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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 4, 2007
Tensions in eastern Europe and violence in the nation's cities led to a split decision on the day's news. ABC and CBS led with FBI statistics for violent crime in 2006. NBC chose the beginning of the President's travels in Europe. Even though the war in Iraq did not make the top of any of the three newscasts, it attracted enough attention to qualify as the Story of the Day with a pair of progress reports, one on the so-called troop surge in Baghdad, the other on the search for the two missing soldiers captured in the countryside south of the capital.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 4, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MUCH ADO ABOUT MINUSCULE RISE IN MURDERS Tensions in eastern Europe and violence in the nation's cities led to a split decision on the day's news. ABC and CBS led with FBI statistics for violent crime in 2006. NBC chose the beginning of the President's travels in Europe. Even though the war in Iraq did not make the top of any of the three newscasts, it attracted enough attention to qualify as the Story of the Day with a pair of progress reports, one on the so-called troop surge in Baghdad, the other on the search for the two missing soldiers captured in the countryside south of the capital.
A hike in the incidence of violent crime nationwide sounds scary until the amount of the increase is mentioned--a nominal 1.3%. All three networks assigned a reporter to the statistic but none translated the percentage into actual deaths: how many more people were murdered in 2006 than in 2005 as a result? Furthermore, if homicides are up 6.8% in large cities, a statistic ABC's Dan Harris (subscription required) cited, and the overall murder rate is up by little more than 1%, that means that in most suburbs, small cities and rural areas, the homicide rate must be falling. Nationwide, CBS' Bob Orr pointed out, "rapes, assaults and property crimes are down."
Still the focus was on things that are getting worse. CBS' Orr ticked off cities that saw an annual increase in killing: Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, Houston, Orlando, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Oakland. His police sources blamed "gangs, guns, increasingly violent teenagers and budget cuts" for police from the federal government. And Harris' unidentified criminology sources found another way to make the data look gloomy: "If the government does not move quickly, what is now a gradual increase in violent crime could get much worse…we may some day look back at today's numbers and say: 'Those were the good old days.'"
MEAN STREETS The response to violent crime was contrasted in Florida, Louisiana and New Jersey. ABC had Pierre Thomas take A Closer Look at the police tactics in two neighboring New Jersey cities: in Newark, violent crime "fueled by poverty and heavily-armed drug gangs" is on the rise and police are using "special units to hunt down fugitives and to target drug dealing;" by contrast in East Orange violent crime is falling as the police have gone hi-tech, using tracking computer models, surveillance cameras and gunshot locating sensors. Thomas did not compare the cost of the two approaches.
NBC's Mark Potter took an In Depth look at Orlando, where the 2006 murder rate has more than doubled compared with 2005. He rode on patrol with police lieutenant Laura Houston who blamed the deaths on an increase in gun violence and robberies committed by teenagers. In New Orleans, CBS' Hari Sreenivasan discovered, neither the police force nor the prosecutor's office has rebounded from the floods after Hurricane Katrina. So the parish's citizens are arming themselves: the monthly volume of gun permits is double that for the period before the storm.
DEFEAT AVOIDANCE The first angle on the Iraq War concerned the status of the US reinforcements in Baghdad, the ones that were supposed to offer sufficient security for politicians to resolve sectarian disputes. CBS' Lara Logan traveled to al-Anbar Province with Gen David Petraeus, the commander of the so-called surge, and he told her that "the number of sectarian murders is one of the key indicators the military uses to monitor the progress." That answer came from NBC's Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon: "Sectarian killings are back on the rise." The Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army "has resumed attacks against Sunnis in Baghdad." Miklaszewski confirmed a report in The New York Times that security forces control only 146 of Baghdad's 457 neighborhoods. Unidentified sources he referred to as "military experts" have long since "stopped talking about victory in Iraq. Instead the current strategy appears aimed at avoiding all-out defeat."
The second angle involved the continuing search for Alex Jimenez and Byron Fouty, the pair of soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division who were captured in an ambush last month, purportedly by the Islamic Army of Iraq. NBC's Ian Williams joined the pair's comrades in 120F temperatures--"another exhausting day"--as the search dragged on in its third week. In the process a further two soldiers have been killed by bombs. Back in New York, ABC's Brian Ross narrated videotape posted by the IAI online that showed the military ID cards of Jimenez and Fouty as evidence that it had executed them. Ross quoted the official USArmy response to the video: "The evidence is very thin."
BOHEMIAN PILSENER All three networks sent their White House correspondents to accompany George Bush on his trip to Europe. First stop was Prague and first news was made by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. In response to a NATO plan to install a missile defense radar in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland, Putin announced that Europe would now be a Russian target. NBC's David Gregory quoted Putin: "Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or some completely new systems--that is a technical matter." Bush's response, noted CBS' Jim Axelrod, was that NATO's defense was not a guard against Russian missiles but for those from Iran or North Korea. "Neither Iran nor North Korea has a missile that can reach Europe," Axelrod shrugged.
ABC's Martha Raddatz (subscription required) stepped away from the White House entourage to take a trip to the Czech village of Stitov where the radar will be built. And a very good idea that seemed too, judging by the freshly poured glass of pilsener that the local mayor enjoyed while he shared his fears of a renewed Cold War. Speaking of which, NBC anchor Brian Williams offered an odd formulation when he stated that "most Americans" who lived through the Cold War "welcomed the thaw" when it ended. Who does Williams imagine belongs to the minority that is nostalgic for those old days Back in the USSR? Was that backhanded Bush-bashing?
CHILDISH THINGS CBS was the only network to assign a reporter to the start of the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor at The Hague. The former President of Liberia is accused of sponsoring the civil war in next-door Sierra Leone. Anchor Katie Couric did that little thing that she does, using the pop culture reference of the 2006 movie Blood Diamond as a hook to introduce Sheila MacVicar's hard news story: "For the first time," MacVicar stated, "prosecutors have made the recruitment of children under age 15 a war crime." She introduced us to Ishmael Beah, soldier at the age of twelve, now author of the war memoir A Long Way Gone. In Sierra Leone, thousands of soldiers were children or teenagers, 50,000 people died, "thousands more were maimed. The prize? Fabulously rich diamond fields." Taylor, who claims never to have set foot in Sierra Leone, pleads not guilty and is being tried in his absence.
NIGERIA NOT NEW JERSEY "Freezer Burn" is the nickname his Republican opponents have attached to the scandal surrounding William Jefferson, CBS' Sharyl Attkisson told us. Jefferson is the Democratic congressman from Louisiana who was caught with $90,000 in cash hidden in a freezer in his house as part of an FBI sting. All three networks assigned a reporter to cover the formal filing of racketeering charges against Rep Jefferson some two years later. As part of its sting, "the FBI videotaped him accepting a $100,000 bribe in cash" outside a hotel, NBC's Pete Williams recalled.
Jefferson's expertise on the Hill was in African development, ABC's Jake Tapper explained. In that capacity he helped organize telecommunications, energy and agribusiness investment in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo, Guinea, Sao Tome and Botswana. The indictment alleges that he demanded $8m in kickbacks for family-owned businesses and bribed a Nigerian politician to pave the way for some of deals. Tapper called the indictment "right out of The Sopranos"--although he did not explain what he meant. Jefferson maintains his innocence.
HO! HO! Back in April, Rehema Ellis was NBC's lead reporter in covering the misogynist insults that led to morning drivetime radio host Don Imus being fired. Since then her follow-ups here and here have concentrated on the use of that same vocabulary in hip-hop music. Ellis is so committed to the hip-hop angle that a symposium by the Rev Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition was given airtime. Her otherwise unremarkable report was notable only for one silly irony. Activists object to the slang form of the word "whore"--the one Imus used. When Ellis showed them picketing the MTV Store in New York City's Times Square, their chant was "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Those dirty lyrics have got to go."
The problem has never been with the word "ho" but its casual use to demean a woman's autonomy and sexuality. This chant proves that "ho" can indeed be used in polite society.
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 highlights of the CNN-staged debate among Democratic Presidential candidates in New Hampshire were narrated by ABC substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos…military tribunals for suspects designated enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba were struck down...this spring's rise in the price of gasoline has been halted…NASCAR auto racing executive William France dies, aged 74…suspects in the alleged plot to sabotage a fuel pipeline at New York's JFK Airport will challenge extradition from Trinidad.
A hike in the incidence of violent crime nationwide sounds scary until the amount of the increase is mentioned--a nominal 1.3%. All three networks assigned a reporter to the statistic but none translated the percentage into actual deaths: how many more people were murdered in 2006 than in 2005 as a result? Furthermore, if homicides are up 6.8% in large cities, a statistic ABC's Dan Harris (subscription required) cited, and the overall murder rate is up by little more than 1%, that means that in most suburbs, small cities and rural areas, the homicide rate must be falling. Nationwide, CBS' Bob Orr pointed out, "rapes, assaults and property crimes are down."
Still the focus was on things that are getting worse. CBS' Orr ticked off cities that saw an annual increase in killing: Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, Houston, Orlando, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Oakland. His police sources blamed "gangs, guns, increasingly violent teenagers and budget cuts" for police from the federal government. And Harris' unidentified criminology sources found another way to make the data look gloomy: "If the government does not move quickly, what is now a gradual increase in violent crime could get much worse…we may some day look back at today's numbers and say: 'Those were the good old days.'"
MEAN STREETS The response to violent crime was contrasted in Florida, Louisiana and New Jersey. ABC had Pierre Thomas take A Closer Look at the police tactics in two neighboring New Jersey cities: in Newark, violent crime "fueled by poverty and heavily-armed drug gangs" is on the rise and police are using "special units to hunt down fugitives and to target drug dealing;" by contrast in East Orange violent crime is falling as the police have gone hi-tech, using tracking computer models, surveillance cameras and gunshot locating sensors. Thomas did not compare the cost of the two approaches.
NBC's Mark Potter took an In Depth look at Orlando, where the 2006 murder rate has more than doubled compared with 2005. He rode on patrol with police lieutenant Laura Houston who blamed the deaths on an increase in gun violence and robberies committed by teenagers. In New Orleans, CBS' Hari Sreenivasan discovered, neither the police force nor the prosecutor's office has rebounded from the floods after Hurricane Katrina. So the parish's citizens are arming themselves: the monthly volume of gun permits is double that for the period before the storm.
DEFEAT AVOIDANCE The first angle on the Iraq War concerned the status of the US reinforcements in Baghdad, the ones that were supposed to offer sufficient security for politicians to resolve sectarian disputes. CBS' Lara Logan traveled to al-Anbar Province with Gen David Petraeus, the commander of the so-called surge, and he told her that "the number of sectarian murders is one of the key indicators the military uses to monitor the progress." That answer came from NBC's Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon: "Sectarian killings are back on the rise." The Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army "has resumed attacks against Sunnis in Baghdad." Miklaszewski confirmed a report in The New York Times that security forces control only 146 of Baghdad's 457 neighborhoods. Unidentified sources he referred to as "military experts" have long since "stopped talking about victory in Iraq. Instead the current strategy appears aimed at avoiding all-out defeat."
The second angle involved the continuing search for Alex Jimenez and Byron Fouty, the pair of soldiers from the Tenth Mountain Division who were captured in an ambush last month, purportedly by the Islamic Army of Iraq. NBC's Ian Williams joined the pair's comrades in 120F temperatures--"another exhausting day"--as the search dragged on in its third week. In the process a further two soldiers have been killed by bombs. Back in New York, ABC's Brian Ross narrated videotape posted by the IAI online that showed the military ID cards of Jimenez and Fouty as evidence that it had executed them. Ross quoted the official USArmy response to the video: "The evidence is very thin."
BOHEMIAN PILSENER All three networks sent their White House correspondents to accompany George Bush on his trip to Europe. First stop was Prague and first news was made by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. In response to a NATO plan to install a missile defense radar in the Czech Republic and missile interceptors in Poland, Putin announced that Europe would now be a Russian target. NBC's David Gregory quoted Putin: "Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or some completely new systems--that is a technical matter." Bush's response, noted CBS' Jim Axelrod, was that NATO's defense was not a guard against Russian missiles but for those from Iran or North Korea. "Neither Iran nor North Korea has a missile that can reach Europe," Axelrod shrugged.
ABC's Martha Raddatz (subscription required) stepped away from the White House entourage to take a trip to the Czech village of Stitov where the radar will be built. And a very good idea that seemed too, judging by the freshly poured glass of pilsener that the local mayor enjoyed while he shared his fears of a renewed Cold War. Speaking of which, NBC anchor Brian Williams offered an odd formulation when he stated that "most Americans" who lived through the Cold War "welcomed the thaw" when it ended. Who does Williams imagine belongs to the minority that is nostalgic for those old days Back in the USSR? Was that backhanded Bush-bashing?
CHILDISH THINGS CBS was the only network to assign a reporter to the start of the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor at The Hague. The former President of Liberia is accused of sponsoring the civil war in next-door Sierra Leone. Anchor Katie Couric did that little thing that she does, using the pop culture reference of the 2006 movie Blood Diamond as a hook to introduce Sheila MacVicar's hard news story: "For the first time," MacVicar stated, "prosecutors have made the recruitment of children under age 15 a war crime." She introduced us to Ishmael Beah, soldier at the age of twelve, now author of the war memoir A Long Way Gone. In Sierra Leone, thousands of soldiers were children or teenagers, 50,000 people died, "thousands more were maimed. The prize? Fabulously rich diamond fields." Taylor, who claims never to have set foot in Sierra Leone, pleads not guilty and is being tried in his absence.
NIGERIA NOT NEW JERSEY "Freezer Burn" is the nickname his Republican opponents have attached to the scandal surrounding William Jefferson, CBS' Sharyl Attkisson told us. Jefferson is the Democratic congressman from Louisiana who was caught with $90,000 in cash hidden in a freezer in his house as part of an FBI sting. All three networks assigned a reporter to cover the formal filing of racketeering charges against Rep Jefferson some two years later. As part of its sting, "the FBI videotaped him accepting a $100,000 bribe in cash" outside a hotel, NBC's Pete Williams recalled.
Jefferson's expertise on the Hill was in African development, ABC's Jake Tapper explained. In that capacity he helped organize telecommunications, energy and agribusiness investment in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo, Guinea, Sao Tome and Botswana. The indictment alleges that he demanded $8m in kickbacks for family-owned businesses and bribed a Nigerian politician to pave the way for some of deals. Tapper called the indictment "right out of The Sopranos"--although he did not explain what he meant. Jefferson maintains his innocence.
HO! HO! Back in April, Rehema Ellis was NBC's lead reporter in covering the misogynist insults that led to morning drivetime radio host Don Imus being fired. Since then her follow-ups here and here have concentrated on the use of that same vocabulary in hip-hop music. Ellis is so committed to the hip-hop angle that a symposium by the Rev Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition was given airtime. Her otherwise unremarkable report was notable only for one silly irony. Activists object to the slang form of the word "whore"--the one Imus used. When Ellis showed them picketing the MTV Store in New York City's Times Square, their chant was "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Those dirty lyrics have got to go."
The problem has never been with the word "ho" but its casual use to demean a woman's autonomy and sexuality. This chant proves that "ho" can indeed be used in polite society.
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 highlights of the CNN-staged debate among Democratic Presidential candidates in New Hampshire were narrated by ABC substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos…military tribunals for suspects designated enemy combatants and detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba were struck down...this spring's rise in the price of gasoline has been halted…NASCAR auto racing executive William France dies, aged 74…suspects in the alleged plot to sabotage a fuel pipeline at New York's JFK Airport will challenge extradition from Trinidad.
