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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM DECEMBER 22, 2006
The start of the long holiday weekend was fittingly marked with very little news and plenty of sentiment. The Story of the Day was not dictated by how the networks led off their newscasts but by how they closed them. All three ended with features about volunteers supplying Christmas cheer to the needy.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR DECEMBER 22, 2006: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CHRISTMAS STORIES The start of the long holiday weekend was fittingly marked with very little news and plenty of sentiment. The Story of the Day was not dictated by how the networks led off their newscasts but by how they closed them. All three ended with features about volunteers supplying Christmas cheer to the needy.
On NBC's Making a Difference, Kevin Tibbles brought us Larry Stewart, a self-styled Secret Santa who has handed out $100 bills to strangers in Missouri for 26 years--a total of $1m over that span. ABC's Persons of the Week were Jake and Sparky Kennedy, who have thrown an annual Christmas in the City party for the past 18 years. Charles Gibson (subscription required) called it a "no-holds-barred, all-donated, all-volunteer holiday party for all of Boston's homeless children," 2,800 guests in all.
And on CBS' Assignment America Steve Hartman told us about Kansas City's Car Santa. Terry Franz is a former used-car dealer who found it was easier to give patch-up junkers away than to sell them. So now he bestows free automobiles on poor people in need of wheels. Hartman extended the gift by persuading his segment's sponsor, ExxonMobil, to pay off Franz' own car loan. By the way, CBS' Katie Couric mentioned in passing earlier in the newscast that ExxonMobil's court-ordered $5bn payment of damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska had been slashed in half on appeal.
CHRISTMAS SHOPPING Only CBS went beyond feelgood closing features in its Christmas coverage. Couric offered trivia too: this season's bestselling product is Tickle Me Elmo and a poll says that 86% of us believed in Santa Claus once upon a time "before we became jaded adults." Anthony Mason told us that gift cards, namely money in disguise, are rapidly replacing concrete presents. This year's $25bn in total card value will exceed toys, games, music, movies or jewelry. As one donor rationalized it: "We give them the gift of shopping."
To round off NBC's newscast, Brian Williams replied to an e-mailer's request for a greeting of peace and harmony. He offered the following sentiment: "Christmas is what you make of it and it still does not hurt to dream"--which falls a little short of the request.
DENVER DAY THREE For its lead, ABC persisted with the snows in Denver. For the third straight day the blizzard that disrupted airline travel led off its newscast. Denver International Airport finally reopened at noon yet Dean Reynolds told us that 100,000 passengers' travel for Christmas will be stymied: "Unclogging the nationwide back-up will take days."
LACROSSE COLLAPSE The latest twist in the sex scandal of the Duke University lacrosse team was the choice for the lead at CBS and NBC.
A trio of players had been accused of an array of depraved behavior towards a stripper hired by the team for an off-campus party. When the stripper changed her account of the evening's debauchery, the local prosecutor dropped the accusations of rape against the three young men. Now they stand charged merely with kidnapping her and sexual assault. CBS' Mark Strassmann reran the exclusive soundbites from the defendants asserting their innocence that were first aired on his network's 60 Minutes. And CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen (at the tail of the Strassmann videostream) predicted to anchor Couric that the entire case may collapse: "The prosecution is losing momentum."
YOU ASKED FOR IT It is a specialty at NBC to cover the long slow decline of Detroit's Big Three and the assignment of CNBC's Philip LeBeau to an In Depth feature fit that trend. The latest development is that General Motors is on the verge of losing its status as the globe's foremost seller of automobiles to Toyota. The Japanese company, which started making cars only in 1966, plans to make 9.4m vehicles next year while making profits of $9.9bn. GM plans to make just 9.1m vehicles and all three Detroit automakers combined to make only $4.4bn in profits in 2006.
FAR FLUNG Yellow-ribbon journalism was the order of the day at NBC. It filed a three-part round-up A Long Way From Home about the deployment of 200,000-or-so US military personnel at the ends of Earth. Praying for peace is the daily assignment along the Korean peninsula's De-Militarized Zone, ceasefire duty officer Chris Dignan--unarmed but equipped with a bullhorn--told Martin Savidge. Martin Fletcher displayed the gingerbread village, nine days in the making, for the Christmas lunch for a USArmy battalion of the 10th Mountain Division in Jalalabad: "one in seven men here has been hit by the enemy" since February.
Meanwhile in Iraq, Jim Maceda went on patrol with a platoon from the USArmy's First Cavalry Division, whose job it is to back up Baghdad police as they kick in doors and dodge sniper fire. Their Christmas holiday "will start and end with another dangerous mission."
MIXED NEWS FROM IRAQ ABC and CBS also filed Iraq-related stories. CBS' Randall Pinkston gave us the good news about the an-Nil neighborhood of Baghdad, which has so far avoided sectarian violence: "children play on the street; young men hang out; businesses open their shops."
ABC's Pierre Thomas (subscription required) told us the bad. Young Moslem men from many countries in Europe--France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain--have volunteered to join the anti-US insurgency in Iraq. These "Iraq War alumni" may now be returning home, battle-hardened and ready to recruit their co-religionists. "People learn through practice, not through theory," ABC News Consultant Anthony Cordesman explained.
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: Purple Heart medal ceremonies for war casualties at Walter Reed Hospital was conducted by President George Bush…NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery completed its mission.
On NBC's Making a Difference, Kevin Tibbles brought us Larry Stewart, a self-styled Secret Santa who has handed out $100 bills to strangers in Missouri for 26 years--a total of $1m over that span. ABC's Persons of the Week were Jake and Sparky Kennedy, who have thrown an annual Christmas in the City party for the past 18 years. Charles Gibson (subscription required) called it a "no-holds-barred, all-donated, all-volunteer holiday party for all of Boston's homeless children," 2,800 guests in all.
And on CBS' Assignment America Steve Hartman told us about Kansas City's Car Santa. Terry Franz is a former used-car dealer who found it was easier to give patch-up junkers away than to sell them. So now he bestows free automobiles on poor people in need of wheels. Hartman extended the gift by persuading his segment's sponsor, ExxonMobil, to pay off Franz' own car loan. By the way, CBS' Katie Couric mentioned in passing earlier in the newscast that ExxonMobil's court-ordered $5bn payment of damages for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska had been slashed in half on appeal.
CHRISTMAS SHOPPING Only CBS went beyond feelgood closing features in its Christmas coverage. Couric offered trivia too: this season's bestselling product is Tickle Me Elmo and a poll says that 86% of us believed in Santa Claus once upon a time "before we became jaded adults." Anthony Mason told us that gift cards, namely money in disguise, are rapidly replacing concrete presents. This year's $25bn in total card value will exceed toys, games, music, movies or jewelry. As one donor rationalized it: "We give them the gift of shopping."
To round off NBC's newscast, Brian Williams replied to an e-mailer's request for a greeting of peace and harmony. He offered the following sentiment: "Christmas is what you make of it and it still does not hurt to dream"--which falls a little short of the request.
DENVER DAY THREE For its lead, ABC persisted with the snows in Denver. For the third straight day the blizzard that disrupted airline travel led off its newscast. Denver International Airport finally reopened at noon yet Dean Reynolds told us that 100,000 passengers' travel for Christmas will be stymied: "Unclogging the nationwide back-up will take days."
LACROSSE COLLAPSE The latest twist in the sex scandal of the Duke University lacrosse team was the choice for the lead at CBS and NBC.
A trio of players had been accused of an array of depraved behavior towards a stripper hired by the team for an off-campus party. When the stripper changed her account of the evening's debauchery, the local prosecutor dropped the accusations of rape against the three young men. Now they stand charged merely with kidnapping her and sexual assault. CBS' Mark Strassmann reran the exclusive soundbites from the defendants asserting their innocence that were first aired on his network's 60 Minutes. And CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen (at the tail of the Strassmann videostream) predicted to anchor Couric that the entire case may collapse: "The prosecution is losing momentum."
YOU ASKED FOR IT It is a specialty at NBC to cover the long slow decline of Detroit's Big Three and the assignment of CNBC's Philip LeBeau to an In Depth feature fit that trend. The latest development is that General Motors is on the verge of losing its status as the globe's foremost seller of automobiles to Toyota. The Japanese company, which started making cars only in 1966, plans to make 9.4m vehicles next year while making profits of $9.9bn. GM plans to make just 9.1m vehicles and all three Detroit automakers combined to make only $4.4bn in profits in 2006.
FAR FLUNG Yellow-ribbon journalism was the order of the day at NBC. It filed a three-part round-up A Long Way From Home about the deployment of 200,000-or-so US military personnel at the ends of Earth. Praying for peace is the daily assignment along the Korean peninsula's De-Militarized Zone, ceasefire duty officer Chris Dignan--unarmed but equipped with a bullhorn--told Martin Savidge. Martin Fletcher displayed the gingerbread village, nine days in the making, for the Christmas lunch for a USArmy battalion of the 10th Mountain Division in Jalalabad: "one in seven men here has been hit by the enemy" since February.
Meanwhile in Iraq, Jim Maceda went on patrol with a platoon from the USArmy's First Cavalry Division, whose job it is to back up Baghdad police as they kick in doors and dodge sniper fire. Their Christmas holiday "will start and end with another dangerous mission."
MIXED NEWS FROM IRAQ ABC and CBS also filed Iraq-related stories. CBS' Randall Pinkston gave us the good news about the an-Nil neighborhood of Baghdad, which has so far avoided sectarian violence: "children play on the street; young men hang out; businesses open their shops."
ABC's Pierre Thomas (subscription required) told us the bad. Young Moslem men from many countries in Europe--France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain--have volunteered to join the anti-US insurgency in Iraq. These "Iraq War alumni" may now be returning home, battle-hardened and ready to recruit their co-religionists. "People learn through practice, not through theory," ABC News Consultant Anthony Cordesman explained.
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: Purple Heart medal ceremonies for war casualties at Walter Reed Hospital was conducted by President George Bush…NASA's Space Shuttle Discovery completed its mission.
