": "The Our Towns column on Dec. 5 described neighbors'
resistance in Greenwich, Conn., to a homeowner's plan to add a new wing, an ice
rink and a golf course to a $14.8 million house on a 14-acre lot. The column
commented that Greenwich 'is not a community of Airstream trailers where people
sit outside on cinder blocks, whiling away the hours by taking aim with their
BB guns at upturned Buicks.' The reference to Airstream, though jocular, was
unwarranted. The brand is a luxury recreational trailer often referred to as a
land yacht. It should not have been associated with shabby surroundings."
