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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM NOVEMBER 24, 2006
The theme of the week has been that the usual rituals of light-news Thanksgiving have been upstaged by carnage in Iraq. It happened yet again as Sunni mosques were targeted for reprisal attacks after yesterday's Sadr City bombs. ABC and CBS were still on holiday schedule, however. ABC preempted its nightly newscast for college football and CBS had Russ Mitchell substitute for anchor Katie Couric.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR NOVEMBER 24, 2006: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
BLACK FRIDAY UPSTAGED The theme of the week has been that the usual rituals of light-news Thanksgiving have been upstaged by carnage in Iraq. It happened yet again as Sunni mosques were targeted for reprisal attacks after yesterday's Sadr City bombs. ABC and CBS were still on holiday schedule, however. ABC preempted its nightly newscast for college football and CBS had Russ Mitchell substitute for anchor Katie Couric.
Just like yesterday, Elizabeth Palmer led CBS' newscast and Tom Aspell led NBC's, both from curfew-quitened Baghdad. Aspell recounted the attacks on Sunni mosques in the Huriyah neighborhood: in a "gruesome display of barbarity," six worshippers were doused in kerosene and burned alive. Palmer laid out the "hard-line demands" against Sunnis by Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr: no sectarian killings, no loyalty to al-Qaeda and reparations for desecrated Shiite shrines--plus a timetable for a US troop pullout.
From the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski predicted that the US military might resume its crackdown on Sadr City, the one that was lifted at the Baghdad government's behest earlier this month. CBS' Lara Logan (no link) previewed her profile of Gen John Abizaid for 60 Minutes. Abizaid's major fear is further destabilization from Iraq "into the region as a whole."
RED & BLACK If Baghdad had been calm, the normal lead story would have been so-called Black Friday, the day in the year when retailers' balance sheets traditionally shift out of the red and into the black as the Christmas holiday shopping season begins. Sure enough CNBC's Jane Wells and CBS' Sharyn Alfonsi were assigned to the malls to catch the rush. Wells focused on deep discounts on plasma TV screens. Alfonsi saw "full-contact shopping" by crowds lured by early sales. "Black-&-blue Friday," she joked.
CBS' Sandra Hughes followed up with a cautionary note. With all those credit card charges, aggregate personal debt, not even including home mortgages, has gone from black to red. "The personal savings rate has not dipped so low since the Great Depression."
RADIOACTIVE Urinalysis in London revealed that Polonium 210 was the poison that killed former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. His deathbed accusation fingered President Vladimir Putin personally for his murder. NBC's Dawna Friesen quoted the spy's bereaved father: "He was killed by a little tiny nuclear bomb." Putin denied the charge.
RFK HIGH The former landmark Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles never recovered its onetime glamour after it was the site of the 1968 assassination of then-Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. The Los Angeles school system took advantage of the hoopla surrounding the release of the Hollywood movie Bobby about that dark day to announce the renovation of the Ambassador site as a new school. "A haunted place," NBC's John Larson called it, "once a playground for celebrities and kings--and then abandoned."
CAMPAIGNS FUTURE AND PAST In contemporary politics, the wife of John Edwards, a presumed contender in Campaign 2008, was assigned a freeSpeech commentary by CBS. Elizabeth Edwards suggested a human face on her husband's pro-working-class populist message. Please, she urged, treat those underpaid service workers at the supermarket checkout counters as human beings. "They have names you know. Chances are they were even wearing their names on their shirts. But did you notice?" Edwards added, "decency costs nothing."
And NBC's Chip Reid filed his version of the report ABC's Jeffrey Kofman filed on Wednesday. The dreaded consequence of those electronic voting machines has materialized--no paper trail for a recount in a too-close-to-call election. In his series Making Your Vote Count, Reid noted the irony that the outgoing Congresswomen in Florida's 13th was Katherine Harris, the election official whose handling of the Campaign 2000 recount led to the switch to electronic in the first place. "She said the state would become a national model for smooth elections."
COLLEGE FOOTBALL The Colorado-Nebraska match-up on the gridiron pre-empted ABC's World News on the east coast. At least ABC posted three packages on-line of what we would have seen if the newscast had aired. First, Hilary Brown contributed her take on the reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques in Baghdad.
Next, the crackdown on illegal immigration at the Mexican border has created a shortage of field labor for California agribusiness. John Quinones visited a pear orchard where fruit is rotting on the ground because of a lack of pickers.
And the Person of the Week we missed celebrating was Paul Newman. Together with chef Michel Nischan, the actor is trying to turn suburban Westport Ct back into the New England cultural center it once was. Charles Gibson recounted their idea to combine a community theater with a fine-dining restaurant with a farmers' market…with a go-kart track.
MENTIONED IN PASSING The network newscasts do not assign correspondents to all of the news of the day. If Tyndall Report readers come across videostreamed reports online of stories that were mentioned only in passing, post the link in comments for us to check out
Today's examples: NASA's Surveyor probe has stopped sending signals back from Mars…Iran has beefed up its missile defense with Russia's help…An obituary for Broadway lyricist Betty Comden.
Just like yesterday, Elizabeth Palmer led CBS' newscast and Tom Aspell led NBC's, both from curfew-quitened Baghdad. Aspell recounted the attacks on Sunni mosques in the Huriyah neighborhood: in a "gruesome display of barbarity," six worshippers were doused in kerosene and burned alive. Palmer laid out the "hard-line demands" against Sunnis by Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr: no sectarian killings, no loyalty to al-Qaeda and reparations for desecrated Shiite shrines--plus a timetable for a US troop pullout.
From the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski predicted that the US military might resume its crackdown on Sadr City, the one that was lifted at the Baghdad government's behest earlier this month. CBS' Lara Logan (no link) previewed her profile of Gen John Abizaid for 60 Minutes. Abizaid's major fear is further destabilization from Iraq "into the region as a whole."
RED & BLACK If Baghdad had been calm, the normal lead story would have been so-called Black Friday, the day in the year when retailers' balance sheets traditionally shift out of the red and into the black as the Christmas holiday shopping season begins. Sure enough CNBC's Jane Wells and CBS' Sharyn Alfonsi were assigned to the malls to catch the rush. Wells focused on deep discounts on plasma TV screens. Alfonsi saw "full-contact shopping" by crowds lured by early sales. "Black-&-blue Friday," she joked.
CBS' Sandra Hughes followed up with a cautionary note. With all those credit card charges, aggregate personal debt, not even including home mortgages, has gone from black to red. "The personal savings rate has not dipped so low since the Great Depression."
RADIOACTIVE Urinalysis in London revealed that Polonium 210 was the poison that killed former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. His deathbed accusation fingered President Vladimir Putin personally for his murder. NBC's Dawna Friesen quoted the spy's bereaved father: "He was killed by a little tiny nuclear bomb." Putin denied the charge.
RFK HIGH The former landmark Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles never recovered its onetime glamour after it was the site of the 1968 assassination of then-Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. The Los Angeles school system took advantage of the hoopla surrounding the release of the Hollywood movie Bobby about that dark day to announce the renovation of the Ambassador site as a new school. "A haunted place," NBC's John Larson called it, "once a playground for celebrities and kings--and then abandoned."
CAMPAIGNS FUTURE AND PAST In contemporary politics, the wife of John Edwards, a presumed contender in Campaign 2008, was assigned a freeSpeech commentary by CBS. Elizabeth Edwards suggested a human face on her husband's pro-working-class populist message. Please, she urged, treat those underpaid service workers at the supermarket checkout counters as human beings. "They have names you know. Chances are they were even wearing their names on their shirts. But did you notice?" Edwards added, "decency costs nothing."
And NBC's Chip Reid filed his version of the report ABC's Jeffrey Kofman filed on Wednesday. The dreaded consequence of those electronic voting machines has materialized--no paper trail for a recount in a too-close-to-call election. In his series Making Your Vote Count, Reid noted the irony that the outgoing Congresswomen in Florida's 13th was Katherine Harris, the election official whose handling of the Campaign 2000 recount led to the switch to electronic in the first place. "She said the state would become a national model for smooth elections."
COLLEGE FOOTBALL The Colorado-Nebraska match-up on the gridiron pre-empted ABC's World News on the east coast. At least ABC posted three packages on-line of what we would have seen if the newscast had aired. First, Hilary Brown contributed her take on the reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques in Baghdad.
Next, the crackdown on illegal immigration at the Mexican border has created a shortage of field labor for California agribusiness. John Quinones visited a pear orchard where fruit is rotting on the ground because of a lack of pickers.
And the Person of the Week we missed celebrating was Paul Newman. Together with chef Michel Nischan, the actor is trying to turn suburban Westport Ct back into the New England cultural center it once was. Charles Gibson recounted their idea to combine a community theater with a fine-dining restaurant with a farmers' market…with a go-kart track.
MENTIONED IN PASSING The network newscasts do not assign correspondents to all of the news of the day. If Tyndall Report readers come across videostreamed reports online of stories that were mentioned only in passing, post the link in comments for us to check out
Today's examples: NASA's Surveyor probe has stopped sending signals back from Mars…Iran has beefed up its missile defense with Russia's help…An obituary for Broadway lyricist Betty Comden.
