- 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 Saturday, July 20, 1996, at 3:30 AM ET

(posted Friday, July 19)

TWA Flight 800, bound from New York to Paris, exploded and crashed near Long Island, killing 230. Speculation on the cause of the crash expanded from a mechanical failure or a bomb to include a shoulder-fired missile. The New York Times dismissed that theory because Flight 800 was flying above the reach of Stinger-class missiles. But the Los Angeles Times reported that Stingers can reach 10,000 feet, and that the TWA jet was flying at 8,000 feet. Buttressing the terrorist angle, the Washington Post reported that Flight 800's pilots had issued no mayday before the plane exploded. White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta elevated the disaster to national security proportions in two "situation room" meetings with the officials from the CIA, FBI, and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Early finger-pointing focused on the FAA (are current bomb-screening procedures adequate?), Muslim terrorists (although President Clinton noted that similar suspicions after the Oklahoma City bombing had proven erroneous), and the Greeks (the flight originated from Athens, which the FAA had previously said "was not maintaining and carrying out effective security measures"). The plane's first officer was named Kevorkian.

The wild up-and-down of the stock market terrorized Wall Street and mesmerized the media. Some front pages advertised "carnage," "pain," "violence," and a "bloodbath"; others passed off the plunge as a mere "bungee jump." The New York Times remarked, "It was the kind of day that makes believers in rational markets cringe." Wall Street analysts behaved like witch doctors before an erupting volcano--flailing, feigning comprehension, and mouthing wishful reassurances. As to what scenario spooked investors, guesses included higher interest rates, falling profits, declining mutual-fund popularity, weak technology-sector earnings, and even a new Korean war. The weirdest theory: Crashes always come 55 days after peaks. The simplest: "Greed is turning to fear." The Times shrugged that the market "can be moved by mysterious, irrational forces" and marveled, "Even the experts were baffled."

The focus of the Olympics hype fell once again on female athletes, led by soccer queen Mia Hamm, basketball star Lisa Leslie, swimmer Janet Evans, sprinter Gwen Torrence, and gymnasts Dominique Moceanu and Shannon Miller. "More women, more muscle and more medals," boasted USA Today's cover story. The larger question was whether this heightened attention heralds an era of growth in women's sports. Several dailies noted that ESPN has joined NBC in committing to air the Women's NBA next year, and the New York Times reported that Nike and other companies are increasingly targeting a women's sports market that has already been estimated at $10 billion. Not everyone seems happy with the trend: The arrival of female soccer players at an Olympic Village dormitory reportedly caused the Tunisian men's team to flee to a hotel.

Media mergers everywhere: Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. made a $2.4 billion bid for New World Communications; the FTC moved close to approving the Time Warner/Turner deal; and Microsoft--which owns SLATE--moved closer to its ambitions to refashion itself as a media company by launching MSNBC with partner NBC. USA Today groaned at the Web site/cable news channel's "relentless self-promotion and equally breathless Internet hullabaloo"; the Washington Post yawned at its "fairly conventional" opening-night interview with President Clinton; the Los Angeles Times cringed at "an embarrassing glitch" in the MSNBC Web site but added that "competitors were impressed." Meanwhile, the New York Times depicted Microsoft as a rapacious software monster that was destroying smaller Internet innovators and the Wall Street Journal depicted the company as a rapacious media company whose online-info-and-advertising project, code-named "Cityscape," threatens to destroy local newspapers.

After months of vehement denials, Newsweek columnist Joe Klein finally admitted that he authored Primary Colors. Klein's confession, which came the day the Washington Post unmasked him, resolved one controversy (Who wrote the book?) and ignited another (Is it ever OK for a journalist to lie?). Fellow scribes savaged Klein for his deceit; defenders excused him because the lies were about a work of fiction. Not so fast, ruled the New York Times: The roman clef was about Clinton, "an unflattering, thinly veiled portrait of the Clintons and the national press corps," making it more like a work of nonfiction than make-believe. Among the tidbits mentioned by the Times: 1) Klein's CBS bosses were annoyed with him but were "waiting to determine whether a backlash develops against Mr. Klein" before deciding whether to punish him; 2) Clinton aides, "speaking on condition of anonymity," faulted Klein for concealing his identity; and 3) Klein said "that he intended to continue writing fiction under the mantle of Anonymous."

Dallas Cowboys receiver Michael Irvin avoided jail time by pleading "no contest" to felony cocaine possession after making a deal with prosecutors. The plea abruptly halted a trial that had turned "bizarre" (a contract was allegedly put out on Irvin's life by a witness' ex-cop boyfriend) and was attracting the kind of celebrity-athlete media circus not seen since the O.J. trial. The New York Times announced Irvin's plea on its front page; the Los Angeles Times scoffed that Irvin "was able to cut a deal," while "Defense attorneys denied the plea bargain was orchestrated to coincide with the beginning of training camp." USA Today weighed in with a pop-psych hand wringer on the Cowboys' megalomania ("But is there a point where it gets to be too much? ... Can extreme adulation develop into a toxic invincibility among players?"), laced with diagnostic speculations by a psychologist at the National Values Center.

"Analysts are now squinting into their TV screens to determine the state of Mr. Yeltsin's health," snickered the Wall Street Journal as the Russian president finally met with Gore after abruptly canceling a meeting with the veep. Questions about Yeltsin's health (Gore reported that he "looked very good," though reporters found the Russian president "pale, stiff, and unsteady") were gradually subsumed by discussions of who his successor would be: Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (moderate pragmatism); Chief of Staff Anatoly Chubais (economic reform); and Security Council chief Alexander Lebed (law and order). Again, the experts seemed baffled. "Russian Government Remains a Mystery Wrapped in a Riddle Inside an Enigma," shrugged the New York Times.

TV talk-show hostess Kathie Lee Gifford testified at a House hearing and a Labor Department forum on child labor overseas. Gifford, recently humiliated by the discovery that much of her signature Wal-Mart clothing line was sewn in sweatshops, urged a ban on products made by exploited children. USA Today reported that Gifford "nearly cried" but was "empowered by surviving [her] scandal" (Gifford declared, "The day that I stop crying is the day I die") and covered the forum like a nightclub opening (headline: "Celebs grapple with sweatshop solutions"). The Washington Post hailed Gifford as "just what the sweatshop battle needed: a famous, embarrassed face to keep the public interested in a complex, hazy problem." But by Thursday the news cycle had put a happy face on sweatshops as the New York Times visited the Honduran plant that produced the Gifford garments and pronounced sweatshops as one ticket out of Third World poverty.

President Clinton temporarily suspended a provision of the Helms-Burton Act that imposed new sanctions on Cuba earlier this year. The Washington Post editorial page praised him for doing "half the right thing," and, like the New York Times, the Post thought Clinton should never have signed the act in the first place. Now, both papers opined, the president should have waived entirely the section of the act that allows U.S. citizens to sue foreigners who "traffick" in property expropriated by the Cuban government. But Clinton got support from articles in both the New Republic and Wall Street Journal, which found common cause in attacking--Canada. Canadian investors, a likely target for Helms-Burton lawsuits, drew fire for their cozy dealings with the Castro government. A "caricature of competitive capitalism," snorted TNR's Charles Lane. "Moral turpitude," agreed Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on the Journal's op-ed page.

Bob Dole reached out to women voters by asking pro-choice Republican Rep. Susan Molinari of New York to keynote the Republican convention. A front-page Wall Street Journal analysis interpreted Dole's invitation as an effort to assuage the "open rebellion" of pro-choice Republican women; the Journal likened the angry women of 1996 to the angry white men of 1994. The Los Angeles Times warned that Christian Coalition boss Ralph Reed was already raising "red flags" over Molinari's selection, while New York Times columnist Frank Rich dismissed her as "a crumb" tossed out by Dole to mollify pro-choicers. Meanwhile, USA Today gushed, "She's young and she uses hip phrases." Numerous dailies quoted Dole saying he was reaching out to women and urban voters. One pundit groaned, "With Bob Dole you can hear the clanking machine of calculation in the background." Muddling the issue of who exactly was in charge was Molinari. The New York Times reported that she was overheard promising Dole on the phone that she would "check and double-check" her speech in advance "with Mrs. Dole and Bob Dole."

Big Labor is back. "Unions Stun G.O.P. With New Political Muscle," blared a New York Times front-page headline over an article marveling at the damage the AFL-CIO's nationwide ad campaign is inflicting on House Republicans. "Labor's Lies," shrieked a Wall Street Journal editorial on the same subject. The Times noted that the GOP increasingly is attacking unions by name. Bob Dole labeled Bill Clinton "the pliant pet of militant teachers' unions," and the House Republican Conference alleged that labor leaders haven't been this ruthless "since the days of Jimmy Hoffa." As if to prove their point, Hoffa's son led an insurrection at this week's Teamsters convention against union president Ron Carey, who had sought to reform the organization after decades of corruption. Philadelphia police were called in to restore order, and the Teamsters' vice president called the insurgency "a really bad signal to ... everyone that's watching."

The author of the week was Patricia Cornwell, whose seventh crime novel featuring Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia, was published earlier this month. What was the cause of the sudden celebration? A profile in the New York Times Magazine lingered long upon the violence to which Cornwell's fans are prone (she receives many letters from prisoners), her unmarried status, and the fact that she described a lesbian character, Lucy, as a "younger version of me." Newsweek cut straight to the chase: Cornwell "is in the middle of a made-for-tabloid scandal." A violence-prone former FBI agent at the FBI Academy, where Cornwell does research, has accused her of stealing his wife. "My personal life is not anyone's business," Cornwell told Newsweek sternly. It seems the Times only half-agreed.

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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.