NYT Front|Back: One Man's Juice vs. Fate of the World

FRONT:

Steroid Cloud Stops McGwire From Entering Hall
This earth-shattering lead story takes up two columns and the most textual space on the cover. It's a sports page story, and not a very scintillating or surprising one at that. Mark McGwire, the symbol of the steroid generation of baseball players, the Godfather of Juice, if you will, failed to garner enough votes for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame on his first bid. For those baseball purists who see this as a victory for preserving the records of past greats, at least for the moment, congratulations. For the baseball players who might be deterred from injecting poison into their veins because of the current trend of cracking down on steroids, well, maybe that's fewer athletes in the world needlessly shrinking their cajones and putting their health at risk. For McGwire: payback's a bitch. End of story.

Intro:

Cal Ripken was the ironman who played in 2,632 consecutive games, Tony Gwynn was the hitting machine who won eight batting titles, and yesterday both were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in near-unanimous votes. But their achievements were overshadowed by the voters’ rejection of Mark McGwire, a slugger who seemed like a modern-day Paul Bunyan before he fell into disrepute because of suspected steroid use.

BACK (Very Bottom of Page A16)

Agency Affirms Human Influence on Climate
Yesterday marked the first time the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unequivocally declared that humans are influencing global warming. For some time now, NOAA has been strong-armed by the Bush White House to blunt or scrub such links from reports and announcements. Now that Bush and Co. has reluctantly green-lighted this for prime time, how grateful it must be that The Times then buries it.

What's worse is the article's whitewash of the Bush administration's prior transgressions in subverting and hiding information that could affect millions of lives, at home and around the world. Though reporter Andrew C. Revkin notes that "climate trends and human activities" were "played down or trimmed when drafts of documents went to the Commerce Department and the White House for approval," he chalks up the impetus and reversal to "the government’s scientific bureaucracy" needing "time to catch up."

Talk about downplaying or trimming information. Revkin and The Times not only smother this news, which is also a victory for truth and a story of defeat for this exasperatingly criminal White House, but they provide cover for what was really behind the delay of the release of the correct global warming data.

Hot air, indeed.

Intro:

A lot of government scientists have said it.

But until yesterday, it appeared that no news release on annual climate trends out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under the Bush White House had said unequivocally that a buildup of greenhouse gases was helping warm the climate.

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One Man's Juice vs. Fate of the World