Word: wiring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...simple fix, either. An electromagnet in the vehicle's nose was connected by wire to a battery in the rear. The nose of each car lined up for the race rests flush against a hinged metal plate that drops forward into the asphalt at the start, allowing the vehicle to roll forward down the inclined raceway. As he settled back into his racer, Gronen's helmet touched off a lever that activated the battery and magnet, and as the metal plate fell forward the magnet's pull toward it gave his vehicle enough extra starting impetus...
...Only 27% of U.S. daily papers and 5% of the radio and TV stations have their own-or a shared-Washington correspondent. As a result, most U.S. voters get reporting on what their own Congressmen are up to only through occasional wire service or network stories or through self-serving news releases issued by the Congressmen themselves. In mid-September, a step will be taken to change all that. Under a six-month grant from Public Citizen, one of Ralph Nader's organizations, the newly formed Capitol Hill News Service will set five reporters on the trails...
...wire services are America's biggest bastions of public relations reporting. To insure that none of their hundreds of local subscribers will object to their coverage, the AP and the UPI are careful to present the official version of news stories in the blandest and least provocative manner. Their philosophy in its most banal formulation is: aim at the lowest common denominator of public interest and avoid alientating either the Chicago Tribune or the Podunk Gazette. Investigative reporting that might raise hackles anywhere is, of course, out of the question: how Hersh managed to break the MyLai story while working...
...WEAKNESS of wire service reporting is compounded by the oligarchic structure of the newspaper industry itself. Papers or chains of papers are owned and usually directly managed by wealthy entrepreneurs who set editorial policy and carefully supervise what their newspapers print. The owners intervene in newspaper policy for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they step in to protect their own interests: in Chicago, for example, because the police look the other way when newspaper trucks with the late editions break every traffic law on the books, someone is going to get an editorial endorsement come next election...
Much more often, however, the owners are simply following their political beliefs. They like Richard Nixon; why should they be eager to obtain wire service stories suggesting him guilty of criminal behavior? They like their friends at the local country club; how could they be expected to sponsor investigations into the financial dealings of those friends? Newspaper owners are integral to the American elite, molders and managers of its policy. They can hardly be expected to question their own behavior...