Presswatch / Zone Defense
Barnes, Fred
ZONE DEFENSE by Fred Barnes R a r e l y , very rarely, the whole thrust of the coverage of a news story changes in midcourse. You can count the times on o.ne hand. In 1980, it happened in the...
...The immediate application at General Motors is in mechanical design...
...And he skewered visiting Congressman Tom Harkin of Iowa, a member of the "No More Vietnams" brigade...
...One resuh is that press coverage of the issue has been scarce, even in cities likely to get enterprise zones...
...When all the pluses and minuses are totaled, the Reagan budget's proposed tax cuts and spending reductions leave the poor with less--and the wealthy with more...
...News like that can't be taken seriously...
...munist countries had been telling them the truth for many decades...
...Morgan's current research interests include the qualitative theory of ordinary differential equations and the numerical solution of non-linear equations...
...Systems of non-linear equations have been solved for many years by "hit or miss" local methods...
...if it hadn't occurred, Reagan might not have won the election...
...E FIGURES illustrate the ransition from simple G(x)=0 to final F(x)=0...
...No White House complaint was lodged...
...thesis con...
...The worry about e n t e r p r i s e zones ts not that they will fail, but that they won't," he concluded...
...Friedman degang'will to select G. However, the resulting algorithm could not achieve the speed and computational reliability necessary for several applications...
...The "meanness" issue set in, and the press obsession with Reagan's "gaffes" was forgotten...
...Now, 1 wonder what would have happened if the National Research Council had found that the ozone layer was eroding even faster than previously thought, perhaps twice as fast, and that the link to increases in melanoma was s t r e n g t h e n e d . The same sort of highly publicized environmental scare stories about the ozone layer that we saw several years ago, maybe...
...More riveting was a column by my colleague Peter Jay of the Baltimore Sun, who discovered the real source of opposition to enterprise zones...
...In both figures, the "simplicity" of G(x) = 0 is reflected graphically in its linear structure-seen as lines and planes...
...Why didn't we informed and intelligent people hear them before, when they were telling us exactly what they tell us now...
...The facts themselves played a role, though the facts weren't so different in Nicaragua and nothing like this happened...
...Another dramatic shift has emerged this year...
...More recendy, George Skekon of the Los Angeles Times...
...Perhaps the most amazing thing about the story was its assumption that any loss of federal money to anyone below the middle class creates an irremediable burden on that person...
...Suppose we want to solve a system F(x)= 0. We begin by generating a simpler system G(x)=0 which we can both solve and continuously evolve into F(x)=0...
...While serving in the U.S...
...7] THE THUGS AND SUSAN SONTAG by Seymour Martin L i p s e t A t a rally of left-wing intellectuals in support of Solidarity, held in New York on February 13th, Susan Sontag c r e a t e d a stir by emphasizing the similarities between Fascism and Communism...
...Local methods depend on an initial estimate of the solution...
...Raymond Bonner, pilloried in January for appearing to accept a questionable guerrilla account of a massacre of villagers by government _9 forces, wrote in March that the Salvadoran election showed "the leftist opposition" had "probably less political support in the population than many thought they had...
...Alexander Morgan is distinguished by being global and exhaustive...
...The "poverty industry" of bureaucrats, consultants, and private contractors rakes offmuch of the money, he said...
...an unsung but quite capable and eminently fair-minded White House correspondent, slipped into the backfield...
...Reagan saw the item, then quashed a scheme to have him give such a speech at Notre Dame...
...He reported, exclusively, that Reagan was ready to sign an extension of the Voting Rights Act in any form in which it might reat:h him, even with several toughened provisions that he opposed...
...Forget that Pollyannish tripe...
...Alexander Morgan is a .Senior Research Scientist in the Mathematics Department at the General Motors Research Laboratories...
...The so-called tax cuts simply prevent an unlegislated tax increase as a result of inflation, or offset the legislated increase in Social Security taxes...
...The Soviet system with its vision of an egalitarian social system has been the obvious choice for those looking for an ideal against which they can invidiously compare their own nation...
...Visits to the Soviet Union, to China, to Cuba, to Vietnam by successive generations did not dispel the belief...
...Speed is also important to economical real-time implementation...
...Yet they, and the parties in which they enlisted, ignored a basic dictum laid down by Karl Marx, that economic abundance, a state which could only be reached in a highly ad~,,anced industrial society, is an essential prerequisite for socialism...
...he wrote...
...The article quoted from a variety of Reagan critics, providing some superficial balance with quotations from Budget Director David A. Stockman and aide Donald Moran, and went on to intimate immorality on the part of Reagan and his economic strategists...
...Probably not since Spain has there been a more open love affair between the foreign press and one of the belligerents in a civil war," she w r o t e . More stridently, the Wall Street Journal in an editorial entitled "The Media's War" attacked Bonner of the Times and other reporters for "journalistic romanticizing of revolutionaries . . . . Much of the American media, it would seem, was dominated by a style of reporting that grew out of Vietnam--in which Communist sources were given greater credence than either the U.S...
...But he noted, quoting Samuel Johnson, "Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome...
...A historic low...
...Reagan has cited it himself, notably in his speech to the NAACP in 1981...
...Morgan received his graduate degrees from Yale University in the field of differential topology...
...It cited the trimming of $1.9 billion from " t h e much-maligned CETA program.'" Does anyone still think a program as rippling with corruption as CETA should be fully restored and that the demise of so-called public service jobs (but not job training) creates a legitimate burden...
...It would no doubt be considered provocative and boorish to ask t h o s e who are working the analogy so hard whether they mean to suggest that the romantic, Robin Hood-model, popular left forces in El Salvador would be likely, in triumph, to turn out to be as oppressive as t h o s e who u l t i m a t e l y p r e v a i l e d in Indochina, but who had once also been considered natural agents of the people's will . . . Somehow, some time the people who fought and argued so passionately against the American effort and who so c o n f i d e n t l y misread the n a t u r e of the other side really need to accommodate the fact of the misjudgment into t h e i r thinking...
...And perhaps most importantly of all, the Vietnam Analogy has come under attack, the mindless assumption that El Salvador represents another quagmire in which the United States is certain to become embedded if it backs the ruling government too ardently...
...7"he category: good news about the environment...
...The National Research Council found that its previous estimates of ozone deterioration had been exaggerated...
...cerned the geometry of differential manifolds, l'ri(# to joining General Motors in 1978, he taught mathematics at the University of Miami in Florida and worked as an analyst at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Plant in South Carolina...
...He Warned that people should have "realistic expectations" about their fruits...
...This came in the biweekly column of Milton Friedman, a column that drew a mention in the competition, Time...
...A report that prime farmlands aren't disappearing...
...So furious, in fact, that he stormed over to the White House and talked the President into changing his mind...
...It occurs when you report a story too soon, thus causing it not to happen m quite the manner that you had reported or, worse, not happen at all...
...economy hits a historic low" and for contending the tax cuts benefit the rich...
...Ultimately, the issue is political morality-whether it is right, in the end, to increase the burden on the poor and near poor even temporarily so that the nation can regain its economic momentum," it said...
...There may have been more written about the issue on op-ed pages than in the news columns...
...A pictograph was entitled: "Rich Man, Poor Man: Reaganomics at Work...
...characterized by a g r e a t e r concentration of elite power than exists in an)' Western social system...
...And Reagan d o e s n ' t change his mind very often...
...Bury it or spike it...
...Many joined " M a r x i s t " movements...
...With earnest, weathered faces of the rural poor, they are just as believable as the thousands of refugees in other camps who say they fled the advancing Salvadoran armed forces or rightwing terrorists...
...The White House was so taken aback by the hostile press reaction to this mild sally that it barely voiced a peep of criticism when a certifiable eye-gouge appeared two weeks later --the Newsweek cover story on "Reagan's America: And The Poor Get Poorer...
...What caused the change in coverage...
...The Duarte government, while hardly receiving accolades, is no longer subjected to the same disdainful treatment accorded the late Somoza government of Nicaragua...
...Examples of the new attitude abound in both the New York Times and the VYas/~ington Post, the two organs most likely to affect national policy and public opinion on El Salvador...
...This, despite the fact that a lessening of an environmental danger is truly man bites dog, which is the stuff of news itself...
...The most impressive was on "Covering the Sandinistas'" in the lf/ashington Journalism Review...
...There is a phenomenon in Washington reporting which my friend Thomas DeFrank of New.sweek refers to as "getting in the backfield...
...Automobile fumes aren't the cause of yaws, psoriasis, and unsightly warts...
...In three church-run centers near the provincial capital of San Vicente, there are about 1,500 refugees who say that left-wing guerrilla terrorism has ruined their lives," she wrote in February...
...A practical method of solution, developed at the General Motors Research Laboratories, provides designers of mechanical parts with a new capability Two r in two unknowns [ . . . . . . I G(x) =0 . "" ~:" " . / J [ Fix) =0 The two pairs of parallel lines of (;(xl = 0 e~dve into the parabola and ellipse ofF(x) = O. The three pairs o/ parallel planes of (;?x)=O evolve into the paraboloid, elhpsoid anti o'hnder of F(x) = 0 C LASSICALLY difficult nonlinear equations-those made up of polynomial expressions-can now be solved with reliability and speed...
...And she asked why "many of u s - - . . . I include myself--did not understand the nature of Communist tyranny," when 4migr4s from ComSeymour Martin Ltpset s the Caroline S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science and Sociology, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University...
...Omang also characterized, in other reports, the coverage of the war as "group grope," with correspondents thirsting always for "bang-bang...
...In terms of making a beeline to journalistic oblivion, this genre of news ranks just below evidence that paring welfare actually spurs the poor toward economic advancement and confirmation that the Soviets are violating some limitation imposed by an arms control treaty...
...To its credit, Newsweek provided two weeks later a rebuttal of the poorget-poorer piece...
...Rosenfeld described an El Salvador struggling not against "a ruling elite," but to overcome the vicissitudes of war...
...In 1980, it happened in the coverage of the presidential campaign when Jimmy Carter began suggesting that Ronald...
...Not mentioned, of course, was that the 1982 cut affected mostly those making over $11,000 (family of four), not including their rent subsidy, Medicaid, free legal aid, Supplemental Social Security, and school lunch benefits...
...Friedman also excoriated Newsweek for saying the poor were being hurt as " t h e U.S...
...The Time essay was the least critical of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 17 the four articles, but together the four had enormous impact, more so than any press criticism in recent memory...
...C e r t a i n l y Reagan's own criticism last March of television journalism had little positive effect, probably less than Spiro Agnew's did back in 1969...
...Perhaps it is too much to expect for Newsweek to grasp the idea of welfare dependency if the President is reluctant to talk about it in the first place...
...Morgan's efforts.is a practical numerical method based on solid mathematical principles with innate reliability...
...In short, nearly everyone in the Administration but the President himself seems lukewarm at best about enterprise zones...
...Two op-ed pieces stand out...
...Are we going to have to watch this script replayed again in El Salvador, or can we in the press succeed in bringing some perspective to the story...
...Reagan was a racist and warmonger...
...9 Population growth doesn't threaten mass starvation across most of the globe next year...
...The American coverage of the war in El Salvador, once largely favorable to the guerrillas, has become far more balanced and evenhandedly skeptical...
...To talk to an Administration official involved in devising the legislation for the zones is to talk to a man who feels stuck with redeeming a rash campaign promise that took none of the complexities of policymaking into account...
...aninteractive design system which models the geometric characteristics of automotive parts...
...Morgan, is not only global, but also exhaustive in that, assuming exact arithmetic, it guarantees convergence to all solutions...
...3"he non-linearity of F(x) = 0 is seen in the curvature of the final shapes in each figure...
...Morgan has devised a method for selecting G which gives rapid convergence and reliable computational behavior, tie first applied a theorem established by Garcia and 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR IUNE 1982 assistance can serve as a disincentive to productive employment and true economic progress...
...It's an entertainment medium and they're looking for what's eye-catching and spectacular...
...Representation of the transitional points, as in figure 1, would require a fi)urth dimension...
...For sure...
...He's spending even more on some programs, the President has boasted, not always accurately...
...He is also co-editor of Public Opinion magazine and the current president of the American Political Science Association...
...In his recent visit, Salvadorans report, he [Harkin] dared President Duarte to drop in unannounced on a military headquarters and a public place, which Duarte did, demanded to see a pre-mapped 'torture' chamber, which turned out to be innocent, and then called for the end of American military aid," Rosenfeld wrote...
...It is fallacious not just in the objective difference between the two situations, but in the way that indulgence of a false analogy can skew judgment...
...In spite of the absolute power held by Stalin, Mao, Tito, and other leaders, and the considerable discrepancies between the ways of life of the party elite and the masses, they still insisted they had seen a society dedicated to equality and freedom...
...Four articles in four separate publications in February also generated considerable impact, both as catalysts in shaping a new outlook toward El Salvador and in reflecting the changed view...
...Meanwhile, the Vietnam Analogy was taken apart in a Post editorial and a Time essay...
...Reliability is the critical element for mathematical methods embedded in large computer programs, because errors may not become evident until after thev have ruined a large data structure compiled at great expense and effort...
...Continuation methods, although well known to mathematicians," says Dr...
...THE MAN BEHIND THE WORK Dr...
...I expect to see much greater use of this mathematical tool in the future...
...However, there are obvious practical limitations on the number of equations and their degree, due to the limited precision of computer arithmetic and computer resource availability...
...It also cited the cut in food stamps of $2 billion in 1982 and the Administration's hope to cut $2.3 billion more in 1983...
...The council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences,also moderated its assertion that ozone depletion is linked to increases in melanoma, an often-fatal skin cancer, and to damaged food C r o p s . " You have to give the Times credit for passing on this good news at all...
...Recent advances in the mathematics of continuation methods at the General Motors Research Laboratories have practical implications for a wide range of scientific and engineering problems...
...With the addition of a third dimension in figure 2, the number of dots representing simultaneous .solutions doubles...
...In Time, Strobe Talbott wrote that "the Viet Nam analogy is really the Viet Nam fallacy...
...9 . . Is it news that some fellow in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off that he should be interviewed nationwide or someone's complaint that the budget cuts are going to hurt their present program...
...The analogy is to a defensive lineman bursting into the backfield and upsetting a running play before it gets started...
...J u s t as the Administration has gone lame in defending its spending cuts, it has failed to argue compellingly in behalf of its chief urban initiative, enterprise zones...
...the Journal asked...
...In a word, better...
...Those who hated America or Britain or France were really not i n t e r e s t e d in how ordinary people were treated under Communism...
...Congressman Richard Cheney of Wyoming called Newsweek editor Lester Bernstein on his own to complain...
...Written by Shirley Christian, the Latin-America correspondent for the Miami Herald, it brilliantly demonstrated "the romantic haze" through which the press saw the Sandinistas...
...They proceed by iterative modifications of this estimate to converge to a solution_9 However, success is not guaranteed, because there are generally no practical guidelines for making an initial choice that will ensure convergence...
...The idea that money for the poor might have anything but a totally beneficial effect is foreign to the Newsweek analysis, however, so foreign that it didn't get mentioned...
...Algorithms based on this method are critical to the functioning of GMSOL[I...
...In The German Ideology, he wrote that the high "'development of productive- forces is absolutely necessary as a practical premise [for socialisml: for tile reason that without it only want is made general, and with want the struggle fi~r necessities and all the old filthy business [the German word was Scbezsse] would necessarily be 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982...
...Next, he utilized some ideas from algebraic geometry-"homogenous coordinates" and "complex projective space"-to prove a new theorem for selecting G. The result of Dr...
...Sontag's talk was booed by the audience_9 Two New York journals, the Sobo News and the Nation, published symposia by prominent intellectual figures evaluating her analysis...
...Housing subsidies, which were cited as an :instance of egregious budget cutting, "have conferred large benefits on owners of property purchased for federal housing projects and on the contractors who have built the projects, in the process destroying as many or more dwelling units than they have built...
...Marx polemicized bitterly against utopian socialists, people who sought to institute socialism under conditions of scarcity...
...One, in the New York Times, was by Peter Watson, a correspondent for the Times of London...
...government or the government it was supporting...
...Omang told Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...She concluded with the statement: "Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant of fascism, fascism with a human face...
...Well, bury it is what the New York Time.~ did in April with a report that the ballyhooed deterioration of the ozone layer in the e a r t h ' s atmosphere is falling behind schedule...
...The big question, though, is about welfare dependency, the forgotten concept in all the talk about the unfairness of the budget cuts...
...The horror of the Indochinese political f a t e - - the repression and the misery, the tragic and eloquent statement of all those "boat people"--none of this evidently is meant to be included in the meaning of the term "Vietnam...
...With regard to the network news," Reagan said, " I wonder sometimes if it isn't the battle of the ratings, the Neilsen ratings, and if they aren't more concerned with entertainment than they are with delivering news...
...It is important that we select a G properl.v, so the process will converge...
...This was no small shift...
...It is hard to understand how there still can be informed and intelligent people who refuse to recognize that Communism in every form is oppressive...
...Sontag wonders why she and her left-wing friends "were not responding to the t r u t h . " The answer is simple: Many have been so opposed to conditions in their own society that they must project their image of an ideal social system onto foreign soil, onto the closed world of Communism...
...It maligned the entire Reagan economic program--a program not without flaws--in the most simplistic and knee-jerk fashion...
...Iiis Ph.D...
...One was to a "bailout" provision he found too s t r i n g e n t , the other to an easier " r e s u l t s " test in proving that an election procedure discriminates against blacks or ttispanics...
...Newsweek got into the backfield last year with a "'Periscope" item to the effect that President Reagan would deliver a State of the World speech at Notre Dame University, the same forum from which Jimmy Carter had announced in 1977 that he was inoculating American foreign policy against an "inordinate fear of Communism...
...The council, the Times reported, "cut by more than half its previous estimate of ho.w much the e a r t h ' s protective layer of ozone was being depleted by manmade chlorofluorocarbons released into the atmosphere, although it indicated it still saw reasons for concern...
...The new method finds all eight solutions to three quadric equations in a few tenths of a second-fast enough f o r computeraided design on a moment-to moment basis...
...That, it is hard to say...
...The convergence proof rests on principles from the area of mathematics called differential topology...
...You don't have to be willing to proclaim the value of"the spur of poverty," as George Gilder did in Wealth and Poverty, to believe that government The Continuation Method The need to solve systems of polynomial equations arises in pursuits ranging from geometric optics to chemical kinetics...
...The notion that the welfare state may have created and perpetuated a permanent underclass, a class discouraged from entering the free market, is really not such an arcane one...
...Here is the way continuation works...
...Vietnam," in this sense, simply ceases to exist after the spring of 1975...
...Acoustics, kinematics and non-linear circuit design are just a few fields that could benefit immediately...
...This method has proved to be reliable and fast in solving problems involving equations up to the sixth degree in three or four variahles...
...Reliability is further compromisetl when multiple solutions are sought...
...Eesh evidence has come my way of a narrow category of news that is almost always destined to be downplayed...
...David R. Gergen, the White House communications director, didn't even mention the piece when he met with Newsweek reporters that week, though he waved the magazine around on ABC-TV's "Good Morning, America" the next day and said the cover picture of a sad, unkempt child "'presents a very misleading image...
...In figure 1, the four clots on the left platte represent the set of simultaneous solutions to the system of equations G(x) = 0. The four dots on the right plane represent the set of simultaneous solutions to the system of equations F(x)= 0. The dashed lines represent simultaneous solutions to intermediate systems whose graphs would show the evolution from one configuration to the other...
...Reagan had objections, it turned out...
...And there is no doubt that Reaganomics increases that burden...
...The press learned only too late that the Bolsheviks, the Chinese Communists, the Vietcong, and the Shah's enemies were something more sinister than political reformers...
...More significantly, the Robin Hood gloss has been stripped off the guerrillas in a way unthinkable in the case of the sainted Sandinistas...
...The inethod developed at General Motors by Dr...
...Army, Dr...
...That is more than the Washington Post and a lot of other papers did...
...of peasants terrorized by the guerrillas...
...What...
...Morgan participated in the development and analysis of simulation models at the Strategy and Tactics Analysis Group in Bethesda, Maryland...
...Without the Skelton story serving as a catalyst, Reagan might have stuck with a complaisant policy on voting rights...
...But to his detriment, he has veered from the welfare dependency argument and is now given to bragging that his cuts in social spending weren't really cuts at all...
...The trouble was that Attorney General" William French Smith learned of the Skekon report the day it appeared from a Justice Department official in Los Angeles, and he was furious...
...Most of the participants were sharply critical, attacking her for giving aid and comfort to reaction...
...By 'Vietnam,' many of those who keep invoking the analogy seem to mean only their own argument against the American involvement there, and they seem very definitely to imply a cutoff date for the analogy," the editorial said...
...With disposable personal income per capita in the fourth quarter of 1981, adjusted for inflation, more than triple its level in the Depression year of 1933, nearly 25 percent higher than in the recession year of 1970, and more than 10 percent higher than in the recession year of 1975 ? . . . What tax cuts...
...Global methods, by contrast, do not require an initial estimate of the solution_9 The continuation method, as developed by Dr...
...Morgan, "are not widely used in science and engineering...
...Makes you wonder, though, who's running the show...
...The story did much more than that...
...Geonoeroa[ Motors stroyed Newsweek's use of numbers, both in gauging the number of poor and in estimating how much federal money actually reaches them...
...Jay cited complaints that the zones would THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1982 29 boom, reducing the obligations of the welfare state and shaving the "political power" of privileged workers by increasing competition...
...But the most impressive pieces were by Joanne Omang and Stephen S. Rosenfeld of the Post...
...Consequently, the White House announced a policy on the Voting Rights Act quite different from the one that Skehon had, quite accurately at the time, reported...
Vol. 15 • June 1982 • No. 6
