Say What? What They’re Saying On Other Editorial Pages Around The Country

NBC wins gold for sappiness and deception NBC has always made it clear that ratings are the yardstick by which it will judge the success of its Olympic Games coverage.

… The network has made some dangerous decisions about the way it blurs reality in the name of a good story.

Announcers almost never explain whether the action is live or on tape. They convey breathless suspense, even if the competition really occurred hours earlier. So in an era when television technology can show almost any happening in real time, NBC has perversely used that technology to create a zone of fictional time.

… NBC has been going where no network has gone before in ignoring the athletes from the rest of the world, and making its profiles as sappy as possible. Appealing to female viewers does not require shooting every background feature with amber lighting and swelling music that suggests the finale of “Lassie Come Home.”

From an editorial in The New York Times

Dole should cut taxes to win White House and boost the economy

Cut taxes. Getting Bob Dole to say those words with enthusiasm is the magic formula … (for) a winning presidential bid.

The Reagan years proved supply-side economics correct, because revenues did increase, from $559 billion in the last Jimmy Carter budget (1981) to $990 billion in the last Reagan budget (1989). That’s a hefty 59 percent increase in tax receipts after a tax rate cut.

… Repeal the record 1993 Clinton tax increase of $250 billion and the previous record 1990 George Bush tax increase of $150 billion. Doing so would take the tax system back to the way it was the last years of the Reaganomics boom.

From an editorial in the Clovis (N.M.) News-Journal

Politicians jump the gun, threaten civil rights

There was President Clinton calling a “domestic summit” on terrorism and dredging up yet again some measures that have nothing to do with the Atlanta bomb. … And there were Republican leaders blindly and blandly assuring us that giving the FBI greater power to plant wiretaps (and pass the results indiscriminately to whoever is the next Craig Livingstone in the White House?) won’t infringe on any civil liberty.

The American governing class seems … confident nobody will notice that its pat and predictable “solutions” are trotted out well before anybody has any idea what the real problems are.

From an editorial in the Orange County Register

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