CONTAINING LINKS TO 58103 STORIES FROM THE NETWORKS' NIGHTLY NEWSCASTS
     TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 10, 2007
There must have been jubilation in the publicity machine for Breast Cancer Awareness Month when their disease was elevated to Story of the Day on the basis of almost no news. Instead we saw the combination of part three of a feature series on ABC, an NBC interview with activist Dr Susan Love and NBC's lead on a study on chemotherapy in the New England Journal of Medicine. ABC and CBS both led with an actual news story--a suicidal teenager wounded four people at a school in Cleveland before shooting himself in the head--but it turned out to be a purely local event with zero claim on the national news agenda. So the unusual publicity afforded to breast cancer can be explained by the vacuum of serious competition.    
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video thumbnailNBCBreast cancer coverageChemotherapy is effective only for some tumorsRobert BazellNew York
video thumbnailABCCleveland shooting wounds four at charter schoolDisciplined student returns, commits suicideEric HorngCleveland
video thumbnailCBSTeenage rehab programs for dropouts, delinquentsHouse hearings into wilderness boot camp abusesThalia AssurasWashington DC
video thumbnailCBSIllegal immigration increases, sparks backlashSocial Security ID crackdown banned by judgeBob OrrWashington DC
video thumbnailNBCLearning disabled students need special educationSupreme Court lets parents use private schoolsPete WilliamsSupreme Court
video thumbnailABCUAW-Detroit Big Three contract talksChrysler settlement after six-hour strikeChris BuryMichigan
video thumbnailNBCUS dollar price declines on foreign exchange marketsDomestic assets bought cheap by foreign firmsLee CowanChicago
video thumbnailCBSReal estate housing market prices continue to fallBuilders abandon partially-finished subdivisionsJohn BlackstoneCalifornia
video thumbnailNBCIraq: Saddam Hussein's Baath regime aftermathDefense Minister faces execution, was CIA spyRichard EngelBaghdad
video thumbnailABCMonarch butterfly migration to central MexicoWings tagged to track insects' southbound routesNed PotterNew York
 
TYNDALL BLOG: DAILY NOTES ON NETWORK TELEVISION NIGHTLY NEWS
PINK RIBBONS There must have been jubilation in the publicity machine for Breast Cancer Awareness Month when their disease was elevated to Story of the Day on the basis of almost no news. Instead we saw the combination of part three of a feature series on ABC, an NBC interview with activist Dr Susan Love and NBC's lead on a study on chemotherapy in the New England Journal of Medicine. ABC and CBS both led with an actual news story--a suicidal teenager wounded four people at a school in Cleveland before shooting himself in the head--but it turned out to be a purely local event with zero claim on the national news agenda. So the unusual publicity afforded to breast cancer can be explained by the vacuum of serious competition.

NBC's cancer lead purported to be a news story--Robert Bazell told us that the recurrence-prevention benefits of chemotherapy are so limited in as many as half of breast cancer patients that they do not justify the adverse side effects--but it turned out to rehash much of the same information that Kate Snow (subscription required) provided yesterday in part two of ABC's series The Fight Against Breast Cancer. Today's part three by John McKenzie also examined how to prevent recurrence. He checked into the various nutritional schemes patients use to stop tumors reappearing--broccoli, green tea, orange juice--and concluded that none has been proven. McKenzie's advice was completely straightforward…and could apply to anybody, with or without cancer: a balanced diet, a healthy body weight, regular exercise, alcohol in moderation.

Dr Susan Love, of the Susan Love Research Foundation, sat down with NBC anchor Brian Williams (at the tail of the Bazell videostream) to publicize her book Dr Susan Love's Breast Book. On the chemotherapy question, she previewed a new delivery system whereby the chemicals will not be applied to a patient's entire body but introduced locally, through the ducts of the nipple where tumors form. Love gave credit to her sponsor Avon, the cosmetics company, for the funding the development of a screening dipstick. A woman will squeeze fluid from her nipple onto the dipstick, which will turn blue if she is at high risk for the disease. Those women will be the ones who go on to receive MRI and mammography.

UPDATE: A factor in allowing NBC to spend the extra time on breast cancer was its limited commercials. Just as ABC has been doing on Mondays this month, NBC (24 min v ABC 18, CBS 19) expanded its newshole by running fewer ads, accepting a single sponsor--Fidelity, the financial investment firm.


SCHOOL DAZE SuccessTech Academy was the name of the Cleveland charter school, founded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where the 14-year-old boy, a student suspended for fighting, killed himself. Perhaps ABC's Eric Horng realized that the event was not worthy of lead placement on a national newscast: it certainly seemed like hype when his reporting was so non-specific--"the victims were carried out on stretchers"--that he avoiding mentioning that the two teachers and two students the boy shot had been wounded not killed. ABC was not alone in making a bigger deal of the incident than it deserved, but at least CBS' Dean Reynolds and NBC's Kevin Tibbles added the reassuring information that none of the injuries were "life-threatening."


WILDERNESS The day's only other news deemed worthy of coverage by reporters at all three networks were the hearings by a House panel into a report by the Government Accountability Office into residential treatment programs for teenagers. That is their formal name: "tough love," was Brian Ross' nickname on ABC; "boot camps" by NBC's Tom Costello; "therapeutic wilderness programs," by Thalia Assuras on CBS. These programs cater to more than 10,000 teenagers each year, some sent there after abusing narcotics, some lacking discipline, others suffering from depression. NBC's Costello counted ten teenage deaths at the programs over a 15 year period and CBS' Assuras cited abuse complaints against some 1,600 staff members in a single year: the camps "often require that teens endure exhausting physical exercise and in-your-face discipline." Assuras quoted GAO anecdotes of youth being "forced to eat their own vomit, denied adequate food, being forced to lie in urine or feces." Bereaved parents told ABC' Ross that "the camps are more about tough than they are about love."


FROM THE BENCH A couple of court decisions attracted attention on CBS and NBC. NBC's Pete Williams was at the Supreme Court for the case of the son of cable TV executive Tom Freston. The boy had a learning disability and Freston wanted him to receive his $22,000-a-year special education in a private school instead of the New York City public system. The Court ordered the city to pay the tuition without requiring Freston's son to enroll in a city school first. Williams noted that parents now have that right in New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Alabama, Florida and Georgia--but not in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. Because the Supreme Court voted 4-4, "the courts are divided."

CBS' Bob Orr followed up on ABC's lead by Pierre Thomas from last Thursday on the Immigration & Customs Enforcement raids on immigrant workers without residency papers. Orr explained that the raids, which have so far netted 4,000 undocumented workers, were about to expand exponentially to a crackdown on 140,000 employers "with 8m suspect employees." ICE planned to do this by using so-called No Match Letters generated from the Social Security system database. The letters would list workers whose names and numbers did not match: "Under the plan workers who could not be confirmed as legal would have to be fired." Orr reported that a judge in San Francisco prohibited the No Match Letters because "simple recordkeeping errors could hurt innocent people." Orr added that the judge's ruling also gives "some cover to those companies and workers who are purposely trying to evade the law."


FALLING PRICES Each of the three networks offered an update on economic news. ABC had Chris Bury cover the United Autoworkers' strike against Chrysler, called off after six hours, a settlement greeted by "a universal sigh of relief" from the rank and file. NBC offered a Nightly 101 explanation on the falling price of domestic business assets as the dollar shrinks in value on world markets. Lee Cowan told us that 800 newly-inexpensive businesses have been bought by foreign firms so far this year, including Samsonite, Owens Corning--and a former sibling company of NBC Universal. General Electric sold its Indiana plastic plant to SABIC, a Saudi Arabian firm. On CBS, John Blackstone continued his reporting from Monday on the slumping residential real estate market. He predicted that by the end of 2008 homes will be worth $4tr less than they were at the height of the boom; already he calculated $1.2tr in value has disappeared. Blackstone took us to a subdivision in Hercules Cal where a developer Dunmore Homes is "now walking away," abandoning its building site in mid-project. Prices have fallen so low that houses are not worth completing.


THE EIGHT OF HEARTS Remember that much-vaunted Most Wanted deck of cards the Pentagon produced when the Baath regime collapsed in Iraq? The eight of hearts was Saddam Hussein's Defense Minister Sultan Hashim. Hashim was arrested and convicted on war crimes and how sits on Death Row in Baghdad. He has not yet been hanged, however, since President Jalal Talabani has refused to sign the warrant of execution. Richard Engel provided that back story in an Exclusive, as told to him by NBC's in-house analyst Rick Francona. Francona had been a CIA spy based in Kurdistan and ran Hashim as an asset from 1996 onwards he organized Taskforce Achilles to plot a coup d'etat against Saddam. When Saddam was toppled and the deck of cards issued, Gen David Petraeus wrote to Hashim offering a deal: "You have my word that you will be treated with the utmost dignity and respect." Petraeus did not prevent Hashim's war crimes prosecution but Talabani will save his neck. The current president was working with Francona, too, at the time, and he "first introduced Hashim to the CIA."


MARIPOSAS As so often happens, animals were the topic of ABC's closer, specifically "those little flecks of orange and black," the migrating monarch butterfly. Ned Potter profiled a tagging organization of 15,000 insect lovers. Tiny wing stickers are used to follow flight patterns en route to central Mexico. For example, Potter told us, a Minnesota monarch will fly south while a Georgia monarch will fly west. "If you take a butterfly from one place to another, it will fly the wrong way for about a week until it somehow recalibrates."


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 House of Representatives is gearing up to vote on whether to condemn the Ottoman Empire for a WWI genocide of Armenians…production of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner has been delayed…a freight train derailment in Ohio sparked a chemical fire…Vice President Dick Cheney was characterized as "a disaster" by former President Jimmy Carter…a female NASA astronaut is in command of the International Space Station…the footprint of Tyrannosaurus Rex has been discovered in Montana.