- By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

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

By William SaletanPosted Tuesday, July 30, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

(updated, Monday, July 29)

A pipe bomb killed one and injured more than 100 at the Olympics Centennial Park. The press corps immediately compared the bombing to the attack at the 1972 Munich Games, and sounded apocalyptic warnings about a new era of global terrorism. The Atlanta explosion, the TWA crash, and the Saudi Arabia bombing herald "a storm surge of violence," said the New York Times. The decision to go forward with the Games was universally applauded: "Terrorism cannot be allowed to halt the Olympics," editorialized the Washington Post. The press also cited the pluck of the athletes and fans who wouldn't let the bomb ruin the event. During the weekend at least, the attack curtailed the adulatory coverage of the U.S. swimming, basketball, and women's gymnastics teams.

Bob Dole's 73rd birthday occasioned articles about his physical fitness. The dailies divulged numerous details about his colon and prostate gland, but pronounced him healthy for his age. One gerontologist expressed concern about "his tendency to wander off on tangents while speaking." The Washington Post reported that young married voters are spurning Dole because they can't relate to him, and a poll confirmed that a third of the electorate regards Dole's age as a presidential liability.

An FDA advisory committee recommended approval of RU486 for sale in the United States. Exultant editorialists accused pro-lifers of having blocked the "abortion pill" for years by politicizing the scientific evaluation process. Pro-lifers replied that Clinton and pro-choicers had engineered the pill's approval by the same method. Final action on the recommendation is scheduled for September.

The Senate passed tough welfare-reform legislation, putting President Clinton on the spot. GOP congressional leaders warned that a Clinton veto would betray his promise to end welfare; editorialists charged that by signing the bill, Clinton would certify himself a cynical brute; pundits cast the decision as a Moment of Truth that would unmask Clinton as either liberal or conservative. "With November looming, Mr. Clinton is wavering," said the New York Times. "Even the sharpest analysts have despaired of predicting his decisions," sighed the Los Angeles Times.

Has the stock market achieved its "selling climax"? Analysts continued to watch Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's facial expressions for clues, but this week's main focus of attention was Elaine Garzarelli, who gained fame by correctly calling the 1987 crash. Garzarelli's bearish midweek advice reportedly spooked the Dow into an 80-point reversal. The Wall Street Journal noted that Garzarelli had been predicting a bull market just four days earlier and had underperformed the Dow by nearly 50 percent as a mutual-fund manager.

Tod Machover's "Brain Opera," a $4.5 million interactive musical installation based on artificial intelligence and built at the MIT Media Lab, ushered in the summer avant-garde festival at Lincoln Center. According to publicity material, the composition was designed to "create the impression of walking, figuratively, into a giant musical brain." Despite hype in the New Yorker, Opera News, and Wired, the New York Times called it "an overblown mindcontrol sequence in a '70s conspiracy movie" and a "lapse of taste."

This week's food scares: Seven people are dead and thousands more ill due to an outbreak of food poisoning in Japan. The culprit, a strain of E. coli known as O157:H7. To prevent the further spread of Mad Cow disease, Britain offered new rules against serving and eating goats' and sheep's heads. Stateside, the U.S. Agriculture Department wants to buy and exterminate recently imported British cattle, but some ranchers are holding out for higher prices. The Japanese crisis inspired the media to publicize statistics (7 million illnesses and several thousand deaths from food poisoning in the United States each year); symptoms ("bloody diarrhea"); and transmission routes ("from cow dung in a field to apples [made] into apple cider").

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow went from being somebody's daughter (Blythe Danner's) and somebody's girlfriend (Brad Pitt's) to being a megastar. Featured on the cover of US and New York and in the pages of Time, Newsweek, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, Paltrow was hailed as the latest incarnation of Audrey Hepburn (she has cheekbones), Grace Kelly (she's got class), Meryl Streep (she does accents), and James Dean (she's "dark, dangerous"). The occasion was her starring role in Emma. The film opens on Aug. 2 and is also being hailed as "sparkling," "buoyant," and filled with "unforced charm."

As investigators of the TWA crash converged on the theory that a bomb brought down the plane, politicians waded in. A New York congressman announced one of the 747's black boxes had been located (it hadn't); Gov. George Pataki suggested that 100 bodies were ready to be hauled out of the water (they weren't); and White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta implied that "chemical leftovers" found on the plane's debris and bodies pointed toward terrorism. (Press Secretary Mike McCurry told reporters to ignore Panetta's remarks.) GOP Sen. Larry Pressler blasted Transportation Secretary Federico Pea for weak leadership on aviation security. President Clinton announced new security measures that may add half an hour to airport boarding times for domestic flights.

Newsweek suspended Joe Klein for a few weeks for having lied about his authorship of Primary Colors; Klein also resigned as a CBS News commentator. Colleagues and media scribes now peddle the Klein saga as a tragedy, with the once "cocky" protagonist becoming "genuinely tortured." In a separate Newsweek embarrassment, reporters covering the president had to rely on a pool report filed by performance artist Anna Deavere Smith, the magazine's latest celebrity correspondent. A Washington Post reporter who teamed with Smith on the report dismissed the criticism, explaining that pool reporting was "not rocket science."

Speaker Gingrich and GOP congressional leaders convened a forum to promote tax cuts that they promised would "jump-start" the economy. The press suggested they were trying to jump-start the Dole campaign by pressuring the candidate to back an electorate-pleasing tax-cut package. The Washington Post unearthed a Dole campaign memo speculating that a broad tax cut would spur enough growth to earn back 40 percent of the revenue loss. The general spin was that Dole is belatedly groping for an economic policy, is being pushed around by anxious supply-siders, and will be guilty of the campaign's most egregious flip-flop if he agrees to a big tax cut.

A military coup in the central African nation of Burundi replaced one tribal regime (Hutu) with another (Tutsi). The coup was indirectly triggered by the mid-July slaughter of 300 Tutsis, which pales beside the 150,000 Burundians who have died in Tutsi-Hutu violence since 1993, which is nothing compared to the 800,000 neighboring Rwandans who have been butchered in clashes between the two tribes. The Clinton administration denounced the coup but softened its criticism of the new regime and declared that no U.S. ground troops will be sent there. As the Washington Post noted, "The military's takeover was roundly condemned around the world. But there was no immediate sign that anyone was preparing to do anything concrete about it."

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.