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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 4, 2007
What a pathetic day of news! ABC led with raids against illegal immigrants--a story neither of the other two networks even mentioned. CBS chose the prospects for fully booked airline flights over Thanksgiving--likewise utterly ignored by its rivals. There were only two stories that were deemed newsworthy enough to qualify for a mention on all three newscasts--and they were tawdry. Marion Jones, the Olympic sprinter admitted that she cheated to win her gold medals and then lied about it. Larry Craig, the Republican Senator from Idaho, argued that he was lying when he admitted being disorderly in a toilet but a judge insisted on his guilty plea. Craig's embarrassment was NBC's lead. But none of the lead stories qualified as Story of the Day. That dubious honor in a newsfree zone belonged to ABC's feature profile of Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Richardson.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 4, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CHEATER MARION AND DISORDERLY LARRY What a pathetic day of news! ABC led with raids against illegal immigrants--a story neither of the other two networks even mentioned. CBS chose the prospects for fully booked airline flights over Thanksgiving--likewise utterly ignored by its rivals. There were only two stories that were deemed newsworthy enough to qualify for a mention on all three newscasts--and they were tawdry. Marion Jones, the Olympic sprinter admitted that she cheated to win her gold medals and then lied about it. Larry Craig, the Republican Senator from Idaho, argued that he was lying when he admitted being disorderly in a toilet but a judge insisted on his guilty plea. Craig's embarrassment was NBC's lead. But none of the lead stories qualified as Story of the Day. That dubious honor in a newsfree zone belonged to ABC's feature profile of Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Richardson.
NBC's Pete Williams spared us a rehashing of the lavatorial details that led to Craig's admission of guilt. He merely summarized the logic of the Minnesota judge who called his plea "entirely proper." Craig "may have felt pressure to plead guilty to get it over with and avoid the publicity," Williams reported, "but that pressure was in Craig's own mind." And, needless to say, the publicity came anyway. ABC's Jake Tapper reminded us that Craig had announced that he would resign from the Senate at the end of September if his conviction was not overturned. "Now he is saying he is not going anywhere" because "he has realized he can still be an effective senator." Tapper foresaw ethics hearings that "could embarrass not just Sen Craig but all of the Republicans--and all of the Senate."
Reporter Amy Shipley of the Washington Post landed the exclusive that Jones, winner of five medals at the Sydney Olympics of 2000, was ready to file her guilty plea. Shipley told NBC's Brian Williams that Jones would admit she had been lying when she claimed she trained with flax seed, a nutritional supplement, in the two years before her track-&-field triumph. Instead she was doping herself with performance-enhancing steroids. Shipley added that the flax seed explanation was identical to the "excuse" from baseball slugger Barry Bonds. "A grand jury is investigating perjury allegations with regard to his testimony."
CELL PHONES & LAPEL PINS ABC anchor Charles Gibson (subscription required) announced that his five-minute profile of Bill Richardson was the first of a twelve-part series dubbed Who Is on each of the Presidential candidates: "How they have come to be who they are--their formative years, their parents, their families, a little bit about their backgrounds." So we were introduced to the Governor of New Mexico, son of a Nicaraguan, born in California, raised in Mexico City, educated in Boston. His father William, a banker "drove me, yes, that is a good word." If he were alive today "he would be telling me to lose weight, to give better speeches." Son Bill confessed to uprooting his wife Barbara: "One day I want to say--'All right, the next five years are yours. We do what you want'--except these next five years."
What a relief that Campaign 2008 was dignified with that extended feature--because the news from the trail was just ludicrous. CBS' in-house consultant Nicolle Wallace told Byron Pitts that the "best funded and best organized" Republicans, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani, "are starting to really knock heads." Pitts' evidence was the Romney Campaign's YouTube video of Giuliani making a habit of receiving cell-phone calls while making speeches. As Giuliani himself said: "If this is the biggest thing they are going to raise, they are in a lot of trouble." Equally laughable was the flap ABC's David Wright (subscription required) found on the Democratic side. Barack Obama used to wear a Stars-&-Stripes pin in his lapel…but no longer. Wright claimed that the candidate caused a "controversy" when he called the flag fashion statement "a substitute for true patriotism."
ENFORCE ABC led with a couple of angles on the immigration beat. Raids to arrest immigrants without residency papers are now ten times more frequent than four years ago. Pierre Thomas asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff why: "When the immigration bill went down in flames this summer he was left with one mandate--enforce the law." Mike von Fremd took the local angle in the Texas town of Irving, where it is now police policy is to check the papers of "every individual they pick up for breaking the law." So far, more than 2,000 individuals have been handed over by local cops to Immigration & Customs Enforcement. "The Mexican consulate is telling Mexicans to steer clear of towns such as this one." Responded Mayor Herbert Gears: "We are not engaging in racial profiling of any kind."
HEAD SLAPS "The United States does not torture. It is against our laws. And it is against our values. I have not authorized it. And I will not authorize it." That was the soundbite NBC's Andrea Mitchell played from President George Bush. Mitchell pointed out that he made that declaration a year after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had "despite dissent on his staff" secretly authorized interrogations using head slaps, water boards and frigid temperatures--and "several practices simultaneously." Mitchell quoted unnamed "officials" as asserting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, too, knew about Gonzales' memoranda even as she "promised US allies that the administration does not use torture." Concluded Mitchell: "It depends on what your definition of torture is."
UPDATE: the networks' disatrous story selection was the target of Bob Garfield's (audio link) wrath on public radio's On The Media.
MYAWADDY DIARY A week after the opposition protests in Myanmar were suppressed, NBC's Ian Williams posed as a tourist with a handheld camera and crossed from Thailand into the border town of Myawaddy. He found the mood "filled with poverty and tension…life goes on but they are nervous of outsiders." The town is a main crossing for dissidents fleeing the military's crackdown. Williams talked to a trio of Burmese Buddhist monks who had participated in last week's street protests. "There were raids day and night. If monks were arrested, they were beaten, kicked and slapped," one monk recounted as he headed into exile.
NEWS KATIE CAN USE Nothing made the day's lack of serious news more obvious than CBS' decision to kick off its newscast with a trio of feature stories: Nancy Cordes surveyed trends in airline travel; a pregnant Kelly Wallace balanced the pros and cons of fish in the diet--mercury toxins vs omega-3 acids--for women with child; Sandra Hughes looked at lead paint on toys. The lead story saw Cordes advise us to book ahead if we were planning to fly over Thanksgiving because several airlines (USAirways, NWAirlines, Continental, United) in several cities (Detroit, Houston, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis) have reduced their capacity by switching from a few wide-body flights each day to a more frequent schedule using small jets with as few as 50 seats. At least Cordes made her anchor happy with her reporting: "Nancy, your story prompted me to buy my Thanksgiving tickets this afternoon so thank you for that."
GARBAGE OUT Both NBC and CBS did their bit to help keep the planet tidy. CBS' Kelly Cobiella in Tampa celebrated GreenArmada.org, a 600-strong volunteer group who retrieve garbage from local rivers and bayous and shorelines. In nine months the group has bagged 40 tons of trash, all picked up by hand. For NBC's In Depth, Kevin Tibbles took us down the periodic table to demonstrate how many metals are to be found in obsolete hi-tech equipment: gold in processors, silver in tape, platinum in circuits, mercury in monitors, lead in solder--"70% of all heavy metals found in landfills comes from discarded electronics." Tibbles recommended recycling.
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: all 3,200 gold miners trapped at the bottom of a shaft in South Africa got out alive…no murder charges are likely to be filed against Marines implicated in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha…the government of Iraq is purchasing weapons from China…a pair of guards working a Philadelphia armored truck were murdered in a robbery.
NBC's Pete Williams spared us a rehashing of the lavatorial details that led to Craig's admission of guilt. He merely summarized the logic of the Minnesota judge who called his plea "entirely proper." Craig "may have felt pressure to plead guilty to get it over with and avoid the publicity," Williams reported, "but that pressure was in Craig's own mind." And, needless to say, the publicity came anyway. ABC's Jake Tapper reminded us that Craig had announced that he would resign from the Senate at the end of September if his conviction was not overturned. "Now he is saying he is not going anywhere" because "he has realized he can still be an effective senator." Tapper foresaw ethics hearings that "could embarrass not just Sen Craig but all of the Republicans--and all of the Senate."
Reporter Amy Shipley of the Washington Post landed the exclusive that Jones, winner of five medals at the Sydney Olympics of 2000, was ready to file her guilty plea. Shipley told NBC's Brian Williams that Jones would admit she had been lying when she claimed she trained with flax seed, a nutritional supplement, in the two years before her track-&-field triumph. Instead she was doping herself with performance-enhancing steroids. Shipley added that the flax seed explanation was identical to the "excuse" from baseball slugger Barry Bonds. "A grand jury is investigating perjury allegations with regard to his testimony."
CELL PHONES & LAPEL PINS ABC anchor Charles Gibson (subscription required) announced that his five-minute profile of Bill Richardson was the first of a twelve-part series dubbed Who Is on each of the Presidential candidates: "How they have come to be who they are--their formative years, their parents, their families, a little bit about their backgrounds." So we were introduced to the Governor of New Mexico, son of a Nicaraguan, born in California, raised in Mexico City, educated in Boston. His father William, a banker "drove me, yes, that is a good word." If he were alive today "he would be telling me to lose weight, to give better speeches." Son Bill confessed to uprooting his wife Barbara: "One day I want to say--'All right, the next five years are yours. We do what you want'--except these next five years."
What a relief that Campaign 2008 was dignified with that extended feature--because the news from the trail was just ludicrous. CBS' in-house consultant Nicolle Wallace told Byron Pitts that the "best funded and best organized" Republicans, Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani, "are starting to really knock heads." Pitts' evidence was the Romney Campaign's YouTube video of Giuliani making a habit of receiving cell-phone calls while making speeches. As Giuliani himself said: "If this is the biggest thing they are going to raise, they are in a lot of trouble." Equally laughable was the flap ABC's David Wright (subscription required) found on the Democratic side. Barack Obama used to wear a Stars-&-Stripes pin in his lapel…but no longer. Wright claimed that the candidate caused a "controversy" when he called the flag fashion statement "a substitute for true patriotism."
ENFORCE ABC led with a couple of angles on the immigration beat. Raids to arrest immigrants without residency papers are now ten times more frequent than four years ago. Pierre Thomas asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff why: "When the immigration bill went down in flames this summer he was left with one mandate--enforce the law." Mike von Fremd took the local angle in the Texas town of Irving, where it is now police policy is to check the papers of "every individual they pick up for breaking the law." So far, more than 2,000 individuals have been handed over by local cops to Immigration & Customs Enforcement. "The Mexican consulate is telling Mexicans to steer clear of towns such as this one." Responded Mayor Herbert Gears: "We are not engaging in racial profiling of any kind."
HEAD SLAPS "The United States does not torture. It is against our laws. And it is against our values. I have not authorized it. And I will not authorize it." That was the soundbite NBC's Andrea Mitchell played from President George Bush. Mitchell pointed out that he made that declaration a year after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had "despite dissent on his staff" secretly authorized interrogations using head slaps, water boards and frigid temperatures--and "several practices simultaneously." Mitchell quoted unnamed "officials" as asserting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, too, knew about Gonzales' memoranda even as she "promised US allies that the administration does not use torture." Concluded Mitchell: "It depends on what your definition of torture is."
UPDATE: the networks' disatrous story selection was the target of Bob Garfield's (audio link) wrath on public radio's On The Media.
MYAWADDY DIARY A week after the opposition protests in Myanmar were suppressed, NBC's Ian Williams posed as a tourist with a handheld camera and crossed from Thailand into the border town of Myawaddy. He found the mood "filled with poverty and tension…life goes on but they are nervous of outsiders." The town is a main crossing for dissidents fleeing the military's crackdown. Williams talked to a trio of Burmese Buddhist monks who had participated in last week's street protests. "There were raids day and night. If monks were arrested, they were beaten, kicked and slapped," one monk recounted as he headed into exile.
NEWS KATIE CAN USE Nothing made the day's lack of serious news more obvious than CBS' decision to kick off its newscast with a trio of feature stories: Nancy Cordes surveyed trends in airline travel; a pregnant Kelly Wallace balanced the pros and cons of fish in the diet--mercury toxins vs omega-3 acids--for women with child; Sandra Hughes looked at lead paint on toys. The lead story saw Cordes advise us to book ahead if we were planning to fly over Thanksgiving because several airlines (USAirways, NWAirlines, Continental, United) in several cities (Detroit, Houston, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis) have reduced their capacity by switching from a few wide-body flights each day to a more frequent schedule using small jets with as few as 50 seats. At least Cordes made her anchor happy with her reporting: "Nancy, your story prompted me to buy my Thanksgiving tickets this afternoon so thank you for that."
GARBAGE OUT Both NBC and CBS did their bit to help keep the planet tidy. CBS' Kelly Cobiella in Tampa celebrated GreenArmada.org, a 600-strong volunteer group who retrieve garbage from local rivers and bayous and shorelines. In nine months the group has bagged 40 tons of trash, all picked up by hand. For NBC's In Depth, Kevin Tibbles took us down the periodic table to demonstrate how many metals are to be found in obsolete hi-tech equipment: gold in processors, silver in tape, platinum in circuits, mercury in monitors, lead in solder--"70% of all heavy metals found in landfills comes from discarded electronics." Tibbles recommended recycling.
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: all 3,200 gold miners trapped at the bottom of a shaft in South Africa got out alive…no murder charges are likely to be filed against Marines implicated in the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha…the government of Iraq is purchasing weapons from China…a pair of guards working a Philadelphia armored truck were murdered in a robbery.
