[PEN-L:6227] from SLATE

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(copyright 1999, Microsoft)

today's papers

China Syndrome

By Scott Shuger

>For the first time in weeks, the domestic economy leads at one of the
majors. The LAT leads with the government's report that the first quarter's
growth of wages, salaries and benefits was unexpectedly slow, which is
surprising because the economy is flat-out booming. But the war still
dominates the news. The NYT lead corrals several unnamed American and NATO
military sources who argue that, despite official Pentagon pronouncements
to the contrary, NATO's bombing campaign is not seriously diminishing the
Yugoslav Army's fighting ability--primarily because NATO's
attack-the-air-defenses-first strategy gave it plenty of time to
disperse and hunker down--and in fact has even strengthened it politically.
According to the USAT lead, the military that's being weakened by the air
campaign is...America's. The story says that according to a soon-to-retire
Air Force general, the Pentagon's ability to respond to hot spots elsewhere
in the world is being degraded because combat squadrons are being stripped
of their best personnel and equipment. The top non-local story at the WP is
a detailed account of the Serb-on-Kosovar-Albanian atrocities that took
place in Djakovica on April 1st. The paper says the murders there of at
least 55 people, including 20 women and children, are particularly
well-documented because the Albanians in the town had set up an elaborate
neighborhood watch system. So elaborate that international war crimes
investigators are now using survivors' accounts to map out a
murder-by-murder account.

>The LAT says that first quarter wage growth was barely half of what had
been expected. Or even more dramatically: for the first time in two years,
the latest wage and benefit gain was basically canceled out by inflation.
As the WSJ points out in its story on the report, this is confounding
because the U.S. labor market is the tightest it's been in 30 years, and
basic supply and demand reasoning entails that workers should therefore
become higher priced. Reading these two stories side by side in search of
the explanation leaves one with more than a few doubts about economic spot
reporting. For instance, the LAT says the wage growth rate is low because
it doesn't generally reflect compensation increases achieved through
bonuses and stock options, while the Journal says the index was dragged
down because of a drop in bonuses awarded to financial service workers
during the first quarter. And the LAT says the rate of raises has been
braked by widespread employee insecurity
lingering from the layoffs of the early 1990s: workers' fears of losing
their jobs keep them from asking for too much. But the Journal says that
"one popular theory" is that "workers' wage demands are no longer pumped up
by fears that escalating prices will erode their paychecks."

>The essential confusion of the discussion is on particular display in one
brief stretch of the LAT story. Within the space of two paragraphs, the
story "explains" that such a small rise in income could add to pressure for
bigger wage increases, but also that it is fresh evidence that inflation
remains tame. The problem is the essential indeterminacy of economic facts.
Are wage demands where they are because of fear or because of the absence
of fear? Does a small rise in income increase the pressure for raises or
relieve it? The papers get in trouble when they try to write as if such
questions have determinate answers. They should instead do much shorter
stories on these topics that stick to the basic quantitative information.

>The contemporary discussion of the effectiveness of the military campaign
against Yugoslavia is also dogged by this sort of indeterminacy. Does the
fact that the Yugoslavian Army now enjoys more political support than it
did before U.S. bombs fell bode well or ill for U.S. war aims? The answer
isn't obvious. More political involvement could mean more political
generals with less military acumen (this is essentially what happened to
the old German general staff under the rise of Nazism).

>The LAT and NYT report that a NATO warplane inadvertently fired a missile
into a suburb of Sofia, Bulgaria, hitting an empty house and killing no
one. Although this episode runs inside at both papers, it's not
inconsequential: NATO is now bombing the wrong *country.* NATO's
explanation is not without interest: the missile was targeting a Serb
surface-to-air-missile radar, which then was turned off. "Without the
guidance of an active signal," the LAT explains, the missile would have
flown the length of its 30-mile range before falling." (The NYT says 50
miles.) Can this really be right? If so, NATO weapons have, in the course
of their modernization, been disimproved. Once upon a time, a pilot could
detonate an errant missile from the cockpit while it was still in the air.
A politically useful feature, no? The papers should look into this.

>... The WP and NYT run stories inside revealing that the author of the
Chernobyl virus, which has caused hundreds of thousands of computer
meltdowns worldwide, is a former Chinese engineering student. For crafting
the virus, the student was...given a demerit. He is now on duty with the
Chinese Army. ...<

>The NYT and USAT front new research indicating that Mars once had a
magnetic field and a tectonic plate geology like Earth's. The WP runs the
story inside. These features were once thought to be uniquely terrestrial,
with the upshot being that Earth's future may look a lot like Mars'
present. Meanwhile, the search for intelligent life on both planets
continues....<

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia now!