Word: watchdogging
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ever since the near disaster at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been debating whether to order the shutdown of other nukes designed and built by the same company, Babcock & Wilcox. Some of the watchdog agency's critics have had no doubts about what the NRC should do: they want a shutdown of all nuclear plants in the U.S. Cooler heads, however, pointed out that most of the plants have relatively good safety records. Besides, any major loss of generating capacity at the onset of the summer months-when electrical consumption...
...legislature did not, of course, rush willingly into creating its own watchdog; it only acted when Common Cause collected 95,506 signatures in support of a new ethics statute. The legislature did, however, squeeze through a watered-down bill in order to avoid seeing the tougher Common Cause proposal on the November ballot. As local attorney Robert Moncreiff explains, "while a lot of people woke up this January and felt the law had dropped out of the sky, it was clear that it would have been on the November referendum list if the legislature didn't act quickly--and nobody...
With a weakened ethics commission, the state's only true watchdog remains a nongovernmental one, the press. Extensive press coverage by the media has thus far led to the resignation of three King appointees, Elder Affairs Sec. Stephen G. Guptill, Insurance commissioner Stephen F. Clifford and, most recently, MDC Associate Commissioner Thomas Da Silva. A fourth King appointee, MDC Commissioner Thomas Haggerty, took a paid "leave of absence...
...heart of the conflict is a fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable disagreement over the role of the press. To the West, the press is the independent Fourth Estate, watchdog of the other three, and profit-making servant of an informed electorate. To the Communist world, the press is an apparatus of the state charged primarily with educating the masses about state policies. Third World leaders may prefer the Western model, but believe they need a controlled press to promote economic development, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Observes Chicago Tribune Editor Clayton Kirkpatrick: "I hear the same complaints from the Third...
Many Third World governments do not exactly encourage better coverage. The London-based International Press Institute, a watchdog group that monitors press freedom, reported in 1976 that 15 developing nations had expelled or refused entry to foreign correspondents in the previous year, and the rate has probably increased since then. Nigeria has booted out nearly all resident foreign journalists; the last Reuters man there was put into a dugout canoe with his wife and eight-year-old daughter and advised to start rowing toward neighboring Benin...