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I spent the end of August and the beginning of September on vacation in Vietnam--with side trips to Cambodia and Thailand. I must recommend the black chicken in a medicinal herb broth in Hanoi…the steamed pig brain with clams in Saigon…and sea snails with lemon grass and ginger in Hue. Swimming in the South China Sea at sunrise is cool…as is watching the sun set above the onetime DMZ at a formerly French hill station, now a Vietnamese national park…as is the air conditioning in the sleeper car of the overnight train from Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City. A Sunday afternoon at the racetrack in HCMC is too darn hot.
Anyway, since I have been gone, the three network newscasts have split on their selection for most newsworthy story. NBC has decided to own the H1N1 swine 'flu (67 min v ABC 47, CBS 40). CBS, led by this week's saturation coverage on The Road Ahead, has decided to focus on the Afghanistan War (78 min v ABC 42, NBC 36). ABC's most heavily-covered single story was President Barack Obama's push for healthcare reform, although it did not cover that debate any more (59 min v CBS 59, NBC 56) than the other two newscasts.
The President made sure that healthcare topped the news agenda by using his bully pulpit for a speech to a Joint Session of Congress. In addition, all three newscasts made an honest effort at filing fact-checkers and explainers about aspects of the healthcare debate. Would abortion be covered by Medicaid? Would terminally-ill patients be encouraged to die quickly? Would immigrants receive health benefits? Whose taxes would be raised? What is a public option anyway? What about not-for-profit co-ops? Why are healthcare premiums so expensive? Which sectors of the medical-industrial complex have most clout? Often these explainers came with logo and label: CBS called its series a Users' Guide to Healthcare…ABC used Fact Check…NBC offered Making Sense of it All.
The other major headline grabber while I was away was Edward Kennedy, dead of brain cancer at age 77. The senator's death accounted for the two heaviest single days of coverage, on August 26th and 27th. Check out Brian Williams' obituary on NBC, John Donvan's essay on the sorrows he suffered--and inflicted--on ABC, and former speechwriter Jeff Greenfield's thoughts on EMK's oratory on CBS.
President Obama's honeymoon ended during August as coverage of his opposition crossed over from ideological niches to the mainstream media--and the MSM are nowhere more mainstream than the network nightly newscasts are. So we heard about Rep Joe Wilson heckling Obama for fibbing about immigrants…James O'Keefe, the prankster pimp, whose video made ACORN poverty activists look venal…the parents who feared Presidential indoctrination of their back-to-school children…the White House's green jobs activist and 9/11 conspiracy petitioner Van Jones…Jimmy Carter's suspicions of racist motives in the most vitriolic of Obama's critics…and populist opinion monger Glenn "I am no journalist" Beck--the one who called Obama himself a racist--who kicked off @katiecouric, the CBS anchor's new online in-depth interview series.
There was a tsunami in Samoa (27 min) and an earthquake in Sumatra (21 min) and floods in suburban Atlanta (18 min). Hurricane Bill (15 min) swept a wave-watching seven-year-old girl to her death in Maine. Yet the major natural disaster as far as the network news was concerned was the forest fire in Los Angeles County. NBC (41 min v ABC 18, CBS 17), owned coverage of the blaze, sending its volunteer firefighter anchorman to Los Angeles to check that Mount Wilson's telecoms towers survived.
The Afghanistan War (156 min) aside, the major news overseas was made by the diplomatic jockeying over Iran's nuclear program (38 min). The election in Afghanistan was widely criticized for being rigged by the incumbent Hamid Karzai but not widely covered as such. Contrast the time spent on Afghanistan's election to the protests against vote rigging in next-door Iran. The networks have devoted six times more attention to the suspect Iranian vote so far this year compared with the suspect Afghan one (183 min v 30).
Terrorism made waves in the networks' news agenda for the first time during the Obama Administration. The conspiracy arrest of Najibullah Zazi, a Denver taxi driver, accused of trying to manufacture explosives from women's beauty products, was most newsworthy (40 min). Next came the Justice Department's decision to launch a criminal investigation into whether the CIA tortured terrorist suspects (18 min) and Scotland's decision to release abdel-Baset al-Megrahi (16 min), the terminally-ill Libyan inmate it had imprisoned for blowing up Pan Am 103. When CNN falsely alerted us that the Potomac River was under terrorist attack on September 11th, the networks covered (8 min) their cable colleagues' mistake. Also check out Sheila MacVicar's creepy tale on CBS of a bungled assassination plot in Saudi Arabia.
A couple of local crimes qualified for that rare crossover to attract national attention. The case of Jaycee Dugard (24 min) was sensational enough that the networks were fully justified in picking it up: she was an eleven-year-old girl when she was kidnapped, now found alive with two daughters presumably fathered by the man who is accused of imprisoning her for 18 years. Annie Le (17 min) was the 24-year-old bride-to-be who was found murdered on her wedding day in the Yale University laboratory where she was a graduate researcher. There was no good reason for this Connecticut case to rise to national scrutiny, truly a dog days story.
In celebrity news, Jacko died of an overdose of anesthetics…David Letterman accused a CBS News producer of trying to blackmail him…CBS News celebrated the life of 60 Minutes' Don Hewitt…Serena cursed out a line judge in Flushing…dog torturer Michael Vick was rehired to play football…Mary--partner of Peter & Paul--died…novelist Dan Brown uses freemasonry to boost Beltway tourism…The Beatles turned animatronic…and Roman Polanski's past caught up with him.
Excellent adventures were enjoyed by ABC's Clarissa Ward and NBC's Adrienne Mong to the Mongolian steppe, by CBS' Mark Strassmann to the Chilean desert, by Miguel Almaguer to Olympic-designated Copacabana Beach, by ABC's Dan Harris to Namibia, by CBS' Kelly Cobiella to The Bahamas…Salacious sex spiced up Mike Taibbi's story about a New York City park for NBC and Brian Ross' coverage of US-Russia diplomacy on ABC…It was not only Time magazine that discovered the depopulation of Detroit: ABC's Barbara Pinto did too and CBS' Dean Reynolds and NBC's Peter Alexander…CBS' Steve Hartman indulged his human interest in taxi drivers here and here…Long careers were ended at a Twinkies bakery, a Pittsburgh saloon and a UPS delivery depot--and by Guiding Light, which stopped selling soap for Procter & Gamble after 73 years…And the prize for the sweetest segment of self-indulgent summer fun goes to NBC's Peter Alexander on the Jersey Shore.
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