THERE鈥橲 a time-honoured tradition in Washington that if you want to release
unpleasant, unpopular or unflattering news to the press, do it late on a Friday.
Federal agencies are quite adept at this trick. It has several advantages. By
the time reporters get the news, most of the key sources will have left their
offices, so putting a story together is a challenge. What鈥檚 more, if reporters
do manage to cobble the story together in time to appear in the Saturday paper,
it鈥檚 the least read paper of the week.
Of course, if you can鈥檛 control the timing of the release of unwanted
information, you can always hope a bigger story eclipses it. That鈥檚 the strategy
the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) relied on earlier this
month. A private company, Celera, announced on a Monday morning (a good time to
get publicity) that it had sequenced 90 per cent of the human genome鈥攁t
least in rough draft鈥攎uch sooner than the NHGRI鈥檚 federally funded effort
to do the same thing. NHGRI officials have numerous arguments in favour of the
federal project continuing鈥攏ot least that researchers have to pay a
boatload of money for Celera鈥檚 data, whereas the NHGRI鈥檚 will be free. But no
one likes to come in second, and if federal officials had their druthers, the
press would ignore Celera.
They practically did. News of the merger between Time Warner and Internet
service AOL pushed anything else to do with health and science to the back
pages. For the NHGRI, that was even better than TGIF.
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WELL, here we are on the other side of the millennial looking glass, and like
Alice, we鈥檙e not sure the world is quite sane. As the clocks struck midnight on
Millennium Eve, there was a worldwide intake of breath. It was wasted breath.
Practically nothing went wrong with the world鈥檚 computer systems. Within hours,
reporters at the government鈥檚 secure Y2K command centre in Washington DC were on
the attack. There was no computer bug, was there? It was all a hoax by hucksters
seeking profit, right?
John Koskinen, who oversaw the US government鈥檚 Y2K preparations, wasn鈥檛
allowed much time to celebrate what most experts had predicted all along鈥攁
preparation job well done. Instead, he and his colleagues spent several days
pointing out to the news media, which were miffed that they had no story to
report, that the lack of breakdowns was a result of hard work. A diplomatic
soul, Koskinen apparently was too polite to point out that many in the media had
chosen over the previous year to quote the most extreme鈥攁nd usually
uninformed鈥擟assandras, while ignoring those rather boring programmers who
had actually done the repairs and knew what was going on.
Finally, the press found something to pounce on鈥攖he Pentagon had lied
about losing much of its spy telemetry from five satellites for three days over
the Y2K weekend. It was truly a Y2K glitch, and there was actually someone to
blame. Somehow, though, a headline declaring 鈥淧entagon deceived public鈥� sounds a
little like a 鈥渄og bites man鈥� story.
ONE casualty of the Y2K rollover was the press itself, or at least one large
member of it. It was discovered almost two weeks into 2000 that CBS had used a
digital sleight of hand to mislead its viewers as they awaited the millennial
moment. In a studio, CBS newscasters had been placed in front of a live image of
Times Square in downtown Manhattan, where millennial festivities were ramping
up. There was something wrong with the picture, however鈥攁t least CBS
executives thought so. Rival television network NBC had placed a huge logo on
the side of a building in the desired camera shot.
No matter, said CBS technicians. They employed a computer program to replace
the real NBC sign with a digital CBS one, set within the otherwise live scene.
But CBS didn鈥檛 tell its viewers. After it was found out, there were embarrassed
admissions that all was not what it seemed, and promises from the TV station to
be more judicious with the technology. Though if it isn鈥檛, how would we ever
know?
