RUST COMMENTERY: AS MORE PEOPLE INVEST IN STOCKS, THEY'LL UNDERSTAND ISSUES BETTER

I was intrigued by a recent observation that 43 percent of the adults in the United States today own stocks. As more and more people invest in stocks they will better understand the economics of corporate profit, the cost to the owners of increased taxes and the downside to the Social Security system as it now is implemented.

It's going to become harder and harder to demagogue the issue by calling for the derisiveness of soak-the-rich tax schemes.

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Making every man and woman a millionaire: The Dow Jones Industrial Average in this century has increased more than 120-fold despite cataclysmic wars, depressions, recessions and inflations, and is now at about 8,500. If it does as well in the next 100 years, it should reach the 1,000,000 level around the 2090s. And that growth does not count dividends. Of course, the Dow advance comes to an annual compounded growth rate of about 6 percent, but by avoiding disastrous mistakes similar to those we made in this century, we could do even better in the next.

Given that perspective, why shouldn't we phase in a new Social Security system for younger people, in which the bulk of their payroll taxes would go to their own retirement accounts? As things now stand, without major payroll tax boosts the actual return for our under-age-30 citizens will be decidedly negative. A new system would both avoid new levies and give participants vastly more than we are getting now.

Taxaholics: Even though federal revenue continues to flood in, the administration never misses an opportunity to boost taxes. In his budget, the president proposed slapping taxes on new sales of variable annuities. (People who already own annuities will have a one-time opportunity to switch from one variable contract to another, tax free.) Clinton's levies include taxing income and capital gains if the holder transfers assets from one subaccount (a mutual-fund-type account) to another. In other words, these vehicles couldn't be used to shelter assets for future retirement. Typical of the Clinton crowd. On the one hand, they pay lip service to capital creation; on the other, they do their darnedest to thwart it. -- Steve Forbes

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Recently I missed THE step when getting off a snorkeling boat and painfully, but not seriously, injured my left leg ... .

I felt rather dumb about the incident until I read the following:

"The mayor of Bangkok, Thailand, falls through open manhole en route to wreath-laying ceremony."

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Wednesday is always a busy day for me (though my column appears on Wednesday, I normally write it on Sunday or Monday) but today is especially noteworthy as events will reveal.

I start off with a 6:30 a.m. men's Bible study small group (which I'll be leading today), have hopefully minor surgery at 8 a.m., attend a major industry announcement at 10 a.m., a corporate business meeting at 11 a.m., an editorial board meeting at 2:30 p.m. which includes an update from Congresswoman JO ANN EMERSON, and a series of events also at 2, 4, 5:30 and 7 p.m. which concern additional growth steps for our community and a visit from the former president of Nigeria.

We will have a lot of detailed news in our Thursday edition, but we're honoring the press release dates this Wednesday on stories we have been following and which I have personally been involved with for months.

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Rush Limbaugh's ratings way up -- everywhere! Despite predictions by an industry trade publication that his star was falling, Rush Limbaugh's latest quarter ratings are way up across the board -- in virtually every major market.

The Rush Limbaugh radio program remains, no matter how you slice it, far and away the leader of talk radio shows across the nation, according to the most recent Arbitron ratings.

The latest numbers show Limbaugh's program consistently pulling much bigger numbers than either his lead-ins or the shows that follow.

Last month, Talkers magazine, a small tabloid hoping to make a name for itself as an industry trade publication, reported that Limbaugh's show had fallen behind both Laura Schlessinger's advice program and Howard Stern's show in some major markets. Radio's official rating system shows otherwise, with Limbaugh the clear front-runner.

The actual numbers are right out of ARBITRON books (an industry ratings bible).

Rush observed that "mine is the most-listened-to show on each station, something that has been common practically since my show began in 1988. My show spikes, which means that I significantly improve on my lead-in and the show following me does not hold the lead. This too is common."

Here are the fall 1997 ratings averages for Limbaugh's show, followed by winter 1998. Also provided are the hours preceding and following his time slot on each station to illustrate the spike.

FALL WINTER HOUR HOUR

97 98 PRE POST

WABC,

New York 4.1 4.9 3.0 2.8

KFI, Los

Angeles 5,9 7.7 4.4 6.5

WLS,

Chicago 5.5 5.6 3.2 4.6

KMOX, St.

Louis 11.8 12.9 9.0 7.3

WWDB-FM,

Philadelphia 4.8 7.5 6.0 5.9

WXYT,

Detroit 6.3 6.5 3.3 4.2

KOGO, San

Diego 6.7 8.2 4.1 5.8

WIBC,

Indianapolis 10.4 11.7 9.1 5.7

WWL, New

Orleans 8.9 12.0 11.6 7.0

KMBZ,

Kansas City 9.0 9.1 5.5 4.6

KSTP,

Minneapolis 7.4 7.8 5.7 8.6

WGST,

Atlanta 6.8 9.3 3.5 4.1

WFLA,

Tampa 7.2 8.3 6.4 6.4

WINZ,

Miami 3.2 3.3 2.9 2.5

KKAR,

Omaha 8.6 11.5 6.4 3.6

WHAS,

Louisville 10.6 13.0 11.3 11.1

WREC,

Memphis 6.0 6.6 2.3 2.3

KFYI,

Phoenix 8.3 8.9 4.8 6.1

WISN,

Milwaukee 7.9 9.1 3.8 9.0

KFBK,

Sacramento 16.2 16.4 11.4 10.4

WGY,

Albany 10.7 13.5 8.2 6.7

KHVH,

Honolulu 3.0 3.9 3.8 2.6

KTOK,

Oklahoma City 7.4 11.1 9.4 5.0

WERC,

Birmingham 8.5 8.9 8.7 4.8

While 2 or 3 ratings points are good by radio standards ... Arbitron shows Limbaugh in the 8 range with St. Louis (12.9), Indianapolis (11.7), New Orleans (12), Kansas City (9.1), Atlanta (9.3), Omaha (13.5), Oklahoma City (11.1) -- in every instance scoring higher than the radio programs before and after him.

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TIME and NEWSWEEK magazines today are seven times more likely than they were 20 years ago to have the same cover as People, according to a new study of journalism trends.

The study was conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a group aimed at getting journalists to consider their standards and public responsibilities.

It found that, in the last two decades, the mainstream news media have shifted their coverage toward lifestyle, celebrity and entertainment reporting and away from government and foreign affairs coverage.

They have also scaled back hard news and emphasized a feature-style approach to stories.

From 1977 to 1997, the number of government stories dropped 38 percent, from one in three stories to one in five. At the same time, the number of stories about celebrities or entertainment tripled, from one in every 50 to one in 14.

On TV, prime-time news magazines have all but abandoned covering government, social welfare and economics over the past 20 years. Instead, they now focus on lifestyle and consumer news, the study found.

"Part of this is there are different kinds of people in the newsroom, more women and minorities, and we're defining what we cover more broadly. That's probably a good thing," Tom Rosenstiel, a former Los Angeles Times media critic, said. He is director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Rosenstiel said he is more troubled by the shift in reporting style.

"We're increasingly standing between the news and the audience, framing it and trying to add an interpretation, " he said. "We may be trying to make it relevant, but we may be getting in the way. We're providing more context and less news."

The two-part study examined 6,020 stories in 16 news outlets over 20 years. It studied Time and Newsweek covers for all of 1977, 1987 and 1997.

Newspaper information was obtained from computer databases, TV broadcasts from the Vanderbilt Archives and the news magazines were found in the Library of Congress.

All media were also examined for six weeks of content from Oct. 2 to Nov. 21, 1997.

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No Democratic senator has abandoned President Clinton on Monica Lewinsky, but three Democrats over the weekend called for a full investigation into the China connection: Biden, Kerry and Moynihan. Biden said someone should go to jail if campaign contributions from a Chinese army general led to the transfer of U.S. technology.

Meanwhile, the administration continues its cooperation with China. On Monday, May 18, believe it or not, a delegation from China's Ministry of Public Security -- its secret police -- visited the U.S. and got a tour and VIP briefing at the FBI. Outrageous!

~Gary Rust is president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.