This building suitable for recycling. A new interdisciplinary operation at the University of Illinois is called the Degradable Plastics Laboratory.
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“The press and the pollsters take for granted that there is a public and that it has opinions,” writes Jay Rosen in the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1989). Not true. For instance, ever since 1967 NATO has said that it might use nuclear weapons to stop a conventional Soviet invasion of western Europe. “But 81 percent of the American public believes, incorrectly, that U.S. policy prohibits the first use of nuclear weapons…. This is an example of a ‘public secret’–a fact that is publicly known but not known by the public.” Rosen also notes that in May 1982, when most people favored a nuclear freeze, “only 30 percent knew that Ronald Reagan opposed it, and 59 percent thought that the issues involved in the freeze were too complicated for the public to decide.
“Anyone who reads only the Chicago Tribune would barely know the Sox exist,” complains William J. Leahy in Leahy’s Corner (May/June 1989). “Channel 9 sports programs always begin with Cubs games when both teams played. The journalistic ethics of the august Tribune comes down to, ‘If we don’t own them, don’t cover them.’”
Trouble: The proposal to build a 125-story needle tower that would overshadow the Sears. Real trouble: The news (from Business Week’s David Greising, June 5) that its would-be developer keeps on his desk a copy of Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for a mile-high tower.
