The Year in Trivia

The feature started on the bottom of page one and carried over to a two-page spread entitled "'98 Year In Review." It featured 8 photos and lots of text (with no ads to break it up) in the Sunday Seattle Times on Dec. 27, 1998. Wow. A review of the highlights of the year, according to our guiding light of the local print media.

The subtitle "Where are the newsmakers of 1998?" leads the reader to expect some follow through on a few of the more important local issues of the past year, such as housing costs (what happened to folks displaced by high rents?), the PacMed scandal (who's taking home the bacon?), the City of Seattle's Olympic bid (who stood to gain from this pork barrel project?), Mayor Paul Schell's bid to sell Key Tower and build a new city hall, pork barrel projects at the Port, tax money to benefit Paul Allen's construction projects in the International District, a City subsidy of parking fees in the infamous Nordstrom/Pacific Place garage, and dozens of other political issues that are seldom covered in the Seattle Times, except to earn plaudits on its editorial page.

But no, we get a fluff piece reminiscent of the opening pages of a high school yearbook; remember all of those human interest stories the Times printed during the year that you skipped over in your search for real news? They're here.

First, some ass-kissing: a paragraph on former Mayor Norm Rice, who completely disappeared from local politics to take long jaunts to Guam, Samoa, and California in his new job as V.P. of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle. No mention of his losing out on a Clinton cabinet post because of his approval for the use of low-income housing funds to build a parking garage for Nordstrom and Pacific Place, nor any questions about his fitness for his new job, given that he favors corporate welfare more than housing for families.

Amongst the other "newsmakers of '98" are several personal stories: a baby that contracted e. coli at the Puyallup Fair, the mother of the deckhand who fell off the Bainbridge ferry, one of the victims of a shooting in a Tacoma karaoke bar, a baby born three months premature, a party guy who fell down an elevator shaft in Pioneer Square, a restaurant closed down by a fire didn't reopen, and the release from prison and return to Seattle of a guy who shot someone in Mongolia. A few of these stories are meant to be inspirational: a woman from Snohomish sails around the world alone (while most other women here at home still can't walk down the street at night alone), Keiko's odyssey to Iceland, two boys stop another boy from shooting up their school, a former ferry captain crosses Puget Sound the hard way (swimming), a pastor helps free friends convicted in the Wenatchee pedophilic sex scandal, and public-access cable TV porn purveyor moves to the Internet after getting his show dumped by TCI.

Add a "dog story" of two gorillas mating at the Atlanta Zoo (one of them used to be an abused "display" animal at a shopping center in Tacoma) and you have two more pages of the newspaper that you can skip over in your search of real news.

Buried in the middle of this garbage is an attempt to follow up on stories that the Times' editorial board probably thought were controversial during the past year: a fire at a boarding home for seniors, the trial of a Port Angeles doctor accused of murdering a brain-dead baby, the resignation of the director of the state's Dept. of Fish and Wildlife (because the department overspent its budget), Bruce and Ellen Craswell's move to form a new right-wing political party, the aftermath of a student drinking binge and rampage at WSU, and Wolfgang Puck's decision to keep showing a racist poster at ObaChine, his fake Chinese restaurant downtown (if you want real Chinese food, head a little further south to the International District).

The only real story in the whole section is a paragraph on the glacial pace of mass transit construction in Seattle, which ends on a light-hearted note: "Sound Transit ... will launch the first of its new bus and commuter-rail services this year." No mention of why it's taken this long or whether Sound Transit's improvements will be too little too late. While the article mentioned the Elevated Transportation Co.'s inability to find any private donors to help fund the monorail extension, it didn't say why, nor did it mention the key fact that rich Seattlites can easily build a privately-funded symphony hall downtown for their own use, but not a mass transit system for everyone's use.

Finally, the article ends with more ass-kissing: a flattering paragraph on Thomas Stewart, the CEO of Food Services Group of America, who was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to the state Republican Party. Can't alienate those rich folks!