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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 15, 2007
The War on Cancer was Story of the Day as the National Cancer Society claimed a murky victory in its latest battle. Both CBS and ABC led with conflicting statistics showing that cancer is gradually declining as a killer. ABC's newscast, on the third Monday this month, had a single, limited sponsor, the diabetes medication Exubera, and thus an enlarged newshole (24 min v CBS 20, NBC 20). It used its extra time for a medical medley: cancer followed by Alzheimer's Disease followed by autism followed by advice on how to decipher such a welter of medical information. NBC had planned to lead with a non-medical domestic crisis, the looming water shortage in the southeast, but a brief stand-up from London with late-breaking news of a collision on the runway at Heathrow Airport superseded the drought.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 15, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CANCER STATISTICS LACK CLARITY The War on Cancer was Story of the Day as the National Cancer Society claimed a murky victory in its latest battle. Both CBS and ABC led with conflicting statistics showing that cancer is gradually declining as a killer. ABC's newscast, on the third Monday this month, had a single, limited sponsor, the diabetes medication Exubera, and thus an enlarged newshole (24 min v CBS 20, NBC 20). It used its extra time for a medical medley: cancer followed by Alzheimer's Disease followed by autism followed by advice on how to decipher such a welter of medical information. NBC had planned to lead with a non-medical domestic crisis, the looming water shortage in the southeast, but a brief stand-up from London with late-breaking news of a collision on the runway at Heathrow Airport superseded the drought.
For news that received such fanfare, it was not clear what the cancer facts are. Introducing their stories, anchors Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC headlined a falling death rate from the disease; on CBS, Katie Couric claimed a decline in the actual number of annual cancer deaths. It could be that both statistics are true, but since no network saw fit to offer an actual number of dead people, how could viewers know? As the population increases, a declining death rate need not mean decreasing deaths. They all cited the same number--a 2.1% annual reduction--yet such a tiny fraction is usually unworthy of headline status. To deserve such attention the newscasts needed to enumerate the thousands of people who are still alive that would have otherwise have died of cancer. Unless you can put a number on the story do not lead with it.
Anyway, whatever the facts of the story, ABC's Dan Harris stated that "this good news is not the result of miracle cures or anything like that." NBC's Tom Costello isolated a trio of factors: fewer cigarette smokers; post-menopausal women no longer taking Hormone Replacement Therapy; and increasing removal of pre-cancerous polyps in the colon. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook offered a hat tip to his colonoscopied anchor by running this soundbite about those polyps from the American Cancer Society's Harmon Eyre: "It began predominantly with the Katie Couric Effect but has been sustained with a lot of other efforts." Looking to the future, NBC's Costello warned that cancer could start killing more people again: "Doctors are seeing more liver and pancreatic cancer. They blame obesity and hepatitis."
Both ABC and CBS followed up with the Alzheimer's story: researchers are making progress in developing a diagnostic blood test, "identifying which patients with mild memory loss would go on to develop the disease within two to six years," as ABC's John McKenzie put it. Even in its earliest stages, he explained, a damaged Alzheimer's brain activates the immune system to attempt to repair it. That immune response leaves markers in the blood. At present there is no test even in the full-blown stages: "Only an autopsy can establish for sure that a patient had Alzheimer's," noted CBS' John Blackstone. "Brain scans and spinal taps are helpful but they are not certain."
Health-&-Medicine is an overcovered beat on the network nightly newscasts. In the story selection trade-off between covering topics of general interest and addressing the narrow concerns of their core demographic audience, the networks lean too far towards the latter. The core audience for the newscasts on broadcast television is older by far than the population at large. Older people tend to be more infirm--and so more personally involved in the medical-industrial complex. The skew of coverage towards their concerns, compounded by the plethora of pharmaceutical advertising that surrounds it, can only alienate younger, healthier viewers. This further narrows the newscasts' audience and distracts from their primary journalistic role, which is to deliver general interest news to the population at large.
In-house physician Timothy Johnson (no link), for example, stated that ABC News uses an e-mail panel of 12,000 healthcare experts, categorized into 200 specialties, to vet medical information for its newsworthiness. Both the cancer and the Alzheimer's story were subjected to that filter before they were selected for coverage. For how many other beats does ABC News rely on such extensive expertise? Does it have 12,000 economists, foreign affairs experts, sociologists, political scientists?
It turns out that for many medical stories, the nightly newscast is an inappropriate medium for journalism. For viewers, especially young healthy ones, who do not have a personal investment, a story on a particular malady lacks the general societal interest to warrant coverage; for those that the malady does affect, a nightly news report will be too superficial. ABC's Johnson himself recommended detailed reporting online instead: viewers should "go only to the sources where they know the names, major medical centers--Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard, Johns Hopkins--to people that they know as reliable sources."
For all the fanfare about the Katie Couric Effect, the bar should be set much higher than it is for medical information to qualify for the nightly news: issues of public health, yes; for information of particular use to individual patients, go online, as Dr Tim suggests.
FINANCIAL LANDMARKS This was a landmark day for financial journalism. It marked the entry by a soon-to-be-sibling of the Dow Jones brand onto cable television. Fox Business Network was launched, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which will soon complete its purchase of Dow Jones. It will compete with 17-year financial news leader CNBC, a network with tiny viewership but huge profits, according to CBS' Kelly Wallace. "Fox declared its approach more Main Street than Wall Street."
At the same time a pair of CNBC reporters appeared on NBC. From the New York Stock Exchange, Maria Bartiromo warned anchor Brian Williams that rising crude oil prices--"up more than 40% in 2007 alone"--would be "no mistake…a negative for the US economy." Bartiromo's colleague Scott Cohn updated us on the push to replace imported oil with ethanol generated from domestically grown corn. The corn harvest, which has swelled to 13bn bushels, up 70% in two years, is now producing too much: "Without enough alternative fuel vehicles to soak it all up, the price of ethanol is falling" and newly-built plants are shutting down. Nevertheless the high global price of crude is keeping regular gasoline prices high. ABC's Chris Bury (subscription required) reminded us that last year the cost of a gallon of gas dropped 47c after Labor Day; this year just 3c. He isolated three factors pushing the price of a barrel of crude above $86: global demand, a weak dollar--and the threat to an Iraqi pipeline as tensions between Turks and Kurds escalate. Inflation-adjusted, crude is still cheaper than it was during the Iranian Revolution, yet "the big question now is not whether the record will be shattered--but when."
The other financial landmark was a looming birthday celebrated by socialsecurity.gov. The nation's oldest babyboomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, turns 62 on January 1st, 2008, so she signed up for Social Security retirement benefits, the first of her cohort of 77m. She is "the raindrop that is about to become a tsunami," as ABC's David Wright (no link) put it. Both Wright and CBS' Chip Reid previewed the eventual depletion of the trust fund. Neither even mentioned the plan President George Bush ballyhooed in 2005 to prevent depletion by privatization. "There are basically two choices for fixing the problem: you either increase taxes or you cut benefits," Reid asserted. "Of course it is perfectly obvious how to fix it," was how Wright put it, "either raise taxes or cut benefits."
EXTRA DRY After Ned Colt's brief lead-off mention of the Heathrow Airport accident, NBC proceeded with its scheduled lead from Martin Savidge. The southeast is on the verge of emergency water rationing. Records dating back to 1894 have been set for lack of rainfall in Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida. A water war has started along the Catawba River, with South and North Carolina each accusing the other of taking too much. In Georgia, restrictions on residential water use have already been imposed. "Officials for the first time are considering restricting water to commercial and industrial users. Farmers would be next."
BADA BING Armen Keteyian took us to an "old smuggling route that cuts across Green Valley," the misnamed section of the Pima County desert along the Arizona-Mexico line. Nowadays, the commodities smuggled northwards are "valuable loads of drugs and human cargo," traffic that is being hijacked by gangs of desert bandits armed with automatic weapons known as bajadores. The marijuana is stolen by narcotraffickers operating out of The Capri Lounge nightclub in Phoenix, Keteyian told us for CBS' Eye on Crime. The immigrants are kidnapped, "often held hostage until families back home pay thousands of dollars in ransom." Each year, between 200 and 300 people are found dead in the 9,000 square mile desert.
SOLIDARITY FOREVER As the Communist Party convened in Congress in Beijing, NBC--the network that owns the broadcast rights to next year's Olympic Games--launched a series entitled China Rising. Mark Mullen called the People's Republic "harder to recognize as citizens raise from Mao to Wow!" He toured District 798, Beijing's art zone with its "trendy and high-end restaurants and nightclubs, the likes of which no one could have even imagined here in China just 20 years ago." Mullen noted that while China's middle class now numbers 300m, peasants in rural poverty still account for 70% of the population. When President Hu Jintao acknowledged to Congress that the Party must address this inequality, Mullen called it "a challenge to be sure--especially in a country strenuously pushing capitalism and Communism at once."
HOW TO LEARN Both CBS and ABC checked out programs to improve the quality of public school education. Bill Weir took advantage of ABC's limited commercials to plant a sloppy wet kiss on KIPP as a Key to Success. Knowledge Is Power Program is a 57-site network of charter schools founded by a pair of Houston teachers, Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin. Supported by millions in donations from The GAP's retail fortune and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, KIPP recruits low-income children, many testing at two grades below their age, and delivers an 80% post-school enrolment in college. Weir ticked off KIPP techniques: higher teacher pay, a longer school day, extra school on Saturday and during the summer, enforced parental participation, heavy homework. He summed it up as Work Hard. Be Nice. No Shortcuts.
CBS' Sandra Hughes took us to Normandie Avenue Elementary in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood so poor that each of the school's 1,000 students qualifies for the federal free meals program. The program there, funded by former Disney TV child star Hillary Duff, is called Blessings in a Backpack. It allows children to take more free food home at weekends in their backpacks. The result is improved attendance on Monday mornings and increased test scores. As one girl testified: "On an empty stomach, you cannot learn anything."
LINKLESS Even though broadcast television is not interactive, it cannot be right for a TV reporter to file a story about a Website without including the address so viewers can check it out. Yet ABC ignored the URL in two separate reports on what we can find online. Jon Donvan showed us a videostream that helps parents diagnose autistic behavior in toddlers. Barbara Pinto (subscription required) introduced us to Dawn Meehan, a stay-at-home mother of six, attracting a growing audience to her Erma-Bombeck-style blog. "She has just been asked to write a book of comedy and advice. Hollywood has come calling asking Dawn to write a family sitcom."
So Tyndall Report Google'd each story and here you are: autismspeaks.org and mom2my6pack.blogspot.com.
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: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued her diplomacy in search of an Israeli-Palestinian peace…the pharmaceutical firm Wyeth lost a Nevada lawsuit filed by breast cancer patients who blamed their tumors on Hormone Replacement Therapy…faulty wiring has been found in implanted heart defibrillators manufactured by Medtronic…the Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to a trio of theoreticians of market mechanisms…Sen Larry Craig (R-ID) has agreed to go public with his version of his disorderly conduct in an airport toilet.
For news that received such fanfare, it was not clear what the cancer facts are. Introducing their stories, anchors Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC headlined a falling death rate from the disease; on CBS, Katie Couric claimed a decline in the actual number of annual cancer deaths. It could be that both statistics are true, but since no network saw fit to offer an actual number of dead people, how could viewers know? As the population increases, a declining death rate need not mean decreasing deaths. They all cited the same number--a 2.1% annual reduction--yet such a tiny fraction is usually unworthy of headline status. To deserve such attention the newscasts needed to enumerate the thousands of people who are still alive that would have otherwise have died of cancer. Unless you can put a number on the story do not lead with it.
Anyway, whatever the facts of the story, ABC's Dan Harris stated that "this good news is not the result of miracle cures or anything like that." NBC's Tom Costello isolated a trio of factors: fewer cigarette smokers; post-menopausal women no longer taking Hormone Replacement Therapy; and increasing removal of pre-cancerous polyps in the colon. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook offered a hat tip to his colonoscopied anchor by running this soundbite about those polyps from the American Cancer Society's Harmon Eyre: "It began predominantly with the Katie Couric Effect but has been sustained with a lot of other efforts." Looking to the future, NBC's Costello warned that cancer could start killing more people again: "Doctors are seeing more liver and pancreatic cancer. They blame obesity and hepatitis."
Both ABC and CBS followed up with the Alzheimer's story: researchers are making progress in developing a diagnostic blood test, "identifying which patients with mild memory loss would go on to develop the disease within two to six years," as ABC's John McKenzie put it. Even in its earliest stages, he explained, a damaged Alzheimer's brain activates the immune system to attempt to repair it. That immune response leaves markers in the blood. At present there is no test even in the full-blown stages: "Only an autopsy can establish for sure that a patient had Alzheimer's," noted CBS' John Blackstone. "Brain scans and spinal taps are helpful but they are not certain."
Health-&-Medicine is an overcovered beat on the network nightly newscasts. In the story selection trade-off between covering topics of general interest and addressing the narrow concerns of their core demographic audience, the networks lean too far towards the latter. The core audience for the newscasts on broadcast television is older by far than the population at large. Older people tend to be more infirm--and so more personally involved in the medical-industrial complex. The skew of coverage towards their concerns, compounded by the plethora of pharmaceutical advertising that surrounds it, can only alienate younger, healthier viewers. This further narrows the newscasts' audience and distracts from their primary journalistic role, which is to deliver general interest news to the population at large.
In-house physician Timothy Johnson (no link), for example, stated that ABC News uses an e-mail panel of 12,000 healthcare experts, categorized into 200 specialties, to vet medical information for its newsworthiness. Both the cancer and the Alzheimer's story were subjected to that filter before they were selected for coverage. For how many other beats does ABC News rely on such extensive expertise? Does it have 12,000 economists, foreign affairs experts, sociologists, political scientists?
It turns out that for many medical stories, the nightly newscast is an inappropriate medium for journalism. For viewers, especially young healthy ones, who do not have a personal investment, a story on a particular malady lacks the general societal interest to warrant coverage; for those that the malady does affect, a nightly news report will be too superficial. ABC's Johnson himself recommended detailed reporting online instead: viewers should "go only to the sources where they know the names, major medical centers--Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard, Johns Hopkins--to people that they know as reliable sources."
For all the fanfare about the Katie Couric Effect, the bar should be set much higher than it is for medical information to qualify for the nightly news: issues of public health, yes; for information of particular use to individual patients, go online, as Dr Tim suggests.
FINANCIAL LANDMARKS This was a landmark day for financial journalism. It marked the entry by a soon-to-be-sibling of the Dow Jones brand onto cable television. Fox Business Network was launched, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which will soon complete its purchase of Dow Jones. It will compete with 17-year financial news leader CNBC, a network with tiny viewership but huge profits, according to CBS' Kelly Wallace. "Fox declared its approach more Main Street than Wall Street."
At the same time a pair of CNBC reporters appeared on NBC. From the New York Stock Exchange, Maria Bartiromo warned anchor Brian Williams that rising crude oil prices--"up more than 40% in 2007 alone"--would be "no mistake…a negative for the US economy." Bartiromo's colleague Scott Cohn updated us on the push to replace imported oil with ethanol generated from domestically grown corn. The corn harvest, which has swelled to 13bn bushels, up 70% in two years, is now producing too much: "Without enough alternative fuel vehicles to soak it all up, the price of ethanol is falling" and newly-built plants are shutting down. Nevertheless the high global price of crude is keeping regular gasoline prices high. ABC's Chris Bury (subscription required) reminded us that last year the cost of a gallon of gas dropped 47c after Labor Day; this year just 3c. He isolated three factors pushing the price of a barrel of crude above $86: global demand, a weak dollar--and the threat to an Iraqi pipeline as tensions between Turks and Kurds escalate. Inflation-adjusted, crude is still cheaper than it was during the Iranian Revolution, yet "the big question now is not whether the record will be shattered--but when."
The other financial landmark was a looming birthday celebrated by socialsecurity.gov. The nation's oldest babyboomer, Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, turns 62 on January 1st, 2008, so she signed up for Social Security retirement benefits, the first of her cohort of 77m. She is "the raindrop that is about to become a tsunami," as ABC's David Wright (no link) put it. Both Wright and CBS' Chip Reid previewed the eventual depletion of the trust fund. Neither even mentioned the plan President George Bush ballyhooed in 2005 to prevent depletion by privatization. "There are basically two choices for fixing the problem: you either increase taxes or you cut benefits," Reid asserted. "Of course it is perfectly obvious how to fix it," was how Wright put it, "either raise taxes or cut benefits."
EXTRA DRY After Ned Colt's brief lead-off mention of the Heathrow Airport accident, NBC proceeded with its scheduled lead from Martin Savidge. The southeast is on the verge of emergency water rationing. Records dating back to 1894 have been set for lack of rainfall in Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida. A water war has started along the Catawba River, with South and North Carolina each accusing the other of taking too much. In Georgia, restrictions on residential water use have already been imposed. "Officials for the first time are considering restricting water to commercial and industrial users. Farmers would be next."
BADA BING Armen Keteyian took us to an "old smuggling route that cuts across Green Valley," the misnamed section of the Pima County desert along the Arizona-Mexico line. Nowadays, the commodities smuggled northwards are "valuable loads of drugs and human cargo," traffic that is being hijacked by gangs of desert bandits armed with automatic weapons known as bajadores. The marijuana is stolen by narcotraffickers operating out of The Capri Lounge nightclub in Phoenix, Keteyian told us for CBS' Eye on Crime. The immigrants are kidnapped, "often held hostage until families back home pay thousands of dollars in ransom." Each year, between 200 and 300 people are found dead in the 9,000 square mile desert.
SOLIDARITY FOREVER As the Communist Party convened in Congress in Beijing, NBC--the network that owns the broadcast rights to next year's Olympic Games--launched a series entitled China Rising. Mark Mullen called the People's Republic "harder to recognize as citizens raise from Mao to Wow!" He toured District 798, Beijing's art zone with its "trendy and high-end restaurants and nightclubs, the likes of which no one could have even imagined here in China just 20 years ago." Mullen noted that while China's middle class now numbers 300m, peasants in rural poverty still account for 70% of the population. When President Hu Jintao acknowledged to Congress that the Party must address this inequality, Mullen called it "a challenge to be sure--especially in a country strenuously pushing capitalism and Communism at once."
HOW TO LEARN Both CBS and ABC checked out programs to improve the quality of public school education. Bill Weir took advantage of ABC's limited commercials to plant a sloppy wet kiss on KIPP as a Key to Success. Knowledge Is Power Program is a 57-site network of charter schools founded by a pair of Houston teachers, Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin. Supported by millions in donations from The GAP's retail fortune and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, KIPP recruits low-income children, many testing at two grades below their age, and delivers an 80% post-school enrolment in college. Weir ticked off KIPP techniques: higher teacher pay, a longer school day, extra school on Saturday and during the summer, enforced parental participation, heavy homework. He summed it up as Work Hard. Be Nice. No Shortcuts.
CBS' Sandra Hughes took us to Normandie Avenue Elementary in South Central Los Angeles, a neighborhood so poor that each of the school's 1,000 students qualifies for the federal free meals program. The program there, funded by former Disney TV child star Hillary Duff, is called Blessings in a Backpack. It allows children to take more free food home at weekends in their backpacks. The result is improved attendance on Monday mornings and increased test scores. As one girl testified: "On an empty stomach, you cannot learn anything."
LINKLESS Even though broadcast television is not interactive, it cannot be right for a TV reporter to file a story about a Website without including the address so viewers can check it out. Yet ABC ignored the URL in two separate reports on what we can find online. Jon Donvan showed us a videostream that helps parents diagnose autistic behavior in toddlers. Barbara Pinto (subscription required) introduced us to Dawn Meehan, a stay-at-home mother of six, attracting a growing audience to her Erma-Bombeck-style blog. "She has just been asked to write a book of comedy and advice. Hollywood has come calling asking Dawn to write a family sitcom."
So Tyndall Report Google'd each story and here you are: autismspeaks.org and mom2my6pack.blogspot.com.
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: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued her diplomacy in search of an Israeli-Palestinian peace…the pharmaceutical firm Wyeth lost a Nevada lawsuit filed by breast cancer patients who blamed their tumors on Hormone Replacement Therapy…faulty wiring has been found in implanted heart defibrillators manufactured by Medtronic…the Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to a trio of theoreticians of market mechanisms…Sen Larry Craig (R-ID) has agreed to go public with his version of his disorderly conduct in an airport toilet.
