(posted Monday, July 15) Newsweek mounts the platform to take the gold medal for Excessive Coverage of an Event That Hasn't Started, while Time sprints to the supermarket checkout stand with a cover on the British royal family that wouldn't look out of place in the pages of its stablemate, People. Newsweek's 32-page Olympics extravaganza is its second Olympics cover in recent weeks. It contains the requisite profiles of track superstars Michael Johnson and Dan O'Brien; the requisite article on the limits of human performance; and the requisite windy essay about the Meaning of the Games (Frank Deford, America's self-appointed sports philosopher, observes: "For all the artifice, we still sense that deep inside the Olympics, there is something dear to be found. So we watch and learn to care.")
Time's we-can't-do-Di-again royalty angle is Windsor: The Next Generation, featuring 14-year-old heartthrob Prince William, easily the most sympathetic member of the House of Windsor to have reached puberty. The article offers no new juicy gossip, but is full of snob color (Eton, hunting, etc.) and fun facts about his everyday life. Not that Time ignores the Olympics: Celebrity photog Annie Leibovitz publishes an Olympic portfolio--atmospheric black-and-white shots of American stars. (It's pretty, but enough with the Michael Johnson cheekbone pictures already.)
Both magazines lead their national sections with Ross Perot's Reform Party, but they disagree on the party's significance. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter argues that Perot-rival Dick "Governor Gloom" Lamm will compel Clinton-Dole to "deal with issues--chiefly entitlements and campaign-finance reform--that they would prefer to avoid." (In an adjoining interview, Lamm delivers his apocalyptic warnings about Social Security and Medicare.) But Time doubts that the Reform Party's scary nostrums--whether they come from Perot or Lamm--will interest voters.