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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM SEPTEMBER 13, 2007
The media protocol before a primetime Presidential speech on network television is for the broadcast networks' major anchors to be invited to the White House for a luncheon briefing by the President himself. Thus all three network news anchor and their Sunday morning talkshow colleagues were able to report on George Bush's Return on Success speech tonight before it even happened. But it was not only the prospect of Bush's televised address that made the Iraq War the Story of the Day--there was actual news from Iraq as well. Sheikh abdul-Sattar abu-Risha, the al-Anbar ally with whom President Bush staged a photo-op last week, was assassinated.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR SEPTEMBER 13, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
LUNCHTIME BEFORE PRIMETIME The media protocol before a primetime Presidential speech on network television is for the broadcast networks' major anchors to be invited to the White House for a luncheon briefing by the President himself. Thus all three network news anchor and their Sunday morning talkshow colleagues were able to report on George Bush's Return on Success speech tonight before it even happened. But it was not only the prospect of Bush's televised address that made the Iraq War the Story of the Day--there was actual news from Iraq as well. Sheikh abdul-Sattar abu-Risha, the al-Anbar ally with whom President Bush staged a photo-op last week, was assassinated.
Bush's briefing covered the short, medium and long term. In the short term, he will order troop levels to be reduced by 5,000 before Christmas: the units "were already scheduled to come home," ABC's White House correspondent Martha Raddatz pointed out, "but they will not be replaced." In the medium term, he has decided that July 2008 will be the date to complete the so-called surge, ending the temporary increase of troop levels by 30,000 that he ordered in January of this year, even though, as David Gregory (no link), NBC's man on the White House beat noted, "the fundamental rationale for the surge--political reconciliation in Iraq--has not happened."
The long term plan was emphasized by NBC anchor Brian Williams and his colleague Tim Russert (no link) of Meet the Press. Williams foresaw a "US presence in Iraq long after the Bush Presidency is over" and Russert called it an "enduring strategic relationship…economic and military and diplomatic." Williams mentioned the permanent US military presence on the Korean Peninsula as the model for Bush's thinking. On ABC, This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos (no link) noted the same "striking analogy" in the President's mind: "He believes that whoever replaces him--like General Eisenhower when he replaced Harry Truman--may criticize the President's policy during the campaign but will likely continue much of it in office."
All three networks agreed on what troop levels Bush intends to bequeath to his successor: "between 90,000 and 100,000"--CBS' Jim Axelrod (no link); "about 100,000"--ABC's Stephanopoulos; "from 90,000 to 110,000"--NBC's Russert. Does this deployment spread the military too thin? CBS anchor Katie Couric (no link) quoted the Commander in Chief as denying such a danger. "In fact, as long as there are no other hot spots, he says, he does not know of a more strategically important place for US troops to be than the Middle East."
As for this week's Congressional hearings, CBS' Couric found Bush "visibly angry" and NBC's Russert called him "absolutely outraged…very energized" about the moveon.org newspaper ad that insinuated that Gen David Petraeus could "betray us" by spinning his testimony to favor White House policies. When the President declared he wanted to find "common ground" with Congressional Democrats, NBC's Russert recounted that Bush was asked what that meant: "Accept Gen Petraeus' report," came the reply. Mused Russert: "This is a man who really is in no mood to compromise."
SHEIKH, RATTLE, ROLL From Baghdad, CBS' Lara Logan was already reporting on the US military tactic of arming former insurgent fighters loyal to local sheikhs in order to pacify Sunni neighborhoods when news of the assassination of abu-Risha arrived. Logan was in the Amariyah section of Baghdad where Sheikh Khaled al-Obeidi, also from al-Anbar, saw his clan's gunmen, now called "volunteers," being armed by the USArmy's First Cavalry Division.
Logan showed us clips from a series of TV commercials abu-Risha had aired that recruited local Sunnis to the previously hated al-Anbar police force. As a consequence abu-Risha had become "a marked man" who "flaunted his elevated status with everyone" from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. ABC's Terry McCarthy (no link) recalled that abu-Risha had "good reason" to find common cause with the United States: "His father and two brothers had been killed by extremists." The army had parked an M-1 tank outside the sheikh's house to protect him, McCarthy added, apparently to no avail.
ON THE HOMEFRONT NBC and ABC rounded out the Iraq War reporting with a couple of features on the homefront. ABC's Bob Woodruff (subscription required) had a personal interest in his A Closer Look in Kentucky: he visited the Louisville home of Sgt John McFarlane with his new roommate. Omar (no last name given) was the military translator in McFarlane's unit and was on hand to help save Woodruff's life when he almost had his brains blown out while reporting from Baghdad. "McFarlane worked for months cutting through a thicket of red tape to get Omar here. He got help from ABC News, a US senator and a host of others." Of the 10,000 translators who have worked with US occupation forces in Iraq, Omar is one of 167 who have been granted visas to live in the United States. NBC sent Mike Taibbi to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to watch the Screaming Eagles stunt parachute team celebrate the opening of a new training facility. Among the jumpers was one-legged Max Ramsey, who lost a limb last year in Ramadi. Ramsey trains fellow military amputees to skydive. Angel Barcenas, a USMC sergeant, lost both of his legs but, shrugs Ramsey, "they are below the knee--so it is a bit of a paper cut."
PONZI SCHEME Only NBC covered the court hearing for Norman Hsu, the fugitive fundraiser. Andrea Mitchell was more interested in what the Hsu case meant for the Presidential campaign of his beneficiary Hillary Rodham Clinton than in the defendant himself, who stands accused of running a $73m Ponzi scheme and appeared "frail, shaky after writing what read like a suicide note." The Rodham Clinton campaign, "scrambling to control the damage," returned the $850,000 in donations that Hsu had bundled together from 260 donors. But Mitchell was incredulous: "How did Clinton not know Hsu had been a fugitive for 15 years?" Mitchell reported that Hsu's haul "should have been a red flag" and speculated that "pressure" to keep up with Barack Obama's fundraising prowess drove Rodham Clinton's team to ignore warnings.
LIGHTS OUT Humberto was the first hurricane to make landfall on the mainland of the United States in two years. It came ashore along the Texas-Louisiana line. "It was not a particularly powerful storm," commented NBC's Don Teague, "but what it lacked in strength it made up for with surprise." At 11pm last night it was a mild tropical storm; just after midnight it was full-fledged. Meteorologists told Teague that "no hurricane in recorded history has ever reached this intensity, this fast, so close to landfall." The good news, ABC's Mike von Fremd (subscription required) pointed out, is that the storm is heading northeast and "may soon be bringing much-needed rain to parched regions of the Deep South." The bad news, CBS' Mark Strassmann showed us, was the flattened Fighting Cardinals scoreboard on High Island. Humberto "ripped away what small Texas towns like this live for--high school football. You cannot have Friday Night Lights without the lights."
REAL ESTATE WOES Yesterday NBC's Kevin Tibbles checked on the impact of foreclosures in the housing market. Now Betsy Stark joins in for ABC's Mortgage Mess series and Anthony Mason contributes for CBS. Mason followed housing activists from ACORN--although he was remiss in not identifying the group nor characterizing its ideology--as they picketed the Greenwich Ct offices of Carrington Mortgage Services. "The Federal Reserve has taken the extraordinary step of urging lenders to cut or postpone payments for cash-strapped borrowers," Mason pointed out, yet CMS was refusing to renegotiate with the foreclosure-bound. "The worst is yet to come," warned Mason, as over the next year 4.5m homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages nationwide "will see their payments skyrocket."
Stark profiled Michael de los Santos, a reformed mortgage broker, now volunteering with the Center for Responsible Lending, trying to make up for "a dark time in his life." He was only 20 years old when he was hired to make loans to would-be homebuyers with poor credit in Virginia. The abuses de los Santos recounted included exaggerating incomes and pushing deals with higher interest rates. "If you are in this adjustable rate it is going to adjust in two years. Do not worry about it. You can come back to me in two years and we will refinance before it adjusts," he recalled himself promising.
Tibbles' In Depth profile was of Brian Jervis of Detroit, who worked for a year for Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender. "Jervis learned he had lost his job as a sub-prime mortgage broker last month when someone called to arrange to pick up the office equipment." Now he "needs to find a new way to pay his own mortgage." Tibbles' report included this soundbite that Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, which originated $500bn in loans in the last year, gave to CNBC: "The rapid increase in value was the problem--and with that same some lending practices that certainly, in retrospect, were not acceptable."
DISTAFF SIDE Tyndall Report is no fan of demographically targeted feature series so we were relieved to see the back of NBC's The Secret to her Success, its female-oriented four-parter produced in collaboration with the network's iVillage Website. Male viewers did not even need to read the title to feel excluded--the shockingly stereotypical pink logo was enough. This series was News You Can Use with such a vengeance that its proper place was on NBC's now-four-hour Today rather than in the limited newshole of a half-hour newscast. The first and fourth entries were the most insufferable: Monday, in-house physician Nancy Snyderman listed personal health tips; today CNBC's Sue Herera did the same for personal finance. By comparison, Tuesday's offering on flextime scheduling at work from Rehema Ellis was somewhat enlightening and Wednesday's paean to friendship from Ann Curry had the virtue of pure frivolity.
LET THEM EAT CAKE A pasta strike in Italy--for correspondent Nick Watt (subscription required), covering the consumer protest against the high cost of wheat for ABC's closer, was as easy as pie. "When the price of the manna of the masses started climbing, consumer groups said 'Basta!'" Watt exclaimed. "I will eat potatoes," one woman told him as she joined in the protest. Sitting in a Roman cafe, glass of red wine at his right hand, bowl of not-yet-eaten pasta steaming temptingly under his nose, Watt found the strike unimaginable: "It is like asking the French to go a day without garlic or the Russians to lay off the vodka!"
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: the cost of a barrel of crude oil remains higher than $80…a pair of GIs who contributed to an anti-war op-ed in The New York Times were killed in Iraq…Google has launched a $30m competition to send a videocamera rover to the moon.
Bush's briefing covered the short, medium and long term. In the short term, he will order troop levels to be reduced by 5,000 before Christmas: the units "were already scheduled to come home," ABC's White House correspondent Martha Raddatz pointed out, "but they will not be replaced." In the medium term, he has decided that July 2008 will be the date to complete the so-called surge, ending the temporary increase of troop levels by 30,000 that he ordered in January of this year, even though, as David Gregory (no link), NBC's man on the White House beat noted, "the fundamental rationale for the surge--political reconciliation in Iraq--has not happened."
The long term plan was emphasized by NBC anchor Brian Williams and his colleague Tim Russert (no link) of Meet the Press. Williams foresaw a "US presence in Iraq long after the Bush Presidency is over" and Russert called it an "enduring strategic relationship…economic and military and diplomatic." Williams mentioned the permanent US military presence on the Korean Peninsula as the model for Bush's thinking. On ABC, This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos (no link) noted the same "striking analogy" in the President's mind: "He believes that whoever replaces him--like General Eisenhower when he replaced Harry Truman--may criticize the President's policy during the campaign but will likely continue much of it in office."
All three networks agreed on what troop levels Bush intends to bequeath to his successor: "between 90,000 and 100,000"--CBS' Jim Axelrod (no link); "about 100,000"--ABC's Stephanopoulos; "from 90,000 to 110,000"--NBC's Russert. Does this deployment spread the military too thin? CBS anchor Katie Couric (no link) quoted the Commander in Chief as denying such a danger. "In fact, as long as there are no other hot spots, he says, he does not know of a more strategically important place for US troops to be than the Middle East."
As for this week's Congressional hearings, CBS' Couric found Bush "visibly angry" and NBC's Russert called him "absolutely outraged…very energized" about the moveon.org newspaper ad that insinuated that Gen David Petraeus could "betray us" by spinning his testimony to favor White House policies. When the President declared he wanted to find "common ground" with Congressional Democrats, NBC's Russert recounted that Bush was asked what that meant: "Accept Gen Petraeus' report," came the reply. Mused Russert: "This is a man who really is in no mood to compromise."
SHEIKH, RATTLE, ROLL From Baghdad, CBS' Lara Logan was already reporting on the US military tactic of arming former insurgent fighters loyal to local sheikhs in order to pacify Sunni neighborhoods when news of the assassination of abu-Risha arrived. Logan was in the Amariyah section of Baghdad where Sheikh Khaled al-Obeidi, also from al-Anbar, saw his clan's gunmen, now called "volunteers," being armed by the USArmy's First Cavalry Division.
Logan showed us clips from a series of TV commercials abu-Risha had aired that recruited local Sunnis to the previously hated al-Anbar police force. As a consequence abu-Risha had become "a marked man" who "flaunted his elevated status with everyone" from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. ABC's Terry McCarthy (no link) recalled that abu-Risha had "good reason" to find common cause with the United States: "His father and two brothers had been killed by extremists." The army had parked an M-1 tank outside the sheikh's house to protect him, McCarthy added, apparently to no avail.
ON THE HOMEFRONT NBC and ABC rounded out the Iraq War reporting with a couple of features on the homefront. ABC's Bob Woodruff (subscription required) had a personal interest in his A Closer Look in Kentucky: he visited the Louisville home of Sgt John McFarlane with his new roommate. Omar (no last name given) was the military translator in McFarlane's unit and was on hand to help save Woodruff's life when he almost had his brains blown out while reporting from Baghdad. "McFarlane worked for months cutting through a thicket of red tape to get Omar here. He got help from ABC News, a US senator and a host of others." Of the 10,000 translators who have worked with US occupation forces in Iraq, Omar is one of 167 who have been granted visas to live in the United States. NBC sent Mike Taibbi to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to watch the Screaming Eagles stunt parachute team celebrate the opening of a new training facility. Among the jumpers was one-legged Max Ramsey, who lost a limb last year in Ramadi. Ramsey trains fellow military amputees to skydive. Angel Barcenas, a USMC sergeant, lost both of his legs but, shrugs Ramsey, "they are below the knee--so it is a bit of a paper cut."
PONZI SCHEME Only NBC covered the court hearing for Norman Hsu, the fugitive fundraiser. Andrea Mitchell was more interested in what the Hsu case meant for the Presidential campaign of his beneficiary Hillary Rodham Clinton than in the defendant himself, who stands accused of running a $73m Ponzi scheme and appeared "frail, shaky after writing what read like a suicide note." The Rodham Clinton campaign, "scrambling to control the damage," returned the $850,000 in donations that Hsu had bundled together from 260 donors. But Mitchell was incredulous: "How did Clinton not know Hsu had been a fugitive for 15 years?" Mitchell reported that Hsu's haul "should have been a red flag" and speculated that "pressure" to keep up with Barack Obama's fundraising prowess drove Rodham Clinton's team to ignore warnings.
LIGHTS OUT Humberto was the first hurricane to make landfall on the mainland of the United States in two years. It came ashore along the Texas-Louisiana line. "It was not a particularly powerful storm," commented NBC's Don Teague, "but what it lacked in strength it made up for with surprise." At 11pm last night it was a mild tropical storm; just after midnight it was full-fledged. Meteorologists told Teague that "no hurricane in recorded history has ever reached this intensity, this fast, so close to landfall." The good news, ABC's Mike von Fremd (subscription required) pointed out, is that the storm is heading northeast and "may soon be bringing much-needed rain to parched regions of the Deep South." The bad news, CBS' Mark Strassmann showed us, was the flattened Fighting Cardinals scoreboard on High Island. Humberto "ripped away what small Texas towns like this live for--high school football. You cannot have Friday Night Lights without the lights."
REAL ESTATE WOES Yesterday NBC's Kevin Tibbles checked on the impact of foreclosures in the housing market. Now Betsy Stark joins in for ABC's Mortgage Mess series and Anthony Mason contributes for CBS. Mason followed housing activists from ACORN--although he was remiss in not identifying the group nor characterizing its ideology--as they picketed the Greenwich Ct offices of Carrington Mortgage Services. "The Federal Reserve has taken the extraordinary step of urging lenders to cut or postpone payments for cash-strapped borrowers," Mason pointed out, yet CMS was refusing to renegotiate with the foreclosure-bound. "The worst is yet to come," warned Mason, as over the next year 4.5m homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages nationwide "will see their payments skyrocket."
Stark profiled Michael de los Santos, a reformed mortgage broker, now volunteering with the Center for Responsible Lending, trying to make up for "a dark time in his life." He was only 20 years old when he was hired to make loans to would-be homebuyers with poor credit in Virginia. The abuses de los Santos recounted included exaggerating incomes and pushing deals with higher interest rates. "If you are in this adjustable rate it is going to adjust in two years. Do not worry about it. You can come back to me in two years and we will refinance before it adjusts," he recalled himself promising.
Tibbles' In Depth profile was of Brian Jervis of Detroit, who worked for a year for Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender. "Jervis learned he had lost his job as a sub-prime mortgage broker last month when someone called to arrange to pick up the office equipment." Now he "needs to find a new way to pay his own mortgage." Tibbles' report included this soundbite that Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, which originated $500bn in loans in the last year, gave to CNBC: "The rapid increase in value was the problem--and with that same some lending practices that certainly, in retrospect, were not acceptable."
DISTAFF SIDE Tyndall Report is no fan of demographically targeted feature series so we were relieved to see the back of NBC's The Secret to her Success, its female-oriented four-parter produced in collaboration with the network's iVillage Website. Male viewers did not even need to read the title to feel excluded--the shockingly stereotypical pink logo was enough. This series was News You Can Use with such a vengeance that its proper place was on NBC's now-four-hour Today rather than in the limited newshole of a half-hour newscast. The first and fourth entries were the most insufferable: Monday, in-house physician Nancy Snyderman listed personal health tips; today CNBC's Sue Herera did the same for personal finance. By comparison, Tuesday's offering on flextime scheduling at work from Rehema Ellis was somewhat enlightening and Wednesday's paean to friendship from Ann Curry had the virtue of pure frivolity.
LET THEM EAT CAKE A pasta strike in Italy--for correspondent Nick Watt (subscription required), covering the consumer protest against the high cost of wheat for ABC's closer, was as easy as pie. "When the price of the manna of the masses started climbing, consumer groups said 'Basta!'" Watt exclaimed. "I will eat potatoes," one woman told him as she joined in the protest. Sitting in a Roman cafe, glass of red wine at his right hand, bowl of not-yet-eaten pasta steaming temptingly under his nose, Watt found the strike unimaginable: "It is like asking the French to go a day without garlic or the Russians to lay off the vodka!"
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: the cost of a barrel of crude oil remains higher than $80…a pair of GIs who contributed to an anti-war op-ed in The New York Times were killed in Iraq…Google has launched a $30m competition to send a videocamera rover to the moon.
