An Israeli attorney's 1987 comment to "The Christian Science Monitor", that his country had never "tried to root out the PLO in the Arab street" was the first modern use in its present sense without the scare quotes. By the end of the decade it came into wide use in both American academic and popular media, as coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada dominated news from the region. This may have been the result of geopolitical shifts taking place at the same time. "The New York Times" language columnist William Safire anonymously quoted a Middle East expert who told him that before the late 1980s the term "Arab masses" had been used instead. "With the eclipse of the Soviet Union, that phrase disappeared because [it] had too much of a Marxist–Soviet–Communist tilt to it." In his 1992 paper on the Arab street as a political phenomenon, David Pollock uses "Arab masses" only once, and in quotes.