Bigfoot political reporter R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. has a travel piece about Los Angeles on the front of today's weekend section, page E29 in New York editions. Maybe Mr. Apple is scouting out restaurants in preparation for the Democratic convention there later this summer. What's remarkable is that Mr. Apple gets away with using language to refer to women that a less senior reporter writing for another section of the paper would find hard to get by the copy desk. He writes of L.A. that "Splendors remain -- and not just the chicks on Melrose Avenue and the biceps boys on the beach at Venice." "Chicks"? Even with the balancing addition of the biceps boys, the word jars.
Rent Control, Out of Control: On page B3 of the Metro section, we get a sober account of a hearing at which something called the "New York City Rent Guidelines Board" approved a 4 percent increase for one year leases, a 6 percent increase for two-year leases, and a $15 surcharge on all rents below $500. While the story devotes plenty of attention to tenants protesting the increases, there's no suggestion that there's anyone out there who thinks there's something weird about, in America, having a government panel decide how much private landlords can charge tenants in rent. We don't have such panels to decide, say, how much department stores can increase clothing prices or how much supermarkets can increase food costs. In fact, some cities, including Cambridge, Mass., have gotten rid of rent controls in recent years, creating vast improvements in neighborhoods that were once slums. Even the Times's own columnist, Paul Krugman, took the newspaper's coverage to task recently for its failure to understand the deleterious effects of rent regulation laws. It doesn't seem like whoever edited today's story on the meeting of the "Rent Guidelines Board" paid much attention to Krugman's column.
Missile Defense Politics: In a lengthy front-page piece on missile defense, two Times reporters come in with the scoop that when dealing with missile defense, "both the administration and its Republican rivals have long been motivated by domestic political calculations as well as by strategic concerns." Now there's a shock: politicians and government officials in a democracy being motivated by what their constituents want them to do. Seems unobjectionable, except that the piece reports that President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, denied that political considerations played any role. A better way for Mr. Berger to have dealt with these reporters might have been to say, sure, political considerations played a role, that's how policy is made in democracies.
Teamster Power: Speaking of political considerations playing a role in policymaking, today's award for burying the lead goes to a paragraph in a story about the success of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign. Mr. Nader met yesterday with the president of the Teamsters union, James P. Hoffa. About midway through the article, which is itself stuck inside the national section, we get the news that "Gore advisers said they had moved aggressively behind the scenes to try to keep Mr. Hoffa from endorsing Mr. Nader, to the point where they had directed projects through federal agencies that would use Teamsters." Well, as the "Missile Defense Politics" item makes clear, we're all for political considerations being taken into account in policymaking. But it still seems worthy of a headline and a front-page story if Gore campaign aides are acknowledging they intervened with the government to channel taxpayer money to a union whose endorsement Mr. Gore is still trying to seek. At the very least, it might be a topic for Congressional hearings. And memo to the Gore campaign: whoever the unnamed "advisers" are that leaked this info should get a lesson in keeping their mouths shut.