TELEVISION;ABC Sends a Young Point of View Into the Field
Date: 11 February 1996
By Lawrie Mifflin
Lawrie Mifflin
Anderson Cooper recalls being stuck at an airport in Rwanda in 1994, weighed down by luggage and video camera, and watching enviously as a CBS News crew left a plane, got into a waiting car and sped off. "At that point, the highest priority in life was a vehicle," he said. At that point, Mr. Cooper was chief foreign correspondent for Channel One, the television company that broadcasts a 12-minute daily news program into 12,000 American high schools. Few adults had heard of him, but he was a celebrity to some eight million American teen-agers who saw his first-person accounts of devastation, despair and defiance in Burma, Vietnam, Somalia, Iran, Haiti and Bosnia.
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MEDIA: PRESS;Some distinguished journalists believe newsroom cynicism is hurting the country.
Date: 12 February 1996
By Iver Peterson
Iver Peterson
HAS journalistic cynicism gone too far? For years, reporters have worn their skepticism about the official version of events not only as a badge of their profession, but as a shield consciously deployed to keep the public from being snookered. Over the years, after the Vietnam War, Watergate and numerous scandals, that skepticism perhaps congealed into a hardened cynicism, but its function remained the same. Being cynical amounted to being smart.
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New Jersey Daily Briefing;Fight to Open Death Records
Date: 12 February 1996
By Terry Pristin
Terry Pristin
When 5-year-old Timothy Wiltsey disappeared in 1991, his mother, Michelle Lodzinksi, of South Amboy, said her son had vanished at a carnival in Sayreville. Her account was not corroborated, and when Timothy's skull was found nearly a year later in a vast marsh in Edison, the mystery intensified. An East Brunswick newspaper, now known as The Home News and Tribune, tried to find out how Timothy had died, but the State Department of Health cited confidentiality restrictions imposed by the AIDS Assistance Act. Tomorrow, the New Jersey Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether the law that prevents health officials from disclosing to anyone but family members that a person died of AIDS should be applied to all death certificates.
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ON POLITICS;Parting Shots? Not From This Pundit
Date: 11 February 1996
By Iver Peterson
Iver Peterson
There is an old description of reporters as people who view the battle from afar and then come down from the hills to shoot the wounded. Political columnists are not so crass. We like to offer lots of free advice and constructive criticism to the wounded first. Then we shoot them. Some of that gunfire came from this corner of the paper for the past year, including a fair number of misses. Now that the time has come to pass this space on to someone else, it is probably appropriate that the departing tenant acknowledge that yes, this is the place that broke the news that Bill Bradley was a cinch to run for re-election. (He didn't.) This is where it was first reported that Virginia Littell might put up a fight for the chairmanship of the State Republcian Commitee against Chuck Haytaian. (Mrs. Littell proved to be far too good a soldier to do such a thing.) And this column also predicted that Governor Whitman's new budget was in trouble because she had failed to find a way to help the state's hospitals pay for charity care. (Nothing came of that, either. Yet.)
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Essay;Chunnel Vision
Date: 12 February 1996
By William Safire
William Safire
Zipping along at 186 m.p.h. from Paris to London, traveling between those capitals in the same three hours as the Metroliner takes to go from New York to Washington, even a neo-Luddite has to salute the progress of technology. In that mood, I wonder about fellow-travelers on the info-highway: with waves of data laptopping our shores, many pre-boomers are disquieted. We worry that all this multimedia information on internets and from satellites will engulf us in some tsunami and leave us high and dry.
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World News Briefs;Burmese Refuse To Extradite Drug Lord
Date: 11 February 1996
Reuters
The Burmese Government has refused to extradite a reputed opium lord to the United States, where he is wanted on heroin trafficking charges.
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World News Briefs;Taiwanese Urges Peace As China Moves Troops
Date: 11 February 1996
Reuters
President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan, in a speech that he said was his definitive word on relations with China, emphasized the need for peace today, one day after China began moving troops toward its coast for what defense officials here described as military exercises. "The one thing that all people on both sides of the straits passionately wish for is a stoppage to the hostile confrontation," Mr. Lee said at a campaign rally for Taiwan's presidential election, which takes place on March 23.
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World News Briefs;Zaire Plans to Close Rwanda Refugee Camps
Date: 11 February 1996
Reuters
Zaire said today that it would gradually begin closing 40 camps holding a million Rwandan refugees, prompting some refugees to leave the camp that is expected to be shut down first. "We will close the camp," Interior Minister Gustave Malumba Mbangula said, referring to the settlement at Kibumba that some refugees began leaving today. "When the camp is closed we will proceed to close another camp. The operation will continue until all camps are closed and all refugees go home."
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