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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 08, 2007
The second Monday in October saw the second of ABC World News' four newscasts with limited commercial interruptions. Sponsorship by Pfizer's Chantix cigarette-quitting drug allowed ABC to have a one-fifth larger editorial newshole (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 19) than its rivals. Like last week, however, the extra time was freed up on a day when there was little news to fill it. The Story of the Day, and the lead on all three newscasts, was a late summer heatwave across the midwest. Apart from that, no other event attracted attention from all three networks' correspondents. Each network ran an Iraq story--but the topics were different. Each picked its own malady--arthritis, cancer, strokes--for a disease feature. Each closed with spectacular scenery--the granite cliffs of Yosemite, the swampland of the Mississippi Delta and the Great Wall of China.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 08, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
SUMMER HEAT IN AUTUMN The second Monday in October saw the second of ABC World News' four newscasts with limited commercial interruptions. Sponsorship by Pfizer's Chantix cigarette-quitting drug allowed ABC to have a one-fifth larger editorial newshole (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 19) than its rivals. Like last week, however, the extra time was freed up on a day when there was little news to fill it. The Story of the Day, and the lead on all three newscasts, was a late summer heatwave across the midwest. Apart from that, no other event attracted attention from all three networks' correspondents. Each network ran an Iraq story--but the topics were different. Each picked its own malady--arthritis, cancer, strokes--for a disease feature. Each closed with spectacular scenery--the granite cliffs of Yosemite, the swampland of the Mississippi Delta and the Great Wall of China.
Once it had been established that the weather was so unseasonably hot that high temperature records for the date had been broken from Indiana to Pennsylvania, there was little else of substance that we had to know about the day's lead. NBC's Lee Cowan quipped that the weather was so fiery that it deserved the nickname Red October and ABC's Chris Bury (subscription required) joked that this was opening day for ice skating at the rink in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza. The only notable disruption from the heat seemed to be that it put the kibosh on Sunday's running of the Chicago Marathon. The race had to be called off after three hours as runners succumbed to dehydration. CBS' Dean Reynolds called it "a foot race through a furnace."
Minneapolis, too, staged a marathon. An entrant happened to be Ben Tracy, a reporter at WCCO-TV, the CBS affiliate. Tracy collapsed and passed out at the 25th mile. He related to CBS' Reynolds how he ended up in hospital: "It was like the Runners' ER--every bed had a pair of tennis shoes sticking out the end of it."
The heatwave was a news hook to inspire a couple of marginally related features. From Atlanta, ABC had Steve Osunsami report on the impact of the prolonged drought in southeastern states. The city's water supply comes from two major reservoirs, Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona. As Atlanta itself "is seeing runaway growth," the reservoirs are shrinking. Levels are already more than twelve feet below normal and are declining at the rate of a further foot each week. Water scientists "believe the unthinkable is now just a year away…this major metropolitan city could actually run out of water."
By contrast, an increase in liquid water was the topic of Mark Phillips' report on CBS. He filed from London but his story was from the Arctic, where ships no longer have to break through ice and can now "cruise the long-elusive Northwest Passage at six knots. Commercial shipping may be possible." With water now open along the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska, "an ironic race" is underway to exploit ocean bed petroleum reserves--"ironic" because they are "now becoming available because of the climate change the use of petroleum has caused."
HILLARY SEES CONSPIRACY When Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked by Iowa voters on four separate occasions about her Senate vote to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, she suspected a concerted attempt to foment the issue by a Democratic rival. She reprimanded questioner Randall Rolph for being a plant and then had to apologize when he insisted that his curiosity about her Iran policy was authentic. ABC's Kate Snow (subscription required) reflected on the exchange: "Tough talk on Iran is perceived by some Iowans as all too similar to the tough talk from Democrats in the run-up to the Gulf War."
NBC had David Gregory survey the state of the Republican Presidential field and Andrea Mitchell look at the Democratic side. Mitchell speculated that Iowa "could be the last chance" for Rodham Clinton's rivals "to stop her march towards the nomination." For Barack Obama, for example, finishing ahead of her in Iowa "is now everything." Why Iowa? "For all her money and campaign experience, Iowa is not an easy fit." Bill Clinton never competed in the caucuses and "Iowa's Democrats remain suspicious of her vote on the Iraq War."
As NBC promoted its sponsorship of a Republican CNBC debate on economic issues, Gregory cited his network's poll last week that showed an increasing proportion of Republican voters advocating change (48% vs 41% in May) as opposed to a continuation of the Bush Presidency. "Loyalty to an unpopular President can be costly…just ask john McCain, whose backing for the war hurt him," mused Gregory. On the other hand "Bush remains popular with the base." George Bush himself was asked whether he considered himself to be a drag on his copartisans. "A strong asset," was his reply.
BAGHDAD OPEN CITY The three separate views of Iraq from Baghdad consisted of a documentary movie, that Blackwater USA shootout and stressed-out children. Jim Maceda filed an In Depth report for NBC on the mental health of Baghdad's war orphans: a UNICEF study has found that half the city's pre-teens have been eyewitness to "a major traumatic event." He called them "the lost generation--tens of thousands of emotionally disturbed Iraqi kids." For them, there is the grand total of one child psychiatrist in the entire city. Dr Haidar abdul-Mosen offers "basic therapy--little more than comforting words."
The FBI intends to have its investigation of last month's shootout involving Blackwater bodyguards completed "in days," stated CBS' Elizabeth Palmer. She took a trip to the traffic circle in Baghdad's Nisoor Square, where it is now estimated that 17 civilians were killed, and found no evidence of FBI diligence. The fight was supposedly started by a car that drove towards a Blackwater convoy yet "astonishingly that car full of forensic clues is still sitting by the side of the road three weeks later." The bodyguards opened fire on a city bus, "a bus that we found back on its regular route, driving right past the scene of the shooting." The driver showed Palmer its bullet holes but has not been approached by the FBI: "Our investigation turned up many witnesses who have not yet been interviewed."
Inside the Green Zone the US military is organizing packed houses for a new documentary "to say the least a very unique launch for a new film," as ABC's Miguel Marquez (subscription required) put it. Meeting Resistance is a movie profile made by a pair of journalists, one British, one American, of "a teacher, a wife, a soldier" who each decide to take up arms. "All say they hate living under occupation." The audiences are made up of ordinary soldiers in an attempt by military brass to offer insight into "what motivates Iraqis to fight Americans."
ASSIGNMENT PARIS Nick Watt of ABC and Ned Colt of NBC both lucked out, assigned to Paris to follow the London jury in the inquest for Prince Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. NBC's Colt saw them enter the highway underpass "nondescript but for a missing foot long chunk of concrete" where the fatal car crash happened ten years ago. ABC's Watt (no link) told us that the budget for the six-month inquest is $20m and that some 30% of the British public is skeptical that accidental death would be an accurate verdict. They include the bereaved father, Mohamed al-Fayed: "He believes the couple was actually murdered on the orders of the British royal family."
DISEASE ZONE ABC is signing up for awareness month with its series The Fight Against Breast Cancer. Barbara Pinto told us about a screening test for a cancer-related gene. A woman who does not have the gene has a 12% lifetime chance of finding a tumor in her breast; the odds for those testing positive range from 35% to 80%. Pinto found a pair of St Louis sisters who both tested positive: Karen Switzer had both breasts surgically removed by radical mastectomy while she was still healthy; Donata Earley waited six months, contracted the disease and has just finished a course of chemotherapy. Pinto should have told us, but did not, what proportion of the population has that troublesome gene.
Strokes was the condition that NBC picked. Robert Bazell wanted us to watch out for Transient Ischemic Attacks: TIAs are painless momentary episodes involving "numbness on one side, blurry vision, dizziness and garbled speech" that disappear after a few minutes. If we have a TIA and get immediate treatment to thin our blood, lower our cholesterol and reduce our blood pressure, our risk of suffering a stroke in the following three months is 80% less than if we go untreated. Bazell should have told us, but did not, what proportion of the population experiences those TIAs.
CBS picked arthritis. Anchor Katie Couric had CNN's in-house surgeon Sanjay Gupta kick off a series Boomer Bodies about the aches and pains of her aging demographic. Gupta zeroed in on women's knees: of the 500,000 artificial replacement joints implanted each year, 70% are fitted for women because their knees are less muscular than men's, "more prone to injuries." Gupta showed us new $30,000-per-procedure ceramic implants that bend and rotate easily. Do not undergo arthroscopic knee surgery for arthritis, he advised "it is no better than just a placebo." Couric told us, as she should have, that arthritis afflicts one American adult in five.
HOME LESS The real estate story has been reported using statistics for months now. CBS' enterprising John Blackstone took a trip to the San Francisco exurbs to flesh out the data. He picked the community of Manteca in San Joaquin County. During California's housing boom, developers built 30,000 new homes there; the city has seen 11,000 defaults in the last 18 months--"half million dollar houses, often bought with nothing down, turned into suburban blight." Blackstone showed us unwatered lawns, mosquito infested swimming pools, garages used by homeless squatters. The reporter and the auctioneer were the only two to turn up as a $620K home was put on the block on the courthouse steps for $464K. No bids.
PICTURESQUE It is too bad that NBC has not cleared the online rights for Roger O'Neil's (no link) Fleecing of America travelogue to the Arkansas swamplands. The federal Fish & Wildlife Service is spending $27m to conserve the ecosystem where the ivory-billed woodpecker--dubbed the "ghost bird" because it was thought to be extinct--may still be alive. O'Neil's characterization of such spending as a "fleecing" was tendentious--and the very beauty of his nature video gainsaid his argument.
The waterfalls of Yosemite National Park have a more conventional picturesque charm. They were the location for ABC's extended Key to Success feature by David Muir on volunteer efforts by mountaineers and hikers to clean up trash from the park. He showed us the wreck of a 1951 Nash that apparently careened off a mountain road into a ravine. The motor was completely encased in squirrel nests and pine cones, but the clean-up removed it anyway. Not pristine.
It is hard to trump the Great Wall of China for spectacle. How did CBS turn the 4,000-mile-long edifice into a news story? Barry Petersen told us that Chinese academics have no interest in it as an object of study so he introduced us to David Spindler, "making solitary hikes to create a massive computer database." Historian Spindler, an American expatriate, "may be the only person whose life is all about the Great Wall."
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: Britain announced plans to halve the size of its military contribution to occupation forces in Iraq…a small plane carrying a team of ten skydiving enthusiasts has gone missing in the Cascade Mountains…an accident at the hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque killed one…sprinter Marion Jones, who won Olympic titles after cheating, will return her medals…the Nobel Peace Prize of Medicine was awarded to a pair of scientists, including World War II refugee Mario Capecchi.
Once it had been established that the weather was so unseasonably hot that high temperature records for the date had been broken from Indiana to Pennsylvania, there was little else of substance that we had to know about the day's lead. NBC's Lee Cowan quipped that the weather was so fiery that it deserved the nickname Red October and ABC's Chris Bury (subscription required) joked that this was opening day for ice skating at the rink in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza. The only notable disruption from the heat seemed to be that it put the kibosh on Sunday's running of the Chicago Marathon. The race had to be called off after three hours as runners succumbed to dehydration. CBS' Dean Reynolds called it "a foot race through a furnace."
Minneapolis, too, staged a marathon. An entrant happened to be Ben Tracy, a reporter at WCCO-TV, the CBS affiliate. Tracy collapsed and passed out at the 25th mile. He related to CBS' Reynolds how he ended up in hospital: "It was like the Runners' ER--every bed had a pair of tennis shoes sticking out the end of it."
The heatwave was a news hook to inspire a couple of marginally related features. From Atlanta, ABC had Steve Osunsami report on the impact of the prolonged drought in southeastern states. The city's water supply comes from two major reservoirs, Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona. As Atlanta itself "is seeing runaway growth," the reservoirs are shrinking. Levels are already more than twelve feet below normal and are declining at the rate of a further foot each week. Water scientists "believe the unthinkable is now just a year away…this major metropolitan city could actually run out of water."
By contrast, an increase in liquid water was the topic of Mark Phillips' report on CBS. He filed from London but his story was from the Arctic, where ships no longer have to break through ice and can now "cruise the long-elusive Northwest Passage at six knots. Commercial shipping may be possible." With water now open along the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska, "an ironic race" is underway to exploit ocean bed petroleum reserves--"ironic" because they are "now becoming available because of the climate change the use of petroleum has caused."
HILLARY SEES CONSPIRACY When Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked by Iowa voters on four separate occasions about her Senate vote to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, she suspected a concerted attempt to foment the issue by a Democratic rival. She reprimanded questioner Randall Rolph for being a plant and then had to apologize when he insisted that his curiosity about her Iran policy was authentic. ABC's Kate Snow (subscription required) reflected on the exchange: "Tough talk on Iran is perceived by some Iowans as all too similar to the tough talk from Democrats in the run-up to the Gulf War."
NBC had David Gregory survey the state of the Republican Presidential field and Andrea Mitchell look at the Democratic side. Mitchell speculated that Iowa "could be the last chance" for Rodham Clinton's rivals "to stop her march towards the nomination." For Barack Obama, for example, finishing ahead of her in Iowa "is now everything." Why Iowa? "For all her money and campaign experience, Iowa is not an easy fit." Bill Clinton never competed in the caucuses and "Iowa's Democrats remain suspicious of her vote on the Iraq War."
As NBC promoted its sponsorship of a Republican CNBC debate on economic issues, Gregory cited his network's poll last week that showed an increasing proportion of Republican voters advocating change (48% vs 41% in May) as opposed to a continuation of the Bush Presidency. "Loyalty to an unpopular President can be costly…just ask john McCain, whose backing for the war hurt him," mused Gregory. On the other hand "Bush remains popular with the base." George Bush himself was asked whether he considered himself to be a drag on his copartisans. "A strong asset," was his reply.
BAGHDAD OPEN CITY The three separate views of Iraq from Baghdad consisted of a documentary movie, that Blackwater USA shootout and stressed-out children. Jim Maceda filed an In Depth report for NBC on the mental health of Baghdad's war orphans: a UNICEF study has found that half the city's pre-teens have been eyewitness to "a major traumatic event." He called them "the lost generation--tens of thousands of emotionally disturbed Iraqi kids." For them, there is the grand total of one child psychiatrist in the entire city. Dr Haidar abdul-Mosen offers "basic therapy--little more than comforting words."
The FBI intends to have its investigation of last month's shootout involving Blackwater bodyguards completed "in days," stated CBS' Elizabeth Palmer. She took a trip to the traffic circle in Baghdad's Nisoor Square, where it is now estimated that 17 civilians were killed, and found no evidence of FBI diligence. The fight was supposedly started by a car that drove towards a Blackwater convoy yet "astonishingly that car full of forensic clues is still sitting by the side of the road three weeks later." The bodyguards opened fire on a city bus, "a bus that we found back on its regular route, driving right past the scene of the shooting." The driver showed Palmer its bullet holes but has not been approached by the FBI: "Our investigation turned up many witnesses who have not yet been interviewed."
Inside the Green Zone the US military is organizing packed houses for a new documentary "to say the least a very unique launch for a new film," as ABC's Miguel Marquez (subscription required) put it. Meeting Resistance is a movie profile made by a pair of journalists, one British, one American, of "a teacher, a wife, a soldier" who each decide to take up arms. "All say they hate living under occupation." The audiences are made up of ordinary soldiers in an attempt by military brass to offer insight into "what motivates Iraqis to fight Americans."
ASSIGNMENT PARIS Nick Watt of ABC and Ned Colt of NBC both lucked out, assigned to Paris to follow the London jury in the inquest for Prince Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. NBC's Colt saw them enter the highway underpass "nondescript but for a missing foot long chunk of concrete" where the fatal car crash happened ten years ago. ABC's Watt (no link) told us that the budget for the six-month inquest is $20m and that some 30% of the British public is skeptical that accidental death would be an accurate verdict. They include the bereaved father, Mohamed al-Fayed: "He believes the couple was actually murdered on the orders of the British royal family."
DISEASE ZONE ABC is signing up for awareness month with its series The Fight Against Breast Cancer. Barbara Pinto told us about a screening test for a cancer-related gene. A woman who does not have the gene has a 12% lifetime chance of finding a tumor in her breast; the odds for those testing positive range from 35% to 80%. Pinto found a pair of St Louis sisters who both tested positive: Karen Switzer had both breasts surgically removed by radical mastectomy while she was still healthy; Donata Earley waited six months, contracted the disease and has just finished a course of chemotherapy. Pinto should have told us, but did not, what proportion of the population has that troublesome gene.
Strokes was the condition that NBC picked. Robert Bazell wanted us to watch out for Transient Ischemic Attacks: TIAs are painless momentary episodes involving "numbness on one side, blurry vision, dizziness and garbled speech" that disappear after a few minutes. If we have a TIA and get immediate treatment to thin our blood, lower our cholesterol and reduce our blood pressure, our risk of suffering a stroke in the following three months is 80% less than if we go untreated. Bazell should have told us, but did not, what proportion of the population experiences those TIAs.
CBS picked arthritis. Anchor Katie Couric had CNN's in-house surgeon Sanjay Gupta kick off a series Boomer Bodies about the aches and pains of her aging demographic. Gupta zeroed in on women's knees: of the 500,000 artificial replacement joints implanted each year, 70% are fitted for women because their knees are less muscular than men's, "more prone to injuries." Gupta showed us new $30,000-per-procedure ceramic implants that bend and rotate easily. Do not undergo arthroscopic knee surgery for arthritis, he advised "it is no better than just a placebo." Couric told us, as she should have, that arthritis afflicts one American adult in five.
HOME LESS The real estate story has been reported using statistics for months now. CBS' enterprising John Blackstone took a trip to the San Francisco exurbs to flesh out the data. He picked the community of Manteca in San Joaquin County. During California's housing boom, developers built 30,000 new homes there; the city has seen 11,000 defaults in the last 18 months--"half million dollar houses, often bought with nothing down, turned into suburban blight." Blackstone showed us unwatered lawns, mosquito infested swimming pools, garages used by homeless squatters. The reporter and the auctioneer were the only two to turn up as a $620K home was put on the block on the courthouse steps for $464K. No bids.
PICTURESQUE It is too bad that NBC has not cleared the online rights for Roger O'Neil's (no link) Fleecing of America travelogue to the Arkansas swamplands. The federal Fish & Wildlife Service is spending $27m to conserve the ecosystem where the ivory-billed woodpecker--dubbed the "ghost bird" because it was thought to be extinct--may still be alive. O'Neil's characterization of such spending as a "fleecing" was tendentious--and the very beauty of his nature video gainsaid his argument.
The waterfalls of Yosemite National Park have a more conventional picturesque charm. They were the location for ABC's extended Key to Success feature by David Muir on volunteer efforts by mountaineers and hikers to clean up trash from the park. He showed us the wreck of a 1951 Nash that apparently careened off a mountain road into a ravine. The motor was completely encased in squirrel nests and pine cones, but the clean-up removed it anyway. Not pristine.
It is hard to trump the Great Wall of China for spectacle. How did CBS turn the 4,000-mile-long edifice into a news story? Barry Petersen told us that Chinese academics have no interest in it as an object of study so he introduced us to David Spindler, "making solitary hikes to create a massive computer database." Historian Spindler, an American expatriate, "may be the only person whose life is all about the Great Wall."
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: Britain announced plans to halve the size of its military contribution to occupation forces in Iraq…a small plane carrying a team of ten skydiving enthusiasts has gone missing in the Cascade Mountains…an accident at the hot air balloon festival in Albuquerque killed one…sprinter Marion Jones, who won Olympic titles after cheating, will return her medals…the Nobel Peace Prize of Medicine was awarded to a pair of scientists, including World War II refugee Mario Capecchi.
