Tilting at Windmills - critiquing SUV's

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2002 by Charles Peters

THE CALIFORNIA THREE-STRIKES law is before the U.S. Supreme Court this year. I hope the court rules against it. Not that I'm automatically against three-strikes laws. Far from it. I favor them when the offenses are violent crimes. But the California law is applied, writes Charles Lane of The Washington Post, even "when a third felony conviction is for a nonviolent crime--even one that could have been charged as a misdemeanor if the prosecutor had wanted to" For 57 percent of the 7,000 prisoners doing life under the California law, the third strike was a nonviolent crime. In the case now before the Supreme Court, the third strike was a conviction for shoplifting videotapes worth $150.

KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND has been my friend for 20 years. Many of you know her as the writer of several thoughtful articles that have appeared in these pages. Her loss in the recent gubernatorial election in Maryland has saddened me. But I'm more mad than sad--mad at the press for its relentless picking at her faults while too often giving her opponent a softer ride. I had been increasingly irritated by this tendency over recent months, but had not taken the trouble to document it. By Oct. 20, I was disturbed enough to carefully follow the coverage for five days by the editors and writers of The Washington Post Metro section. During that time, they ran three negative stories about Kathleen on the front page of the Metro section: "Townsend's Anti-Crime Efforts Struggle," "Townsend Attacked on Gun Checks," and "Maryland's Defunct Crime Institute Costs $200,000: Townsend Project Halted Two Months After its Launch" There were no positive headlines about Kathleen.

For her opponent, there was only one headline that could appear negative to at least some people: "Ehrlich Defends His Stance on Abortion: Activists Say Gubernatorial Hopeful Opposes a Woman's Right to Choose." And that story appeared not on Metro's page one but on page six. The only front-page Metro mention of Ehrlich was the kind of photo a candidate would sell his soul for, showing a smiling Ehrlich holding his smiling three-year-old son, surrounded by smiling supporters.

The editorial pages of The Washington Post and The Baltimore Sun endorsed Kathleen. So why the rough treatment by the reporters? (The Sun's were equally guilty.) As the frontrunner for a long time, she was the most tempting target to take down a notch or two, and that temptation was compounded by her own missteps and even more by her family's celebrity. Beyond that, there's a tendency for reporters, most of whom are liberal, to bend over backward to criticize liberals and to wake up too late to the damage they are doing. I have seen this tendency work against Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and, most recently, Al Gore. Remember how the reporters would jump all over Gore for his "exaggerations" on minor matters, while ignoring Bush's substantive lies--for example, three about Texas health care in just one debate?

IT WAS A BIG STORY ON THE business pages last month when Citigroup named Sally Krawcheck to run its research and brokerage division, which will be called Smith Barney, which is just what it used to be called before it was acquired by Salomon Brothers, which in turn was acquired by Travelers Group, which itself was acquired by Citigroup.