Bold Journalists

The Seattle Times recently ran a headline article entitled, Bad Teachers, warning parents to beware of public school teachers who are falling down on the job. The emphasis was on high school teachers, and the article featured some courageous student journalists, who dared to name bad teachers in their high school newspaper. In the spirit of fearless investigative reporting, we hope that the Times will follow up this piece with a series of articles on Bad Principals, Bad School Board Members, Bad Superintendents, Bad State Representatives and Senators, Bad Governors, and Bad Corporate Executives. After all, there are incompetent and undeserving individuals in every walk of life. Why not ferret them out, and warn the public?

Surely the Times didn't mean to focus the beam of scrutiny on teachers alone, just because they happen to occupy a relatively powerless position in our society? My neighbor who teaches at Garfield High School reports that he commonly works an 80-hour week, teaching five classes a day in overcrowded rooms and grading papers far into the night, all without a dollar of overtime pay. This schedule leaves him little time to write letters to the Seattle Times.

Ruth Wilson

For once in his life, Bill Clinton told the truth, or tried to. During a press conference on June 25, the President was asked a number of questions, some of which seemed to unsettle him, such as why he his popularity ratings have dropped in the wake of the Kosovo war. Then a reporter asked Mr. Clinton how the war had not gone according to plan. In defensive tones, the President described the sustained bombing campaign, and then said,

"I know that from your point of view [the point of view of reporters], there were a lot of civilian casualties, but that's because you got to cover them, as opposed to covering the civilian casualties of the Gulf War. If you talk to any military person who was involved in both conflicts, they will tell you that there were far, far more civilian casualties in Iraq - I mean more by several times as many." (NY Times, June 26, 1999, pA11)

Of course, the key miscalculation of the Kosovo war was a failure to keep the press in check. If only the American media had spared the public any news of civilian casualties, popular support for the bombing of Serbia and surrounding areas might remain high. The lesson of the Gulf War is that if the State Department and the Pentagon can present an air war as a beautiful, precise sport, featuring bold pilots in shining planes, roaring towards "military targets", then most of the public will be taken in. Show a few photos of the burned and mangled people on the ground, or talk about the children who have lost arms and legs to cluster bombs, and popular support starts to fizzle. In fact, roughly comparable numbers of civilians were killed in the bombings of Serbia and Iraq. According to Human Rights Watch, approximately 2,500-3,000 (perhaps a low estimate) Iraqi civilians were killed in the allied bombings of 1991, while somewhere between 1,000-2,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo this year. Unmentioned by the President was the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi children have died since the Gulf War, due to the destruction of Iraq's infrastructure, and the ongoing economic embargo. Also unmentioned was the fact that bomb and missile attacks on Iraq have been carried out on Bill Clinton's orders, many times since 1991, and US planes are continuing to bomb Iraq, every few days, as they have since January of this year, killing civilians on a regular basis, in the North and South, near Mosul and Basra. Since January, dozens of innocent Iraqis have been killed, and hundreds wounded.

Ruth Wilson

Urban weeklies occasionally engage in dog fights, skirmishing for phone sex ads, happy hour announcements, and other gaudy notices that even manage to support some news, but the Tacoma City Paper recently scored a preemptive strike over its rival the Tacoma Reporter. At first glance the four and a half-year-old Reporter seems to have a tactical advantage in the battle for the City of Destiny, as its June 24 issue outgunned City Paper, 28 pages to 20. But then the upstart City Paper deployed an additional 28-page section for that week, promoting the 1999 McChord Air Expo. The supplement, which also ran in the Northwest Airlifter and the Ranger was assembled, written, and produced by the editorial staff of Swarner Communications, which also publishes City Paper. As a disclaimer at the bottom of the cover of 1999 McChord Air Expo explains, "The McChord Air Show Program is published by Swarner Communications, Inc., a private firm, in no way connected with the Department of Defense."

Doug Nufer