PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susun Douglas Stupid Press Tricks Hurry, hurry, come one, come all, into the big top for this summer's stupid press tricks. First up, William Satire. Huffing and puffing about...
...Informing its readers about a major archeological find of a female skeleton in the Peruvian Andes...
...Well, maybe...
...The Beavis and Butthead style of writing continued as we learned that the body provided new information to historians...
...For one thing, because the coverage was almost entirely about her and whether she was a hypocrite, and only incidentally about the sweatshop workers, many of them teenage and even preteen girls, who endure slave-like working conditions not just in the United States and Honduras, but in Mexico, China...
...About how the Inca lived...
...How they dressed...
...Her column appears in this space every month...
...My Weekly Reader does better than this...
...Thailand...
...Bob Herbert, The New York Times columnist who has launched a one-man crusade against Knight and Nike, noted that Knight's salary in 1995 was more than $1.6 million, with stock holdings valued at $4.5 billion...
...Indonesia, and elsewhere...
...Sitting around like old gossips, vying over who really knows more about White House operatives Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca, they keep insisting that, unlike Whitewater, everyone can understand Filegate, so it's going to be a pivotal, apocalyptic story...
...feel they have hit pay dirt with Filegate...
...Why should I?" At least Kathie Lee has some shame...
...On June 18, The New York Times announced in its business section that layoffs are out...
...Said Jordan, "I don't know the complete situation...
...This all by way of vindicating a previous F.B.I, director...
...The spotlight-hogging female who connives to hide her ambition behind a mask of perkiness is much more irresistible as a villain than the established, successful, calculating male CEO...
...Huffing and puffing about Filegate, he charged F.B.I...
...So far the story isn't either as easy to follow or as gripping to outsiders as the pundits wish...
...Let's go to topics people are deeply concerned about: downsizing and job flight...
...latest poster girl, Kathie Lee Gifford...
...Time named Philip Knight—"Phil" to Time readers—one of America's twenty-five most influential people...
...hiring is back...
...Certainly this helps explain why, at the same time that Perky Lee was being beaten with sticks, boys who profit big-time from sweatshops got somewhat different treatment...
...As sleazy and criminal as Filegate may be, a lot of people don't seem to care, because they see it, too, as an insider story...
...If you blinked you would miss the fleeting oblique warning that "the pursuit of cheap labor...
...Herbert also pointed the finger at celebrities less easy to hate than Kathie Lee—Andre Agassi, Spike Lee, or Michael Jordan, for example, who makes $20 million a year pitching Nikes—and insisted they confront their own complicity in promoting sweatshop conditions abroad...
...Five days later, the Times announced that Nabisco would cut 4,200 jobs worldwide, 2,400 in the United States...
...So why was the story also making me queasy...
...Typical MO for the Inca...
...When workers object to their treatment, they are fired, Herbert wrote...
...Time wrote, "The body screamed "human sacrifice' from the start...
...For another, coverage of this issue has been unabashedly sexist...
...The crazy things they believed in...
...Director Louis Freeh with failing to protect people's confidential files from "political snoops...
...But wait: Two days later, the paper announced that Navistar International, North America's biggest producer of trucks and school buses, was eliminating between 3,000 and 5,000 jobs and moving its huge factory in Ohio "elsewhere...
...So no more diss-ing the man who had Martin Luther King wiretapped, collected secret files on thousands of Americans from Todd Gitlin to Leonard Bernstein, and organized COIN-TELPRO, which spied on, harassed, and smeared students, feminists, and leftists...
...Say what you like about J. Edgar Hoover—he never let the Bureau become a doormat for White House aides," Satire said...
...Next up, the pundits, the news media's answer to melatonin...
...So much for layoffs being outre...
...No discussion of job flight would be complete without reference to NAFTA's Susan Douglas teaches at the University of Michigan...
...which is what she was...
...She's important, all right...
...Because of all the negative publicity about downsizing, "'Now companies are choosing to highlight the potential for new hires down the road...
...Elsewhere, it turns out, may be Mexico...
...Desperate for an in-side-the-beltway story they can really sink their teeth into now that the Senate Whitewater hearings are over, John McLaughlin et al...
...My favorite example of a stupid press trick this summer came from Time in a dazzling display of science reporting...
...A full-page photo of the Nike CEO smiled jubilantly at us while we read about his shoes bringing "myth-defying rebelliousness" to athletes and to "every man and every woman" who can now "fly to the sun without melting their wings...
...Herbert informed readers that, by contrast, workers at Nike sweatshops in Indonesia make $2.20 a day, that their daily activities are "ruthlessly controlled," and that female workers have been physically abused by their bosses...
...Her relentless promotion of herself as America's most perfect wife and mother made her sweatshop comeuppance deeply gratifying...
...can redound on the mighty...
Vol. 60 • August 1996 • No. 8
