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HOME / the week/the spin: The week's big news, and how's it's being spun.

By Posted Saturday, Aug. 17, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

(posted Friday, Aug. 16)

The Republican Convention in San Diego was deemed a success. Public fights over abortion and other issues were avoided, and Dole got a bump in the polls. Dole's acceptance speech was ruled successful in content, if not in delivery. The New York Times' R.W. Apple: "It is hard to say what more the Republicans could have done." The major theme of the coverage was that the convention was overly scripted and the media were being manipulated. (Innovation: boring bits--e.g., speech by Gerald Ford--timed specifically to allow for TV commercials.) Commentators noted the irony that as political conventions are more and more packaged for television, television loses interest. Ratings were low. Ted Koppel went home in a public huff halfway through the week. Protesting that there was no story, 12,000 journalists remained behind and covered it anyway.

The media's verdict on Jack Kemp vindicated Dole's claim to have scored 15 (Kemp's old football number) on a scale of 10. Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Kemp had "transformed the mood [in the Republican Party] from despondent and defeatist to exuberant and hopeful." Analysts described Kemp, variously, as Dole's conciliatory gesture to the alienated right, Dole's conciliatory gesture to the alienated middle, the conservative conscience of a Dole administration, and the liberal conscience of a Dole administration. The press questioned whether Kemp could stomach the "discipline" of subordinating his instincts to Dole's, then savaged him when he did so by abandoning his liberal positions on immigration and affirmative action. Kemp pleaded that his "metamorphosis" toward Dole's view was only fair, since Dole had switched to Kemp's side on tax cuts. (For a less friendly take, see this week's "Assessment.")

The direction of the Republican Party consumed much of the convention coverage. Newspapers depicted the GOP's delegates as shockingly conservative, reported that the delegates had approved a shockingly conservative platform, then marveled that the featured speakers were surprisingly moderate. Dole, Gingrich, and Chairman Haley Barbour asserted that they hadn't even read the platform. Right-wing delegates were quoted complaining angrily that they'd been had. Another theme was corporate schmoozing. "Companies, trade associations, lobbying shops, and law firms are ... renting yachts, taking over the art museum and botanical gardens, inviting guests to the race track, and throwing lavish spreads at every fancy restaurant in town," reported the Washington Post. It was noted that the Democrats do the same thing. Critics hounded Barbour for allowing Amway to subsidize the GOP's self-produced convention broadcast on Pat Robertson's cable channel. When the party relented and paid out of its federal convention subsidy, critics protested that it was billing the taxpayers.

The return of supply-side economics offended liberals and mainstream economists (including SLATE's Paul Krugman). Critics said that the economy doesn't need a tax-cut stimulus, that Dole's promise of 3.5 percent growth without inflation is absurd, his revenue estimates are inflated, his spending cuts wouldn't pass Congress (repeating Reagan's mistake), and that the tax cut would exacerbate income inequality. Others questioned how Dole could square his projections of more productivity and tax revenue with his pledges to curtail IRS enforcement and free parents to spend less time at the office. GOP Sen. Alfonse D'Amato told Don Imus that, contrary to Kemp's protestations, the tax cut would require curbs on Medicare. "I'm not running this year, so I can say it and tell the truth," said D'Amato.

Russia suffered military fiascoes in Chechnya. First, Chechen rebels shocked the world by wresting their capital, Grozny, from Russian troops; then the Russians reportedly agreed to a truce; then Russian forces attacked Chechen refugees anyway. The American press drew several conclusions: Yeltsin had it coming (for reneging on previous cease-fire deals); the Russians have fallen to "an appalling new low" from their superpower status; a demoralized and undisciplined Russian army could be "dangerously destabilizing" to Russian democracy; and national security chief Alexander Lebed, whose political enemies have dumped the crisis in his lap, could turn the tables on them by solving it. There were the requisite comparisons to America in Vietnam.

The Luftwaffe (German air force) moved into its new training center in New Mexico, the first U.S. military site ever leased to a foreign country. Outrage among American patriots spurred inquiries from 60 members of Congress; a retired Green Berets colonel charged, "Hitler would be proud!" But a county official welcomed the Germans' $10 million boost to the local economy. Meanwhile, a German reinsurance company, the world's largest, captured the second-biggest share of the U.S. market by purchasing an American company. The Germans did lose one battle: Bunte magazine settled a defamation lawsuit by Tom Cruise, conceding, "Bunte has been advised that Mr. Cruise is not, in fact, sterile and that his sperm count is perfectly normal."

More fertility controversies engulfed Great Britain. First came the destruction of 3,000 frozen human embryos, then a woman aborted one of her twin fetuses because she couldn't afford to raise two children. Now pro-lifers are raising money to head off a similar twin-abortion by another woman, and a tabloid has agreed to pay a hefty bonus to "Wondermum," a woman with eight fetuses, if she succeeds in delivering them alive. Doctors say the feat has never been accomplished before and could kill her, but pro-lifers are exhorting her to proceed. Her PR consultant, who arranged O.J. Simpson's recent trip to Britain, has reportedly contacted diaper and baby-food companies to discuss endorsement deals.

Excitement about extraterrestrial life continued. Last week's Mars mania, triggered by a meteorite that purportedly showed signs of ancient microscopic life on Mars, gave way to this week's speculation that life may exist on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Pictures and data transmitted by the Galileo spacecraft suggest that beneath Europa's frozen surface lies a hot core and a "gigantic dark sea that may seethe with alien life forms." Researchers are lobbying for exploratory missions to Europa, while critics warn that even a far cheaper mission to Mars isn't worth further cuts in U.S. domestic programs. The next subject of life-speculation seems to be Titan, a moon of Saturn. (For SLATE's take, click here.)

Florida jurors awarded a cancer-stricken smoker $750,000 from a tobacco company, agreeing that the cigarettes amounted to a defective product. Tobacco lawyers called it an "aberration," but anti-tobacco activists hailed it as a fundamental shift in how jurors will decide future cigarette lawsuits. Tobacco stocks dived on Wall Street, but promptly bounced back. The Wall Street Journal noted that "tobacco investors, like smokers, have been living with risk for years." The next threat to the industry is an FDA crackdown on tobacco sales and advertising, scheduled for September.

A power outage struck 4 million people in nine Western states, the second massive power failure in the region within the past two months. The apparent cause was high electricity consumption, though the immediate trigger was a tree branch that brushed a power line in Oregon. The episode inspired a flurry of fretful articles on the perils of dependence on technology. The Los Angeles Times mused that such glitches "are the unpredictable but inevitable consequences of the growing complexity of a technological civilization, systems experts say. ... The answer may be that human ingenuity is on a collision course with the mathematics of chaos." Power companies asked residents to conserve energy; residents, in newspaper interviews, generally refused.

The Reform Party held its first national convention with speeches by presidential candidates Dick Lamm and Ross Perot. Lamm framed the contest as the party's opportunity to transcend Perot's ego. But with little doubt that Perot would win the mailed balloting, coverage focused on whether the nomination was rigged. (Many party members didn't get ballots, while others got more than one.) The Wall Street Journal portrayed the convention's participants as paranoid and "crazy." But other dailies were charmed by its unscripted, "homey" atmosphere, and some columnists applauded the party for highlighting campaign reform and the dishonesty of Dole's and Clinton's election-year tax cuts.

Movie critics surprised themselves by liking Basquiat, a movie based on the life of 1980s graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and written and produced by 1980s bad-boy artist Julian Schnabel. ("Best known," explained People magazine, "for putting broken crockery on canvas.") The movie, they wrote, was everything Schnabel is not supposed to be. "Decently modest," said Variety. A "small, funny, rather sweet-tempered film," said The New Yorker's Anthony Lane. Roberta Smith of the New York Times praised Schnabel's restraint in keeping songs he wrote or sang off the movie's soundtrack.

Baseball players and owners inched toward a new multiyear labor deal. While negotiations stalled over arcane issues, sports writers mused on whether capitalism is good for baseball. The New York Times lamented that fans have "lost their last bit of innocence and their idealism as the game metamorphosed into an industry as big and brutal as any other on the planet." But Los Angeles Times columnist Mike Downey applauded the discipline of the marketplace, predicting that the two sides won't repeat their stubborn impasse of two years ago "because baseball is one strike away from being as popular in this country as cricket." USA Today applauded the deal's inclusion of revenue sharing, which should mitigate inequality between teams in rich and poor markets.

Photos from Reuters

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