Letters.

Bringing Up Baby

As a working mother who got her professional start at the Monthly, I was dismayed to read Charles Peters' assertion (Tilting at Windmills, November 1999) that children are better off if one parent stays home during their early years, or if both parents work part-time and share child-rearing.

Most studies that have followed the children of working parents over time have found no negative effects of long parental work hours on children's achievement, intellectual ability, or emotional well-being. What the studies do show is intuitive: that children grow up healthiest and happiest when they are showered with love and support--from parents, professional caregivers, family members, and others.

The children of working parents learn that Mommy and Daddy love them and that other people can love them too. And when they grow up, these boys and girls reap another benefit: the knowledge that they can pursue their goals and be good parents.

ESTHER SCHRADER Reporter Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.

Kind Word

The Washington Monthly makes me wish we could make it required reading. Thank you Charles Peters and all you dedicated journalists who don't subscribe to the "gotcha" mentality of most. What would we do without you?

BARBARA COULSON Marshall, NC

Liberal Foundations

In the November 1999 issue of The Washington Monthly, David Callahan paints a sinister and one-sided portrait of free-market and conservative policy institutes. Callahan, who works for the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, asserts that corporations have stepped up donations to conservative think-tanks during the 1990s.

A balanced report would have informed your readers that "corporate giving to public-affairs organizations disproportionately benefits organizations seeking to expand regulation and the welfare state," according to a review conducted by the Capital Research Center. Further, foundations such as MacArthur, Ford, Rockefeller, and the Pew Charitable Trusts give well over a billion dollars each year to their pet liberal causes, including projects inimical to business interests.

RICHARD NOYES Director Free Market Project Alexandria, Va.

The Enforcers Reply

It is unfortunate that in his November 1999 article, "Asleep on the Beat," Robert Worth chose to ignore the facts and distort the EPA's record on federal environmental enforcement. This Administration's federal environmental enforcement program is the strongest in the history of environmental law, both in terms of federal presence and environmental results.

Mr. Worth cited 340 individuals doing enforcement work in EPA Headquarters in 1993 and 140 in 1997. This is seriously in error--the comparable total in EPA Headquarters is now in excess of 500 full time equivalents.

STEVEN A. HERMAN Assistant Administrator Environmental Protection Agency Washington, D. C.

I am disappointed that The Washington Monthly chose to run an article as incomplete and misleading as "Soft on Crime? It does not accurately depict the work U.S. Attorney's offices are doing to enforce environmental laws. That is not surprising because your reporter failed to contact anyone in the Justice Department who knows what environmental crimes prosecutors are doing across the country. The real story is that federal prosecutors are taking on this country's biggest polluters and winning.

ROBERT C. BUNDY United States Attorney District of Alaska Anchorage, Ala.

In his jeremiad against state environmental agencies, Robert Worth argues that states have begun a "race to the bottom" through lax enforcement of environmental laws. His argument just doesn't hold water, clean or otherwise.

He acknowledges that there are significant problems with environmental enforcement and compliance data--then uses just that questionable data, along with unnamed sources and unpeer-reviewed studies from groups with suspect motivation, to indict states and EPA. He ignores reams of good data showing that, by virtually every measure, actual environmental quality has been improving.

He might have mentioned that states have increased their work forces by 60 percent in the last decade and their environmental budgets by 140 percent. States now spend about twice what EPA spends on the environment. States implement about 75 percent of the environmental programs that can be delegated to the States, do 97 percent of the environmental inspections, and conduct more than 80 percent of all enforcement.

ROBERT E. ROBERTS Executive Director The Environmental Council of the States Washington, D. C.

Robert Worth replies: Mr. Herman claims that I "ignore the facts and distort the record" on federal environmental enforcement. But I stated that federal enforcement appears to be in good health (although that doesn't excuse the feds from failing to oversee the states adequately). As for the staffing figures I have, these come from EPA officials in the office at the time and are based on the older definition of enforcement, not the new, broader one.

Mr Bundy's letter does not address the study published by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility that I cited in my article, which found that prosecution of environmental crimes has fallen sharply during the Clinton administration. When I called the Justice Department about the study, they cited some of their successes but did not respond to PEER's claim about the falloff in prosecution.

As for Mr. Roberts' claim that I use "questionable data": As I acknowledged in the article, there were errors in last spring's EPA reports on state enforcement. But officials at the EPA and Inspector General's offices agreed that even accounting for these errors, state enforcement has declined significantly. Mr. Roberts claims that states have increased their budgets by 140 percent in the last decade, but this says nothing about enforcement. And finally, the fact that the states are charged with the bulk of environmental enforcement--as Mr. Roberts notes--is precisely the reason why their failure to do a better job deserves more public attention.

Changing Times

I was amused by Gregg Easterbrook's review of my book Republic of Denial: Press, Politics and Public Life in your October issue, which lacks in attentive reading of my thesis what it packs in poorly timed assessment on his part of what's happening out there.

Last point first: Mr. Easterbrook claims I treat the fact that the news business is a business as a "sinister fact?" What rot. Of course it's a business, and I deal with the history of it: The question, agonized over in the business, is what else it has been. In that context, Mr. Easterbrook dismisses my critical treatment of Mark Willes' management of Times Mirror and its flagship newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, which as the book explains, Willes ran as publisher for an extended period before handing off that second job to a hapless protege in June. Mr. Easterbrook informs us that under Mr. Willes the Los Angeles Times "continue to be excellent--it now rivals for first-place in quality The New York Times, a fact not well known on the East Coast."

Readers may want to know that since your review went to press the Los Angeles Times has become a spectacle of self-inflicted managerial disaster. It did this by following Mr. Willes' diktat to tear down the "wall" between "church" (the newsroom) and "state" (the front office), a plan critiqued at length in my book, right out the window. In late October, Kathryn Downing, Mr. Willes' hand-picked replacement as publisher, apologized to what news reports called an "appalled" Los Angeles Times newsroom for a "betrayal" of the paper's integrity in the form of a secretive scheme to share advertising profits with a subject of the paper's coverage. She announced a needed rewriting of "wall" guidelines "clearly defin[ing] editorial independence and integrity" and "special awareness training for current and future business-side employees" about "wall" culture and lore. In case Downing and Mr. Willes (who issued a lame apology about the episode not being the Times' "finest hour" and the need "to reflect deeply and carefully on what happened") thought that cleared the air, the paper and corporation's founding family heir and former chairman, Otis Chandler, wrote the paper's "abused and misused" editorial department blasting Willes' and Downing's "unbelievably stupid and unprofessional management."

More serious is Mr. Easterbrook's suggestion that my thesis is that "the country is going to hell in a handbasket" (what a phrasemaker!) and that the news business fails to deal with that steady trend. That is not my thesis. As I take care to write in my introduction, the cumulative experience of decline, loss, trauma and erosion in recent decades from Vietnam to Watergate to rustbelt to inflation to job insecurity is "not the only story of our time, and it need not constitute destiny now. But it's the story that dominated American history and spirit in the last third of the twentieth century. It's the real world components of the story that have taken the bloom off the liberations, hopes, and turns for the better of the era." Shaping political and cultural history, that is what Jimmy Carter tried and failed to treat as "malaise," that is what Ronald Reagan succeeded in treating as "Morning in America." The effect, together with all sorts of other factors, I argue, broke the chain of public engagement with "the news" as meaningful, and the news business has failed to deal with that fact. Instead, trying to hold its numbers (let alone, as at the Los Angeles Times, increase them to levels Otis Chandler and other news business figures have called outlandish), it resorts to marketing schemes, and a commercialization of method and mission at the expense of editorial integrity and public trust. That's the story of what happened at the Los Angeles Times, that's a story all too common in the news business around the country. You can read about the why and wherefore in my book, but not in Mr. Easterbrook's piece.

MICHAEL JANEWAY Director Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism New York, N.Y.