Up Against the Wall
by Doug Nufer
Free Press staff writer
Flash! Airports worldwide are being converted from drab public utilities into swank privately owned department stores. The next Congress may actually cut corporate welfare. President Clinton's stand on job creation for public welfare recipients resembles a GOP plan to replace it with a system of tax credits to private donors- a system which leading economists and sociologists say won't work. A prisoner sues to raise his earnings from .40 cents an hour to the minimum wage.
The items cited above come not from The Nation or In These Times, not from any pantywaist weeklies or dailies or even from any disreputable scandal sheets, but from the greatest newspaper in America, The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal's staff-written reports give Business (and anyone else who'd care to notice) the lowdown on what's happening in the country and around the world, in candid detail that suffers little bullshit even while it's OP-ED page shovels out some of the most high-handed bullshit around. Agree or disagree, but don't overlook the comprehensive picture of world commerce provided by the news and comment of The Wall Street Journal.
Considering the vast and even underrated impact commerce has on the way we live and the unrivaled authority The Wall Street Journal wields as it reaches more influential readers than any other publication, I wanted to see how the standard of American journalism matched up against the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and the New York Times. The week of September 23, 1996, was perhaps an unfair arbitrary choice for comparison of dailies, if only because the Seahawks won their first game.
Sure enough, the P-I took an early lead with a photo spread that devoted half of the front page to the Seahawks and Mariners. Then, however, in a surprise move the evening Times pulled ahead with an eight-inch shot to divulge the wedlock of a dead president's son and a blonde woman who reportedly loved sex. The New York Times might have conceded the graphics battle and gone to work on news covering welfare, interest rates, elections, the West Bank, and Gulf War veterans, offering only a tasteful cover shot of a busty Rwandan being groped by her rape child as token resistance to the Monday onslaughts of the local dailies. But then, on Saturday, Gotham's gray lady showed her class with a double hanging, depicting two freshly executed Afghans.
The locals, meanwhile, ran the obligatory AP stories of national and world events, along with regional stories on schools, Boeing sales, elections, etc. The Wall Street Journal had no graphics other than a graph and some line-drawn portraits, and, as if unconcerned with sports or sex, The Wall Street Journal's Monday brightened only with a tidbit disclosing that the heir apparent to Ford Motors (Henry's great-grandson) is an avid environmentalist. For violence, The Wall Street Journal offered a rollicking story of Rio de Janeiro crime, but news of trigger-happy police earning their "Wild West Bonus" by gunning down hoodlums appeared below the fold, and the fact that the police chief once got fired for allegedly being a party to torture was on page A7.
Although one of the week's biggest stories came straight from the business beat (the Federal Reserve Bank deciding not to raise the prime rate), the non-business dailies made points sensationalizing what turned out to be a non-story after The Wall Street Journal thoughtfully downplayed the issue on Monday. In The Wall Street Journal article, John Wilke toyed with the subject, colloquially nudging into sentences with a "Well," "OK," "Besides," "And," or "But." His breezy speculations not only outperformed the other papers' retrospective analyses, but they (and an editorial) also seemed to dictate policy. The Wall Street Journal may not really tell the Fed what to do, but the command it has of the news has the resonance of absolute authority.
With authority comes a self-confidence that can afford largesse. Tuesday's front page Work Week column regularly compiles egregious atrocities committed by bosses. Some months ago that space noted how some businesses routinely refused to pay overtime. Examples of fines and penalties for deliberate offenses had shock value, to say nothing of the value of cost benefit analysis - telling employers what to expect if they cheated. Front page news briefs touch upon events other dailies cover (and may refer to articles elsewhere in the paper), but by specializing in commerce, The Wall Street Journal is free not to pay attention to sports, movie stars, and the sex lives of dead presidents' sons. Then again, nothing is off-limits. Articles explore a wide range of interests from viewpoints that almost seem leftist if only because the writers don't need to qualify what they assert if what they assert happens to challenge the status quo. When the nation's business newspaper refers to "corporate welfare," people listen and nobody chides them for whining about something that doesn't exist.
This credibility also comes from a knack The Wall Street Journal has for showing the future by documenting a business trend that has taken hold. Even though the trend may seem confined to a circle of stockholders, customers, and suppliers, it often has ramifications far more widespread than, say, a football team's first win of the season. Kyle Pope's 9/24 article "Airport Privatization Begins to Take Off, Led by Britain's BAA" is a terrific example of this. Hampered by government restrictions, rising costs, and a failure to make the most of being a duty-free trading post, hundreds of airports around the world can't afford to operate. A British company, BAA, is buying many of these public utilities and turning them into moneymaking enterprises. Some of the changes BAA makes are sensible and long-overdue: charging .50 for coffee instead of $1.00 sells more coffee and pleases more travelers. Other changes are more controversial: expanding duty-free shops into luxury department stores that take over concourses seems to be a precarious short-term solution, with the World Trade Organization poised to wipe out tariffs. Then, there are concerns about safety and security. As the article puts it, "Can for-profit companies be trusted to do the public good?"
Tucked in the back of the text is what may be an irrelevant point. Although BAA leases airports in Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, no U.S. airports are privately owned because federal law prohibits airports from making a profit. Why irrelevant? Because while the New York Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Times sniff the sheets of honeymooning celebrities, bills are moving forward in both houses of Congress to remedy that legislative glitch. Chances are, by the time you do read about this issue outside of the pages of The Wall Street Journal, President Clinton will be signing it into law.
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Contents on this page were published in the November/December, 1996 edition of the Washington Free
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