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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM NOVEMBER 15, 2006
So much for the decision to drop Stay The Course as the slogan for fighting the Iraq War. For the third day this week, all three networks led with Iraq, this time their Pentagon correspondents covered the appearance of Gen John Abizaid at Senate Armed Service Committee hearings. As ABC's Jonathan Karl (subscription required) put it: "Abizaid rejected almost every major proposal for changing course in Iraq."
TYNDALL PICKS FOR NOVEMBER 15, 2006: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
IRAQ HEARINGS So much for the decision to drop Stay The Course as the slogan for fighting the Iraq War. For the third day this week, all three networks led with Iraq, this time their Pentagon correspondents covered the appearance of Gen John Abizaid at Senate Armed Service Committee hearings. As ABC's Jonathan Karl (subscription required) put it: "Abizaid rejected almost every major proposal for changing course in Iraq."
CBS' David Martin led with Abizaid's admission that even if the US wanted a military buildup, there are not enough troops available for permanent reinforcements. He quoted Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY): "Hope is not a strategy." Replied Abizaid: "Despair is not a method." And NBC's Jim Miklaszewski's report countered Abizaid's reassurances with the Defense Intelligence Agency finding that violence in Iraq is increasing in "scope, complexity and lethality." NBC's Andrea Mitchell's profile of the so-called wise heads of the Iraq Study Group featured this quip from former Presidential aide David Gergen: "It is as if the White House is outsourcing its foreign policy."
FLIGHT PATTERNS All three networks also covered US Airways' $8bn offer to buy out the bankrupt Delta Airlines. NBC's Tom Costello's headline was the size of the resulting airline, America's largest with 350 worldwide destinations. CNBC's Phil LeBeau (at the end of the Costello package) predicted that if the merger goes ahead the remainder of the industry would consolidate, resulting in four or five megacarriers. "It stinks for passengers," was the paraphrase of critics offered by CBS' Bob Orr, envisaging fewer cheap seats, fewer flights and more crowded planes.
ABC anchor Charles Gibson was in Atlanta, Delta's home town, on his weeklong American Road Trip. Gibson himself (subscription required) offered a feature on the boosterish success of the Georgia Aquarium while Steve Osunsami offered the downside with the potential economic dislocation of a Delta Airlines takeover.
DELIBERATIVE BODY Sen Trent Lott (R-MS), once rejected because of his unabashed nostalgia for Dixiecrat racial segregation, has been rehabilitated to the GOP Senate leadership. NBC's Chip Reid reported why: Lott knows the rules of the Senate, all the better to organize Republican filibusters. Also in politics, CBS' Gloria Borger handicapped the Democratic Presidential field for 2008 (she surveyed Republicans yesterday) tipping a Rodham Clinton match-up against Barack Obama. Borger claimed Obama voted against the Iraq War--but the rookie senator was not yet elected in 2002.
I WANT MY… Because the Arab-speaking channel of the al-Jazeera news network routinely gets exclusive access to Osama bin Laden's videotape propaganda, CBS' Wyatt Andrews repeated criticism of its newly-launched English-language channel as "Osama TV." By the way, if CBS were to obtain a bin Laden exclusive, airing it would be the right journalistic thing to do, even at the risk of being called names by Andrews' sources.
Andrews quoted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--"vicious, inaccurate, inexcusable"--to demonstrate how "most Americans" do not like the channel. How would they know? No US cable and satellite channel carries the feed: "TV news they cannot get on TV," Andrews called it.
ABC's Brian Ross has no such scruples about reporting on al-Qaeda and its supporters. Alexis Debat of his Investigative team smuggled a camera into an Islamic festival outside Lahore, where Ross' sources claim English radicals of Pakistani descent were recruited for last year's London suicide bomb attacks. Ross added that al-Qaeda is having an easier time recruiting in Pakistan following last month's CIA drone attack on a madrasah that killed 80.
IMAGINE THAT Last decade, NBC was the network that most egregious in its overcoverage of the OJ Simpson trial. It is appropriate, then, that NBC was the only network to assign a reporter, George Lewis, to If I Did It, the novel by the former football star. The book is an imaginary reenactment of the murder of his ex-wife, for which the author was acquitted, as if he himself were the killer. Lewis added that the plot is also to be presented as on TV by FOX--after NBC was offered the special but turned it down.
CBS' David Martin led with Abizaid's admission that even if the US wanted a military buildup, there are not enough troops available for permanent reinforcements. He quoted Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY): "Hope is not a strategy." Replied Abizaid: "Despair is not a method." And NBC's Jim Miklaszewski's report countered Abizaid's reassurances with the Defense Intelligence Agency finding that violence in Iraq is increasing in "scope, complexity and lethality." NBC's Andrea Mitchell's profile of the so-called wise heads of the Iraq Study Group featured this quip from former Presidential aide David Gergen: "It is as if the White House is outsourcing its foreign policy."
FLIGHT PATTERNS All three networks also covered US Airways' $8bn offer to buy out the bankrupt Delta Airlines. NBC's Tom Costello's headline was the size of the resulting airline, America's largest with 350 worldwide destinations. CNBC's Phil LeBeau (at the end of the Costello package) predicted that if the merger goes ahead the remainder of the industry would consolidate, resulting in four or five megacarriers. "It stinks for passengers," was the paraphrase of critics offered by CBS' Bob Orr, envisaging fewer cheap seats, fewer flights and more crowded planes.
ABC anchor Charles Gibson was in Atlanta, Delta's home town, on his weeklong American Road Trip. Gibson himself (subscription required) offered a feature on the boosterish success of the Georgia Aquarium while Steve Osunsami offered the downside with the potential economic dislocation of a Delta Airlines takeover.
DELIBERATIVE BODY Sen Trent Lott (R-MS), once rejected because of his unabashed nostalgia for Dixiecrat racial segregation, has been rehabilitated to the GOP Senate leadership. NBC's Chip Reid reported why: Lott knows the rules of the Senate, all the better to organize Republican filibusters. Also in politics, CBS' Gloria Borger handicapped the Democratic Presidential field for 2008 (she surveyed Republicans yesterday) tipping a Rodham Clinton match-up against Barack Obama. Borger claimed Obama voted against the Iraq War--but the rookie senator was not yet elected in 2002.
I WANT MY… Because the Arab-speaking channel of the al-Jazeera news network routinely gets exclusive access to Osama bin Laden's videotape propaganda, CBS' Wyatt Andrews repeated criticism of its newly-launched English-language channel as "Osama TV." By the way, if CBS were to obtain a bin Laden exclusive, airing it would be the right journalistic thing to do, even at the risk of being called names by Andrews' sources.
Andrews quoted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--"vicious, inaccurate, inexcusable"--to demonstrate how "most Americans" do not like the channel. How would they know? No US cable and satellite channel carries the feed: "TV news they cannot get on TV," Andrews called it.
ABC's Brian Ross has no such scruples about reporting on al-Qaeda and its supporters. Alexis Debat of his Investigative team smuggled a camera into an Islamic festival outside Lahore, where Ross' sources claim English radicals of Pakistani descent were recruited for last year's London suicide bomb attacks. Ross added that al-Qaeda is having an easier time recruiting in Pakistan following last month's CIA drone attack on a madrasah that killed 80.
IMAGINE THAT Last decade, NBC was the network that most egregious in its overcoverage of the OJ Simpson trial. It is appropriate, then, that NBC was the only network to assign a reporter, George Lewis, to If I Did It, the novel by the former football star. The book is an imaginary reenactment of the murder of his ex-wife, for which the author was acquitted, as if he himself were the killer. Lewis added that the plot is also to be presented as on TV by FOX--after NBC was offered the special but turned it down.
