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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 30, 2007
A light day of news saw a split vote by the networks on how to kick off their newscasts. NBC had Brian Williams anchor from Philadelphia where he will moderate a debate by the Democratic Presidential field: his lead amounted to a promo for MSNBC's coverage in primetime. ABC watched the increase in the global cost of crude oil prices and translated it into the prospects for prices at the pump. CBS led with a spat on Capitol Hill over the future of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The dispute was the only news deemed important enough to warrant coverage by a reporter on all through newscasts--and so it qualified as Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 30, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CONSUMER PRODUCT BUREAUCRACY WARS A light day of news saw a split vote by the networks on how to kick off their newscasts. NBC had Brian Williams anchor from Philadelphia where he will moderate a debate by the Democratic Presidential field: his lead amounted to a promo for MSNBC's coverage in primetime. ABC watched the increase in the global cost of crude oil prices and translated it into the prospects for prices at the pump. CBS led with a spat on Capitol Hill over the future of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The dispute was the only news deemed important enough to warrant coverage by a reporter on all through newscasts--and so it qualified as Story of the Day.
At stake was a proposal to expand the powers and budget of the CPSC to ensure the safety of consumer products. "There is wide agreement," asserted NBC's Tom Costello--rerunning the now-famous clip of Bob the Tester dropping toys down an office wall--that the commission "is overstretched." ABC's Lisa Stark called the CPSC "a shell of its former self." And CBS' Chip Reid conceded that Nancy Nord, its acting chairwoman, "agrees the agency is badly in need of more resources to modernize testing labs." However, Nord rejected aspects of the proposed expansion, including a plan to empower the attorney general of each state to file lawsuits to enforce federal consumer protection laws, collecting fines as high as $100m per violation. "I would rather be hiring scientists and safety inspectors than lawyers," Nord declared to NBC's Costello. Nord's opposition led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for her resignation.
The storm broke at just the right time for ABC, which aired part two of its Made in China series on the safety of goods imported from Chinese factories. David Kerley documented a guided tour he was given of a toy factory that "has never had a recall" and a "state of the art" shrimp farm--"but we only saw what they wanted us to see." He found People's Republic bureaucrats "happy to show off their labs, which test food and toys" and then offered the caveat that those labs check "only a fraction of the $300bn of goods" exported to the United States.
IOWA MINUS 65 NBC tried to instill a sense of urgency into the Presidential debate to be conducted on MSNBC by its pair of anchors, Brian Williams and Tim Russert of Meet the Press. "Only 65 days before the first votes in Iowa," Andrea Mitchell counted. "This is it for them," announced Russert (at the tail of the Mitchell videostream), referring to second-tier candidates Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson. "They know they have to make a mark in tonight's debate--two months to go."
The other storyline of the night was whether top contenders Barack Obama and John Edwards would be able to mount a challenge to frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mitchell aired a couple of candidate soundbites against her. Edwards' complaint was substantive: Rodham Clinton "defends the status quo, takes money from Washington lobbyists." Dodd, behind in the polls himself, cited polls, which happen to show her with a commanding lead, to render a horse race criticism against her that he himself conceded was unfair. "When you have got 50% of the American public say: 'I am never going to vote for that person.' That is a liability and that is a reality." Russert pointed out that Obama "has to be very pointed in separating himself" from Rodham Clinton yet he predicted that Edwards would be yet edgier: "He is absolutely going on a no holds barred, take no prisoners. I believe he will be more candid, more blunt, more acerbic in his language than Barack Obama."
MACRO ECONOMY ABC led with economic news as David Muir followed the rising price of crude through the refinery system and concluded that a gallon of gasoline would become 25c more expensive in just one week. With the Federal Reserve Board poised to cut interest rates, tomorrow, Muir noted that oil prices tend to rise as the dollar weakens: "There is a great concern that a cut in rates could possibly weaken it even more." NBC consulted Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money, who insisted that interest rates must fall regardless: "We have got to get housing to stabilize--and the only organization that can do it all at once is the Federal Reserve--because housing has become such a key component of the slowdown in the economy."
Stanley O'Neal is "the most prominent casualty of the mortgage meltdown," declared Anthony Mason on CBS. He was the boss of the brokerage Merrill Lynch, fired because he presided over $8bn in losses from wrong-way wagers on the value of real estate loans. "CEOs are losing their jobs; borrowers are losing homes. They are all paying for placing exceedingly bad financial bets," mused Mason--except that O'Neal was not paying. Yesterday, ABC's Muir (subscription required) reported that he would leave his job with a $200m severance; today CBS' Mason estimated the package at $160m in stock options. "Some pay more than others."
Returning to the rising price of gasoline, a soundbite Muir used from analyst Art Hogan of the Wall Street firm Jefferies & Co sounded fishy: "What this 25c more per gallon means--that takes about $100m a day out of consumer spending." But surely the purchase of gasoline is a component of "consumer spending." The $100m extra spent on gasoline is, by definition, spent by the consumer. How can those purchases be not spent?
RIVERS OF BABYLON A trio of reports were filed on Iraq, each with a different angle. ABC's Miguel Marquez (subscription required) went to Baghdad's Shorjah Market, the site of a gruesome terrorist bombing (text link) in February. Since then the market has been secured: it is surrounded by concrete barriers; all shoppers are frisked; merchants must cart their wares in by hand. The areas surrounding the market have seen 48 deaths by "bomb, gun and mortar" since February, but not one in the secure zone. Merchants in the Jamiyah neighborhood are being subsidized to reopen their businesses. So far 700 storekeepers have applied for funds. Shops are open--but empty. "Large scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has stopped here but there are still criminal gangs. Most people in Jamiyah are still too afraid to leave their homes.
On NBC, Lisa Myers followed up on yesterday's report by CBS' David Martin on the immunity granted to Blackwater USA bodyguards when they were initially questioned by the State Department about last month's killing of 17 civilians in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. Myers' unidentified "official" source told her that the grant of immunity was a "mistake," offered "without the approval of the State Department's top managers." Her source told her "such guarantees were often offered during investigations in Baghdad over the last two years." The FBI is continuing its investigation to develop an unimmunized account of the killings and at the corporate level Blackwater USA announced that it is cooperating with the feds. Some operatives, however, "are now refusing," Myers was told.
CBS chose to focus on the Mosul Dam on the Tigris River, built in 1984 and now "perilously close" to collapse, according to the USArmy's Corps of Engineers. Allen Pizzey, astonishingly, explained that the dam was "built on a type of rock that dissolves when it comes into contact with water." If it breaks it will let loose a 60 foot high wall of water onto the city of Mosul 45 miles to its south and 15-foot floods would reach as far as Baghdad. "Biblical proportion," was how Pizzey put it.
CHILDHOOD HORRORS Child abduction was the accusation by the government of Chad against a French charity. ABC's Hilary Brown (subscription required) narrated the footage from London. Zoe's Ark claimed to be rescuing orphans from Darfur, transporting them through Chad and flying them to France where they would be cared for by foster families. As they were about to board their charter plane the aid workers were arrested for kidnapping. There were 103 children in their charge "lured from their families," according to Brown. "Many were not orphans. Many were not from Darfur." The aid workers, facing 20 years of hard labor in a Chadian prison, deny all charges. "They insist that they were acting in good faith."
Child pornography was the issue at the Supreme Court and only CBS assigned a reporter to cover the hearing. Wyatt Andrews explained how draconian the federal law banning child porn is. It not only makes possession illegal, with "no free speech protection." It also bans "merely claiming to have" the material through advertisement or promotion. Furthermore, to be illegal, the material does not have to be pornographic; it merely has to have "scenes depicting underage sex." Thus movies such as Lolita and American Beauty fall foul of the law since their plots involve sexually active minors. Thus promoting, or even describing such movies, in DVD sleeve notes or a newspaper review, for example, involves an implicit claim of possession of the material. "The only question here," Andrews summarized, "is whether talking about having child porn" is criminal.
Has anybody seen Romeo & Juliet recently? It was verysexy unarousing.
WELCOME TO DIXMOR Both ABC and CBS offered a review of Rockstar Games' latest videogame release Manhunt 2. The protagonist is Daniel Lamb--"I live in hell"--whose task is to escape from Dixmor Insane Asylum "where they torture and murder with axes, fire, wire," as ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) put it. It "may be the most violent videogame yet." Still, it has been watered down, Tapper pointed out, with its creators "removing a castration scene." Banned in Britain as "casually sadistic," Tapper stated that there is "no doubt, in this country, the game will make a killing."
In CBS' Eye on Technology feature, Daniel Sieberg told us that Manhunt 2 can be played on a SONY PlayStation 2 console, but "the experience is even more intense using Nintendo's Wii, which gets players to act out the violence." Thus killing with a knife requires a lunge with a stabbing motion; beating someone's brains out with a sledgehammer or shovel requires the swing of a club. Sieberg worried about children becoming aggressive or desensitized from playing Manhunt 2 even as he reassured us: "Researchers have not found a direct scientific link between playing violent video games and carrying out those acts in real life." So parents who have committed their children to vicious mental institutions can sleep easy, we suppose.
Nintendo Wii is the very system that Sieberg's colleague Jon LaPook praised just three weeks ago for offering wholesome low-impact exercise games for the elderly to play.
DINNER HOUR Filing from Masai Mara in Kenya under the Our Planet logo, NBC's Martin Fletcher tried to turn his footage of the migration of million-strong wildebeest herd from Tanzania into a global warming story. He worried that extreme weather caused by climate change would disrupt the wildebeest cycle of feeding and breeding, as east African drought alternates with heavy rains. Fletcher tried. But in the end this was just a traditional animal closer, telling the sad tale of the young injured Wilbert the wildebeest. Wilbert could not keep up with his kin and ended up as dinner for Leona the lioness and her cubs. "Sorry that did not have a happier ending," apologized anchor Brian Williams.
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: a suicide bomber killed seven people near Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi…James Peake has been nominated as the Secretary for Veterans Affairs…Tropical Storm Noel has stalled over Cuba…in an effort to conserve wetlands in Oregon's Klamath County, river levees were destroyed…the levels of drinking water in Georgia's Lake Lanier are not as low as feared…the installation of a solar power panel on the International Space Station suffered a set back…the Boston Red Sox celebrated their World Series victory with hometown fans.
At stake was a proposal to expand the powers and budget of the CPSC to ensure the safety of consumer products. "There is wide agreement," asserted NBC's Tom Costello--rerunning the now-famous clip of Bob the Tester dropping toys down an office wall--that the commission "is overstretched." ABC's Lisa Stark called the CPSC "a shell of its former self." And CBS' Chip Reid conceded that Nancy Nord, its acting chairwoman, "agrees the agency is badly in need of more resources to modernize testing labs." However, Nord rejected aspects of the proposed expansion, including a plan to empower the attorney general of each state to file lawsuits to enforce federal consumer protection laws, collecting fines as high as $100m per violation. "I would rather be hiring scientists and safety inspectors than lawyers," Nord declared to NBC's Costello. Nord's opposition led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for her resignation.
The storm broke at just the right time for ABC, which aired part two of its Made in China series on the safety of goods imported from Chinese factories. David Kerley documented a guided tour he was given of a toy factory that "has never had a recall" and a "state of the art" shrimp farm--"but we only saw what they wanted us to see." He found People's Republic bureaucrats "happy to show off their labs, which test food and toys" and then offered the caveat that those labs check "only a fraction of the $300bn of goods" exported to the United States.
IOWA MINUS 65 NBC tried to instill a sense of urgency into the Presidential debate to be conducted on MSNBC by its pair of anchors, Brian Williams and Tim Russert of Meet the Press. "Only 65 days before the first votes in Iowa," Andrea Mitchell counted. "This is it for them," announced Russert (at the tail of the Mitchell videostream), referring to second-tier candidates Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson. "They know they have to make a mark in tonight's debate--two months to go."
The other storyline of the night was whether top contenders Barack Obama and John Edwards would be able to mount a challenge to frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mitchell aired a couple of candidate soundbites against her. Edwards' complaint was substantive: Rodham Clinton "defends the status quo, takes money from Washington lobbyists." Dodd, behind in the polls himself, cited polls, which happen to show her with a commanding lead, to render a horse race criticism against her that he himself conceded was unfair. "When you have got 50% of the American public say: 'I am never going to vote for that person.' That is a liability and that is a reality." Russert pointed out that Obama "has to be very pointed in separating himself" from Rodham Clinton yet he predicted that Edwards would be yet edgier: "He is absolutely going on a no holds barred, take no prisoners. I believe he will be more candid, more blunt, more acerbic in his language than Barack Obama."
MACRO ECONOMY ABC led with economic news as David Muir followed the rising price of crude through the refinery system and concluded that a gallon of gasoline would become 25c more expensive in just one week. With the Federal Reserve Board poised to cut interest rates, tomorrow, Muir noted that oil prices tend to rise as the dollar weakens: "There is a great concern that a cut in rates could possibly weaken it even more." NBC consulted Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money, who insisted that interest rates must fall regardless: "We have got to get housing to stabilize--and the only organization that can do it all at once is the Federal Reserve--because housing has become such a key component of the slowdown in the economy."
Stanley O'Neal is "the most prominent casualty of the mortgage meltdown," declared Anthony Mason on CBS. He was the boss of the brokerage Merrill Lynch, fired because he presided over $8bn in losses from wrong-way wagers on the value of real estate loans. "CEOs are losing their jobs; borrowers are losing homes. They are all paying for placing exceedingly bad financial bets," mused Mason--except that O'Neal was not paying. Yesterday, ABC's Muir (subscription required) reported that he would leave his job with a $200m severance; today CBS' Mason estimated the package at $160m in stock options. "Some pay more than others."
Returning to the rising price of gasoline, a soundbite Muir used from analyst Art Hogan of the Wall Street firm Jefferies & Co sounded fishy: "What this 25c more per gallon means--that takes about $100m a day out of consumer spending." But surely the purchase of gasoline is a component of "consumer spending." The $100m extra spent on gasoline is, by definition, spent by the consumer. How can those purchases be not spent?
RIVERS OF BABYLON A trio of reports were filed on Iraq, each with a different angle. ABC's Miguel Marquez (subscription required) went to Baghdad's Shorjah Market, the site of a gruesome terrorist bombing (text link) in February. Since then the market has been secured: it is surrounded by concrete barriers; all shoppers are frisked; merchants must cart their wares in by hand. The areas surrounding the market have seen 48 deaths by "bomb, gun and mortar" since February, but not one in the secure zone. Merchants in the Jamiyah neighborhood are being subsidized to reopen their businesses. So far 700 storekeepers have applied for funds. Shops are open--but empty. "Large scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has stopped here but there are still criminal gangs. Most people in Jamiyah are still too afraid to leave their homes.
On NBC, Lisa Myers followed up on yesterday's report by CBS' David Martin on the immunity granted to Blackwater USA bodyguards when they were initially questioned by the State Department about last month's killing of 17 civilians in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. Myers' unidentified "official" source told her that the grant of immunity was a "mistake," offered "without the approval of the State Department's top managers." Her source told her "such guarantees were often offered during investigations in Baghdad over the last two years." The FBI is continuing its investigation to develop an unimmunized account of the killings and at the corporate level Blackwater USA announced that it is cooperating with the feds. Some operatives, however, "are now refusing," Myers was told.
CBS chose to focus on the Mosul Dam on the Tigris River, built in 1984 and now "perilously close" to collapse, according to the USArmy's Corps of Engineers. Allen Pizzey, astonishingly, explained that the dam was "built on a type of rock that dissolves when it comes into contact with water." If it breaks it will let loose a 60 foot high wall of water onto the city of Mosul 45 miles to its south and 15-foot floods would reach as far as Baghdad. "Biblical proportion," was how Pizzey put it.
CHILDHOOD HORRORS Child abduction was the accusation by the government of Chad against a French charity. ABC's Hilary Brown (subscription required) narrated the footage from London. Zoe's Ark claimed to be rescuing orphans from Darfur, transporting them through Chad and flying them to France where they would be cared for by foster families. As they were about to board their charter plane the aid workers were arrested for kidnapping. There were 103 children in their charge "lured from their families," according to Brown. "Many were not orphans. Many were not from Darfur." The aid workers, facing 20 years of hard labor in a Chadian prison, deny all charges. "They insist that they were acting in good faith."
Child pornography was the issue at the Supreme Court and only CBS assigned a reporter to cover the hearing. Wyatt Andrews explained how draconian the federal law banning child porn is. It not only makes possession illegal, with "no free speech protection." It also bans "merely claiming to have" the material through advertisement or promotion. Furthermore, to be illegal, the material does not have to be pornographic; it merely has to have "scenes depicting underage sex." Thus movies such as Lolita and American Beauty fall foul of the law since their plots involve sexually active minors. Thus promoting, or even describing such movies, in DVD sleeve notes or a newspaper review, for example, involves an implicit claim of possession of the material. "The only question here," Andrews summarized, "is whether talking about having child porn" is criminal.
Has anybody seen Romeo & Juliet recently? It was very
WELCOME TO DIXMOR Both ABC and CBS offered a review of Rockstar Games' latest videogame release Manhunt 2. The protagonist is Daniel Lamb--"I live in hell"--whose task is to escape from Dixmor Insane Asylum "where they torture and murder with axes, fire, wire," as ABC's Jake Tapper (subscription required) put it. It "may be the most violent videogame yet." Still, it has been watered down, Tapper pointed out, with its creators "removing a castration scene." Banned in Britain as "casually sadistic," Tapper stated that there is "no doubt, in this country, the game will make a killing."
In CBS' Eye on Technology feature, Daniel Sieberg told us that Manhunt 2 can be played on a SONY PlayStation 2 console, but "the experience is even more intense using Nintendo's Wii, which gets players to act out the violence." Thus killing with a knife requires a lunge with a stabbing motion; beating someone's brains out with a sledgehammer or shovel requires the swing of a club. Sieberg worried about children becoming aggressive or desensitized from playing Manhunt 2 even as he reassured us: "Researchers have not found a direct scientific link between playing violent video games and carrying out those acts in real life." So parents who have committed their children to vicious mental institutions can sleep easy, we suppose.
Nintendo Wii is the very system that Sieberg's colleague Jon LaPook praised just three weeks ago for offering wholesome low-impact exercise games for the elderly to play.
DINNER HOUR Filing from Masai Mara in Kenya under the Our Planet logo, NBC's Martin Fletcher tried to turn his footage of the migration of million-strong wildebeest herd from Tanzania into a global warming story. He worried that extreme weather caused by climate change would disrupt the wildebeest cycle of feeding and breeding, as east African drought alternates with heavy rains. Fletcher tried. But in the end this was just a traditional animal closer, telling the sad tale of the young injured Wilbert the wildebeest. Wilbert could not keep up with his kin and ended up as dinner for Leona the lioness and her cubs. "Sorry that did not have a happier ending," apologized anchor Brian Williams.
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: a suicide bomber killed seven people near Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi…James Peake has been nominated as the Secretary for Veterans Affairs…Tropical Storm Noel has stalled over Cuba…in an effort to conserve wetlands in Oregon's Klamath County, river levees were destroyed…the levels of drinking water in Georgia's Lake Lanier are not as low as feared…the installation of a solar power panel on the International Space Station suffered a set back…the Boston Red Sox celebrated their World Series victory with hometown fans.
