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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JULY 20, 2007
NBC made a big push to elevate the constitutional crisis facing President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan into the Story of the Day, leading with a report from the State Department followed by an interview with a leader of the foreign policy establishment, retired diplomat Richard Haass. Neither of the other two networks took an interest in the upheaval in Islamabad so, again, the Iraq War was the most heavily covered story on all three newscasts combined, with CBS choosing President George Bush's plea for patience as its lead. ABC, like NBC, led with a story neither of the other newscasts even mentioned--continuing problems with the security screening of cargo containers at ports of entry.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JULY 20, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
SURGE LIKELY TO BECOME PERMANENT FIXTURE NBC made a big push to elevate the constitutional crisis facing President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan into the Story of the Day, leading with a report from the State Department followed by an interview with a leader of the foreign policy establishment, retired diplomat Richard Haass. Neither of the other two networks took an interest in the upheaval in Islamabad so, again, the Iraq War was the most heavily covered story on all three newscasts combined, with CBS choosing President George Bush's plea for patience as its lead. ABC, like NBC, led with a story neither of the other newscasts even mentioned--continuing problems with the security screening of cargo containers at ports of entry.
CBS' White House correspondent Bill Plante heard the President assert "the importance of giving our military the time they need" and drew the conclusion that the progress report scheduled to be delivered to Congress in September would not contain positive news. "The administration had hoped to show that the troops surge was a success but there now appears to be no way to meet those expectations that soon."
It is time for reporters to find another word than "surge" to describe the US military strategy in Iraq. A surge is defined as a quick, temporary increase, like a rushing wave, followed by reversion to a previous status--think why computers have surge protectors. So when Plante quotes Gen Rick Lynch hoping that his tactics will bear fruit "15 months from now" Plante misspeaks when he paraphrases that soundbite: "The surge can still succeed." Plante predicted that Bush will "very likely" agree to maintaining the troop build-up beyond September. This reinforcement of 30,000 troops--announced in January, completed in June--has been gradual and its concomitant change of tactics seems fated to be longlasting. A surge it ain't.
The other two networks covered the politics of the war. NBC's David Gregory noted how Republican Presidential candidates "have largely remained supportive," perceiving "the first sign of a break" in a quote from Rudolph Giuliani to The New York Times in which he implied that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had detracted from US pressure on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) told us about the "pointed response" from the Pentagon after Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton requested a briefing on its contingency planning for a troop pullout. The Pentagon asserted that any such discussion "reinforces enemy propaganda." Tapper added that "publicly Pentagon officials insist they are focused exclusively on the surge strategy"--there is that misused word again--even as his anonymous sources "close to the Pentagon" told him that general logistical pullout planning is under way. CBS' David Martin already filed an Exclusive about that planning last week.
MUSHARRAF’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED Monitoring Pakistan from her beat at the State Department, NBC's Andrea Mitchell hailed "an historic victory for opponents to the embattled president." Pervez Musharraf's decision to fire the nation's chief justice was repudiated by the courts in "an unprecedented show of independence." Mitchell noted a "growing pro-democracy movement" against the military strongman. Over the past six years, the United States has spent $10bn to support Musharraf's regime and now critics of the Bush Administration say "he may not survive politically and the US has no Plan B."
So NBC anchor Brian Williams sat down with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Haass pointed not to the democratic activists but to the recent wave of protests and suicide bombings from radical Islamists: "The military is unhappy with him increasingly because he cannot keep order." Haass added that all that aid from the US gives him the image of "a puppet." He called this "the beginning of the end of the Musharraf era" and predicted his replacement, not by civilian democrats but by "another senior military man, a member of the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan."
Why did NBC decide that Pakistan matters so much to make it its lead? Haass used an odd phrase--the "nightmare that keeps me and others up at night"--to introduce his answer: "the loss of political control, of central government control, over its nuclear weapons."
CLARITY All three networks assigned a reporter to decipher the White House's executive order forbidding the CIA from torturing prisoners. Spies are forbidden from using interrogation techniques that a reasonable person would deem "beyond the bounds of human decency." So mutilation is out, humiliation is out, extreme heat and extreme cold are out. ABC's Martha Raddatz called the guidelines "very vague…there really does seem to be a lot of latitude here" and NBC's Pete Williams noted that "the government will not say what specific methods are allowed."
CBS' Bob Orr offered a hall of mirrors: first he noted that the White House denies any torture had ever been used even before this executive order was released to ban it; then he reported that the CIA detention program that the order is supposed to regulate has never been confirmed even to exist in the first place; nevertheless "the President has long defended past CIA detentions" even though they may not exist. Orr concluded that "on the surface" the purpose of the executive order seemed to be to protect the human rights of captives, yet its true rationale is to offer "legal clarity" to spies.
EXPLODING BANANAS It was five years ago the ABC's Brian Ross launched his investigation into the feasibility of using cargo containers at seaports for weapons smuggling. Back then he demonstrated how uranium evades scanners when encased in lead shields. So it should be no surprise that ABC alone covered the latest technology to scan incoming cargo for radioactive material. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff unveiled the machine as "the wave of the future" at a photo-op in Los Angeles. DHS claims the new device in its $2bn development program has a 95% accuracy rate. Ross countered with the Government Accountability Office number--45%. His unnamed scientist sources told him that "the only real improvement" in the new machines is fewer false positives. Now kitty litter and bananas are no longer mistaken for a nuclear weapon.
URIBE’S POLITICAL WILL At first blush, NBC's report from Colombia on its progress since the narcoguerrilla conflicts of the 1980s seemed completely flattering to Alvaro Uribe, the nation's president. Trish Regan of CNBC filed her report from the former cocaine capital of Medellin in the Andean highlands, where Uribe boasted to her of his "political will." Regan praised the city's booming economy and plummeting crime rate contrasting it with the days when it was "terrorized by drug lord Pablo Escobar and right-wing guerrillas." Then came Regan's provisos: Uribe has not been evenhanded in the civil war, "bombing cocaine labs and raiding guerrilla camps" but not targeting "right-wing paramilitary groups;" prosperity in trade, finance and construction still leaves nearly half of the population beneath the poverty line; and Uribe's pacification is only partial--"paramilitary groups, leftist guerrillas and drug lords continue to operate outside the cities." Uribe's "political will," Regan reflected, is a euphemism for "military force."
LOCATION, LOCATION Property values are booming in the Barracks Row neighborhood of Washington DC, what CBS' Sharyl Attkisson called "a once shabby area" near the US Capitol that has received $2.75m in federal urban renewal funds in the last three years. Those funds are the pet project of Rep Jerry Lewis of Republican from California. The latest investment will be "giant decorative arch kiosks for merchants," Attkisson previewed, "hardly shabby now." Why should a congressman not help our nation's capital prosper? Attkisson explained the catch: Congressional rules dictate that neither members nor their spouses should have any financial interest in an earmarked project. Technically, Lewis' wife has no interest in Barracks Row itself--but her $943m townhouse sits only four blocks away and the rising tide of gentrification helps the neighbors too.
COURIC THE CREDULOUS Sometimes it seems that CBS anchor Katie Couric does not pay attention to the stories her newscast airs. "That was an incredible story," she enthused about Steve Hartman's Assignment America profile of Kyle Lograsso, a five-year-old prodigy who plays golf against adults. "Halfway through I thought: "This is amazing; it is so cute.' And then I realized how incredibly moving it was."
Duh! That cute-and-then-moving switch is par for the course, to coin a phrase. It would have been incredible if the golf prodigy turned out not to have survived a life-threatening illness--infantile cancer made him blind in one eye--before turning out to be both charming and accomplished. As CBS was closing its week of newscasts with Kyle the Duffer consider NBC's Making a Difference and ABC's Person of the Week: one found the blindness hardship angle, the other found the golfing tragic one, in otherwise unemotional news events.
ABC, whose sports division airs the Open Golf tournament from Scotland, had substitute anchor Elizabeth Vargas honor amateur competitor Drew Weaver: Weaver is a collegiate athlete at Virginia Tech, where he happened to be an eyewitness to his fellow student's lethal shooting spree this spring. NBC found a printing press that allowed cameras to show the production of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without risk of a reporter reading the book's secret ending: Lee Cowan is not blind so the 1,500 run of Braille books meant nothing to him.
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: on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell back below 14000 after a single day at that milestone…a federal court found that leukemia contracted by Vietnam War veterans was caused by the toxin Agent Orange…Israel released 250 militant members of the Palestinian Fatah faction from prison…smokers can now resume carrying cigarette lighters onto airline flights…a troop of boy scouts had to be rescued from forest fires in a Utah canyon.
CBS' White House correspondent Bill Plante heard the President assert "the importance of giving our military the time they need" and drew the conclusion that the progress report scheduled to be delivered to Congress in September would not contain positive news. "The administration had hoped to show that the troops surge was a success but there now appears to be no way to meet those expectations that soon."
It is time for reporters to find another word than "surge" to describe the US military strategy in Iraq. A surge is defined as a quick, temporary increase, like a rushing wave, followed by reversion to a previous status--think why computers have surge protectors. So when Plante quotes Gen Rick Lynch hoping that his tactics will bear fruit "15 months from now" Plante misspeaks when he paraphrases that soundbite: "The surge can still succeed." Plante predicted that Bush will "very likely" agree to maintaining the troop build-up beyond September. This reinforcement of 30,000 troops--announced in January, completed in June--has been gradual and its concomitant change of tactics seems fated to be longlasting. A surge it ain't.
The other two networks covered the politics of the war. NBC's David Gregory noted how Republican Presidential candidates "have largely remained supportive," perceiving "the first sign of a break" in a quote from Rudolph Giuliani to The New York Times in which he implied that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had detracted from US pressure on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) told us about the "pointed response" from the Pentagon after Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton requested a briefing on its contingency planning for a troop pullout. The Pentagon asserted that any such discussion "reinforces enemy propaganda." Tapper added that "publicly Pentagon officials insist they are focused exclusively on the surge strategy"--there is that misused word again--even as his anonymous sources "close to the Pentagon" told him that general logistical pullout planning is under way. CBS' David Martin already filed an Exclusive about that planning last week.
MUSHARRAF’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED Monitoring Pakistan from her beat at the State Department, NBC's Andrea Mitchell hailed "an historic victory for opponents to the embattled president." Pervez Musharraf's decision to fire the nation's chief justice was repudiated by the courts in "an unprecedented show of independence." Mitchell noted a "growing pro-democracy movement" against the military strongman. Over the past six years, the United States has spent $10bn to support Musharraf's regime and now critics of the Bush Administration say "he may not survive politically and the US has no Plan B."
So NBC anchor Brian Williams sat down with Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Haass pointed not to the democratic activists but to the recent wave of protests and suicide bombings from radical Islamists: "The military is unhappy with him increasingly because he cannot keep order." Haass added that all that aid from the US gives him the image of "a puppet." He called this "the beginning of the end of the Musharraf era" and predicted his replacement, not by civilian democrats but by "another senior military man, a member of the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan."
Why did NBC decide that Pakistan matters so much to make it its lead? Haass used an odd phrase--the "nightmare that keeps me and others up at night"--to introduce his answer: "the loss of political control, of central government control, over its nuclear weapons."
CLARITY All three networks assigned a reporter to decipher the White House's executive order forbidding the CIA from torturing prisoners. Spies are forbidden from using interrogation techniques that a reasonable person would deem "beyond the bounds of human decency." So mutilation is out, humiliation is out, extreme heat and extreme cold are out. ABC's Martha Raddatz called the guidelines "very vague…there really does seem to be a lot of latitude here" and NBC's Pete Williams noted that "the government will not say what specific methods are allowed."
CBS' Bob Orr offered a hall of mirrors: first he noted that the White House denies any torture had ever been used even before this executive order was released to ban it; then he reported that the CIA detention program that the order is supposed to regulate has never been confirmed even to exist in the first place; nevertheless "the President has long defended past CIA detentions" even though they may not exist. Orr concluded that "on the surface" the purpose of the executive order seemed to be to protect the human rights of captives, yet its true rationale is to offer "legal clarity" to spies.
EXPLODING BANANAS It was five years ago the ABC's Brian Ross launched his investigation into the feasibility of using cargo containers at seaports for weapons smuggling. Back then he demonstrated how uranium evades scanners when encased in lead shields. So it should be no surprise that ABC alone covered the latest technology to scan incoming cargo for radioactive material. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff unveiled the machine as "the wave of the future" at a photo-op in Los Angeles. DHS claims the new device in its $2bn development program has a 95% accuracy rate. Ross countered with the Government Accountability Office number--45%. His unnamed scientist sources told him that "the only real improvement" in the new machines is fewer false positives. Now kitty litter and bananas are no longer mistaken for a nuclear weapon.
URIBE’S POLITICAL WILL At first blush, NBC's report from Colombia on its progress since the narcoguerrilla conflicts of the 1980s seemed completely flattering to Alvaro Uribe, the nation's president. Trish Regan of CNBC filed her report from the former cocaine capital of Medellin in the Andean highlands, where Uribe boasted to her of his "political will." Regan praised the city's booming economy and plummeting crime rate contrasting it with the days when it was "terrorized by drug lord Pablo Escobar and right-wing guerrillas." Then came Regan's provisos: Uribe has not been evenhanded in the civil war, "bombing cocaine labs and raiding guerrilla camps" but not targeting "right-wing paramilitary groups;" prosperity in trade, finance and construction still leaves nearly half of the population beneath the poverty line; and Uribe's pacification is only partial--"paramilitary groups, leftist guerrillas and drug lords continue to operate outside the cities." Uribe's "political will," Regan reflected, is a euphemism for "military force."
LOCATION, LOCATION Property values are booming in the Barracks Row neighborhood of Washington DC, what CBS' Sharyl Attkisson called "a once shabby area" near the US Capitol that has received $2.75m in federal urban renewal funds in the last three years. Those funds are the pet project of Rep Jerry Lewis of Republican from California. The latest investment will be "giant decorative arch kiosks for merchants," Attkisson previewed, "hardly shabby now." Why should a congressman not help our nation's capital prosper? Attkisson explained the catch: Congressional rules dictate that neither members nor their spouses should have any financial interest in an earmarked project. Technically, Lewis' wife has no interest in Barracks Row itself--but her $943m townhouse sits only four blocks away and the rising tide of gentrification helps the neighbors too.
COURIC THE CREDULOUS Sometimes it seems that CBS anchor Katie Couric does not pay attention to the stories her newscast airs. "That was an incredible story," she enthused about Steve Hartman's Assignment America profile of Kyle Lograsso, a five-year-old prodigy who plays golf against adults. "Halfway through I thought: "This is amazing; it is so cute.' And then I realized how incredibly moving it was."
Duh! That cute-and-then-moving switch is par for the course, to coin a phrase. It would have been incredible if the golf prodigy turned out not to have survived a life-threatening illness--infantile cancer made him blind in one eye--before turning out to be both charming and accomplished. As CBS was closing its week of newscasts with Kyle the Duffer consider NBC's Making a Difference and ABC's Person of the Week: one found the blindness hardship angle, the other found the golfing tragic one, in otherwise unemotional news events.
ABC, whose sports division airs the Open Golf tournament from Scotland, had substitute anchor Elizabeth Vargas honor amateur competitor Drew Weaver: Weaver is a collegiate athlete at Virginia Tech, where he happened to be an eyewitness to his fellow student's lethal shooting spree this spring. NBC found a printing press that allowed cameras to show the production of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without risk of a reporter reading the book's secret ending: Lee Cowan is not blind so the 1,500 run of Braille books meant nothing to him.
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: on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell back below 14000 after a single day at that milestone…a federal court found that leukemia contracted by Vietnam War veterans was caused by the toxin Agent Orange…Israel released 250 militant members of the Palestinian Fatah faction from prison…smokers can now resume carrying cigarette lighters onto airline flights…a troop of boy scouts had to be rescued from forest fires in a Utah canyon.
