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HOME / other magazines: Summaries of what's in Time, Newsweek, etc.

By AnonymousPosted Tuesday, July 23, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

Time and Newsweek, July 29
(posted Monday, July 22)

Newsweek and Time offer nearly identical packages on TWA Flight 800: Both reconstruct the flight and crash; profile the victims; speculate on likely suspects (consensus: Middle Eastern terrorists); investigate lax American airport security; and question whether the FAA is sacrificing safety for convenience (sound familiar, ValuJet?). Time's account of how U.S. airlines have resisted expensive new security measures is especially good. Also, Newsweek retains its status as the (Almost) Official Newsweekly of the Olympic Games with four stories, and Time publishes a comprehensive profile of Bosnian Serb strongman Radovan Karadzic that chronicles how he flitted from ideology to ideology until he found one--violent nationalism--that could catapult him to power.

The newsweeklies duel over the Joe Klein-is-"Anonymous" revelation. Serial liar Klein plays the victim in his Newsweek column, writing that the media scrutiny has made his last few months "pretty awful," but insists that his conduct is "justifiable." In Time, columnist Margaret Carlson indicts Newsweek editor Maynard Parker for his active role in the cover-up. (Parker approved a "Periscope" item about Primary Colors that he knew was false.) She also paints Klein as a hypocrite by citing a column from early 1996 in which he castigated the Clintons for their "lawyering, fudging, misdirection, obfuscation, and generally slouch behavior" in the face of tough questioning.

The New Yorker, July 29
(posted Monday, July 22)

While other media perform last rites on Bob Dole, The New Yorker explores the relationship between Bill Clinton and another dead Republican, Richard Nixon. Monica Crowley, a 27-year-old who aided Nixon in his Final Years, contends that Tricky Dick craved Slick Willie's attention. Nixon scorned Clinton when Clinton ignored him, and admired Clinton when Clinton consulted him. Also, The New Yorker manages to find something new to write about Atlanta, describing how the city has relentlessly destroyed its history for the sake of commerce. And Ken Auletta charts the troubled marriage between ABC and Disney.

U.S. News & World Report, July 29
(posted Monday, July 22)

Flight 800 also takes the cover of U.S. News, but the magazine skips the emotional stories about victims to detail how investigators are probing the crash. U.S. News also probes the week's other New York crash--at the stock market. It concludes that the bull is dying, but that the bear hasn't yet escaped its cage. In the "News You Can Use" category, the magazine offers investors 10 stock tips for the erratic market.

The Nation, July 29 & August 5
(posted Monday, July 15)

The Nation finds the first fresh Olympics angle in weeks--vigorous disapproval--as its writers condemn the Atlanta organizing committee for trying to shut unions out of Olympic construction; excoriate big business for commercializing the games beyond recognition; and denounce Olympic Committee Chief Juan Antonio Samaranch and his top aides for their fascist sympathies. (Not criticized in the package, but certain to raise the hackles of Nation letter writers, are the Olympics' imperialist equestrian competition and militaristic pentathalon.) Also, Katha Pollit offers a scathing critique of conservative "family wage" proposals.

Economist, July 20
(posted Friday, July 19)

The commercialization of the Olympics does not trouble the free-marketeering Economist, whose cover celebrates "The Zillion Dollar Games." The opening editorial notes that governments, not businesses, have corrupted the Olympics (Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, etc.), and contends that corporate sponsorship makes the Games cleaner, more exciting, and more popular. Elsewhere in the Economist, the editors do bite (or at least nibble on) the Invisible Hand that feeds them: The magazine warns multinationals that they must not ignore moral, political, and environmental controversies in developing countries. "Where governments cannot or should not act, the burden shifts to managers of international companies to exercise their responsibility as moral individuals." Take that, Royal Dutch/Shell! The magazine also publishes its monthly review of books and multimedia; with a special focus on Spanish fiction and the Middle East.

Weekly Standard, July 29
(posted Monday, July 22)

The Weekly Standard puts tabloid favorite O.J. Simpson on its cover. "Why He Still Haunts Us" makes the familiar point that race defeated justice in the O.J. trial, and blames the acquittal on the civil rights movement, which "grew corrupt, turned on the society it had served, and became an active menace to it." No issue of the Standard is complete without the slap at Bob Dole; this week, Michael Barone polls the "swing" voters of Michigan and finds that they view Dole as a wishy-washy, bungling geriatric. Also in the magazine, John Podhoretz calls Independence Day the "last war movie," and argues that the liberal Hollywood elite could never "imagine any circumstance in which a present-day American military force might be worthy of celebration for going into battle against a real army."

New Republic, August 5
(posted Friday, July 19)

The cover story on Washington, D.C., cab drivers combines three of TNR's favorite subjects: race, immigration, and Islam. Stephen Glass presents the city's cab industry as a microcosm of America's immigration debate. Young African-Americans won't hack because of the servile, Driving Miss Daisy stigma. But the immigrants who've taken African-America's place behind the wheel (many of them devout Muslims) believe that the hard work is a ticket to the middle class. Elsewhere in the magazine: the Dick Lamm backlash. In past issues, TNR's Matthew Miller has applauded the Reform Party candidate's tough talk on entitlements, but this week, John Judis butchers the sacred Lamm in the TRB column, accusing him of exaggerating Social Security's ills and indulging in granny-bashing. TNR also throws stones at Boutros Boutros-Ghali: David Rieff says the U.N. chief is irresolute and unprincipled, but adds that the organization itself is so rotten that not even Boutros-Ghali's ouster would improve it.