At News Weeklies, Apocalypses Now

Is there such a thing as the perfect cataclysm? If there is, will Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report ever find it?

These questions pop up--like poisoned whales--after swimming through the current issues of the national newsweeklies.

In each case, the three magazines hype a disaster the editors apparently hope will keep their magazine alive on newsstands until the next issue. Moreover, all three magazines boast environmental topics for their cover stories--a sign that the editors probably have been studying opinion polls about the public’s major concerns of the moment. Or that suitable foreign crises, sex scandals or pop social trends were not available.

In fact, Newsweek and U.S. News are so bereft of fresh gloom that they recycle old news. Both take a retrospective look at the Exxon Valdez disaster, originally touted nearly everywhere as the oil spill that devoured Alaska.

The two magazines report that, yes, the Exxon spill did indeed kill thousands of birds, hundreds of otters, an unknown number of fish and a few whales. Unfortunately for disaster connoisseurs, they note somewhat glumly that the calamity doesn’t even begin to live up to its early billing as one of the great catastrophes of all time.

Newsweek puts it this way: “It appears thus far that the Big Spill has not been an environmental apocalypse: thousands of creatures have needlessly died and vast stretches of wild land have been defaced, but the food chain has survived.” But that’s enough good news. In the same paragraph the note of optimism is ruthlessly muffled with a warning about the dark dangers of the future.

“What we know already is sobering, for the next major spill is just one nautical mistake away,” writer Jerry Adler admonishes.

U.S. News’ summation is brighter, on the whole. The magazine says that Mother Nature’s winter storms will help clean Alaska’s beaches and that wildlife has come through in relatively good shape. But even so, the writers can’t resist ending with a longing glimpse over the brink. “Given the foreseeable limits of technology and the foibles of human behavior, other catastrophic oil accidents are inevitable,” they write, sharing Newsweek’s safe certitude.

Satan Forgiven

Perhaps to the chagrin of environmentalists, Exxon--popularly branded as the Great Satan of the affair--comes off relatively lightly in both stories. The oil giant is portrayed partly as the victim of its own terrible sense of public relations, constantly making gaffes that obscured the work it was doing to clean up Prince William Sound.

Both Newsweek and U.S. News betray their essential characters in their cover treatments of the Alaska oil spill. Newsweek seems the smarter of the two, using the question “Is the damage permanent?” to tempt readers. U.S. News, the most stolid of the newsweeklies despite recent revampings, bills the spill as “The Disaster That Wasn’t,” the kind of headline that tempts only desperate insomniacs.

Meanwhile, Time magazine proves itself the canniest of the three, choosing a disaster that hasn’t quite happened yet--but could any day, maybe even as you turn the pages.

Amazon Perils

Time’s choice for the night at the end of the tunnel is “Torching the Amazon,” a tour of the perils that might be wrought by burning off much of the Amazon rain forest. These dangers include eradication of 1 million species of plants and animals and changing the world’s weather patterns, including accelerating the greenhouse effect.

Writer Eugene Linden gets off to a galloping start on this one, reporting that last year “an estimated 12,350 square miles of Brazilian rain forest--an area larger than Belgium--was reduced to ashes. Anticipating another conflagration this year, scientists, environmentalists and TV crews have journeyed to Porto Velho to marvel and despair at the immolation of these ancient forests.”

Three paragraphs later, however, Linden has slowed to a trot. “Time and again, the forest has defied predictions that it was doomed,” he writes, in a concession to historical fact. But in the next sentence he tries to get back up to speed. “But now the danger is more real and imminent than ever before as loggers level trees, dams flood vast tracts of land and gold miners poison rivers with mercury,” he cautions in a litany of environmental destruction.

Linden’s clincher is a quote from Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution. “The Amazon is a library for life sciences, the world’s greatest pharmaceutical laboratory and a flywheel of climate,” Lovejoy told Time. “It’s a matter of global destiny.”

Now that sounds like the perfect--non-nuclear--cataclysm.

Breaking the Ice

The current Discover magazine is another fruitful source of annihilation titillation. The cover of the September issue carries the teasing headline, “The Melting of Antarctica.” The desolate continent--best known lately as the site of a worrisome hole in the ozone layer--could lose its massive ice caps with unbearable consequences to the rest of the earth, reports writer Michael Parfit.

Regrettably, the editors let it slip too soon just how speculative the article is. The story begins with an awkward but revealing introductory blurb: “On the great expanse of the Antarctic ice sheet, a group of patient researchers try (sic) to determine if the ice they’re standing on is on a slow slide toward disaster.” It’s enough to make you wish they were wearing ice skates.

Those with the will to plod on will find just how remote the disaster is. Deep in his article, Parfit confesses, “The fate of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is not the crisis of the hour--its potential impact could still be generations away.”

Job Replacement

Magazine editor becomes talking head: New Republic editor Michael Kinsley is leaving the magazine to replace Tom Braden as co-host of Cable News Network’s “Crossfire” political talk show. He will be replaced by contributing editor Hendrik Hertzberg. It’s the second time that Hertzberg, a former speech writer for former President Jimmy Carter, has replaced Kinsley, editor of the magazine from 1979 to 1981 and from 1985 until now.