Some newspaper stories simply reach out and grab you, so vivid is the mental picture they create. The image that such a good read provides often trumps the picture that television projects.

Exhibit A would be an Associated Press story in Thursday’s newspaper telling of a drunken flight crew on Russia’s leading airline beating up a passenger who had complained about their drunkenness. The male flight attendants were so intoxicated that they “behaved improperly” and only began catering to passengers and hour and a-half into the flight, according to an airline spokeswoman.

“The daily [newspaper] Izvestia quoted another passenger as saying that half of the food the crew served ended up on the floor, leaving the aisle strewn with debris,” the AP story reported.

The passenger who had the temerity to demand to be served by a sober flight attendant left the plane at his Siberian destination with an impressive black eye and a damaged ego and was carted off to a doctor, even as police opened a criminal case against the airline employees. It was not the airline’s finest hour, public relations-wise.

Now, I ask you: Who could read that item and not have forced upon his mind’s eye a robust impression of that Flight From Hell?

For openers, the pre-skirmish conversation amongst the parties involved was likely a doozy. You can pretty much imagine how that phase must have gone, until the first vodka-fueled punch was thrown. Factor in passengers screaming, little kids crying, an over-turned drink cart blocking would-be intervenors trying to intervene, and spilled borscht greasing the floor to make things interesting under foot and you have the ingredients for one of those dumb reality television shows that are all the craze.

Another news story that provoked rich mental images was the one belatedly disclosing that former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger had lifted from the National Archives classified documents concerning the Clinton regime’s anti-terrorism efforts, or lack thereof. Berger had been reviewing the material to determine which documents should be provided to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He resigned this week as an adviser to the John Kerry presidential campaign because of the incident.

Berger said he knowingly removed handwritten notes “by placing them in his jacket and pants and inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.” He chalked the entire undertaking up to “sloppiness,” the sloppy part apparently being that he got caught.

The mind’s image has Berger – coat, pants pockets and cummerbund stuffed to overflowing with the secret papers – glancing furtively about while “inadvertently” completing the job by loading up his briefcase. Waddling out the front door of the joint, he bulges at the seams like a bag lady who has just liberated half of the Blue Light Special stock from the local Kmart. Nixon’s Watergate break-in, it ain’t. But you work with what you have.

Berger returned most of the documents, the Associated Press news story reported, but some, which he said he had “accidentally” discarded, are missing. The only surprise in that development, of course, is that anyone could ever be surprised. If Las Vegas odds makers were making book on which will surface first – the missing documents, or Jimmy Hoffa – the smart money would surely be on Hoffa. There is about as much chance of those babies reappearing as there is of President Bush’s microfilmed Alabama National Guard duty records, said to be “damaged beyond use,” being made whole any time soon.

Democrats professed to be shocked – shocked, they said – that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the political hybrid that Texas Republicans hatched when they crossed a bantam rooster with a pit bull, would puff himself up with glorious indignation to the point that his head nearly exploded with alleged concern about the “grave national security crisis” Berger had created.

Republicans said they were disappointed and their feelings had been terribly hurt, as well, to think that former president Bill Clinton would hint of dirty tricks on their part in the breaking of the news story about Berger’s sloppy operation. It was “interesting,” Clinton said, that the incident came to light on the eve of the 9-11 commission’s report that was expected to be critical of the Bush administration. Especially since Berger had told his story to federal investigators way back in October of last year. Talk about your stale news.

The image invoked there was of back-room Republican campaign strategists high-fiving each other and drinking a toast to the power of the accidentally well-timed inadvertent coincidence. You wouldn’t get that picture on television.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net