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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM AUGUST 02, 2007
An eight-lane Interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during the evening rush hour yesterday, too late for the networks' east coast nightly newscasts. The failure of the 40-year-old span was so dramatic and deadly--as many as 30 motorists may have been killed as they plunged 64 feet into the water--that it was a dominant Story of the Day. All three anchors were on the scene in Minnesota. With a total of 45 minutes of coverage on the three newscasts combined this single story accounted for 76% of the entire newshole. It was the third biggest Story of the Day of 2007 so far--behind only the first two days of coverage of April's murder-suicide spree on the Virginia Tech campus.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR AUGUST 02, 2007: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MASSIVE HEADLINES FROM MINNESOTA An eight-lane Interstate highway bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed during the evening rush hour yesterday, too late for the networks' east coast nightly newscasts. The failure of the 40-year-old span was so dramatic and deadly--as many as 30 motorists may have been killed as they plunged 64 feet into the water--that it was a dominant Story of the Day. All three anchors were on the scene in Minnesota. With a total of 45 minutes of coverage on the three newscasts combined this single story accounted for 76% of the entire newshole. It was the third biggest Story of the Day of 2007 so far--behind only the first two days of coverage of April's murder-suicide spree on the Virginia Tech campus.
CBS and ABC each led its newscasts with its anchor's own reporting. ABC's Charles Gibson took us along on a helicopter ride to view the destruction from the air. CBS' Katie Couric--who used a crisper than usual newsy style in her newscasts earlier in the week--reverted to morning-show-style human interest for her lead. She concentrated on the "night of unimaginable anxiety" suffered by a pair of sisters who feared that their sibling was one of the unidentified motorists who had plummeted to her death--only to reveal lamely at the end of her story that their fears were unfounded and the sister was alive.
There are two markers of a really big news story. The first is when it is given a logo: ABC chose Disaster on the River; CBS Twin Cities Tragedy; NBC Tragedy in Minnesota. The second is that network anchors feel compelled to close their newscasts with reflection, a commentary on the day's events. All three complied: NBC's Brian Williams speculated on whether infrastructure, "not a sexy topic," would become an issue in Campaign 2008 as a result of this bridge collapse; ABC's Gibson (no link) touched on weighty questions of theodicy by citing Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey; CBS' Couric concluded that it is just not right that bridges fall down: "When we are driving over a bridge, we should be able to think about what we are going to do that night, not whether we will live to see another day."
NOT NICE ABC anchor Charles Gibson followed up with the eyewitness accounts of Joe Chapman, a passing jogger, and Kimberly Brown, a motorist who was on the bridge at the time. Brown chillingly described falling in her car through the air before just walking away: "I pretty much closed my eyes until we landed." NBC anchor Brian Williams illustrated the poignancy of the suffering of the twin cities' "Minnesota Nice" residents by focusing on Assistant Fire Chief John Fruetel, an early first responder on the scene. Fruetel was literally at a loss for words to describe his grief.
HAPPY CAMPERS Couric's anxiety-ridden pair of sisters notwithstanding, the major human interest story of the collapse concerned the day camp school bus of 52 children returning from an excursion to a local water park. The bus slammed against the side of the roadway as it trembled but was not on the portion that fell into the river. ABC's Mike von Fremd (subscription required) played the cell phone message home by ten-year-old Kaleigh Swift, one of the campers: "Momma! Momma! The bridge broke when we were crossing it." All three networks honored Jeremy Hernandez, the 20-year-old camp counselor who kicked the back door open and ushered all the campers to safety, with only two of his charges requiring hospitalization. "He did not have time to think. He just knew to start a human chain out the emergency door," recounted CBS' Tracy Smith. Hernandez relived the rescue for NBC's Ron Mott: "My heart was beating fast."
BIG MUDDY The reason that the full death toll is unknown is that the rubble is under water. "The dangers divers face are extreme, avoiding mountains of twisted steel and concrete and cars," CBS' Byron Pitts explained. The debris field has "created pockets of fast moving water, small whirlpools that can pull a diver to his death." A rescuer described it to NBC's Lee Cowan like this: "Imagine the search for victims at Ground Zero in New York--only under water." Cowan went out on the water of the Mississippi in a canoe to demonstrate its strong current and limited visibility: "Add to that concrete, sharp edges, debris, gas, oil." And above ground, ABC's Dan Harris warned, "those huge slabs of concrete are incredibly unstable."
FEELING FATIGUED The disaster was epic enough for NBC to invite veteran correspondent Robert Hager out of retirement to preview the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB will start with Army Corps of Engineers videotape of the actual collapse. All three networks shared that footage with us. Hager reminded us that it was metal fatigue that caused the failure of an Ohio River bridge in West Virginia in 1967 that killed 46 and of an interstate highway bridge in Connecticut in 1983.
CBS had Ben Tracy of its Minneapolis affiliate WCCO-TV recount the history of the I-35 span. He stated that the bridge was "state of the art" when it was built 40 years ago but "was designed without the extra support common to later designs, which meant if one component failed, the whole bridge was likely to fall." The federal Department of Transportation designated it as Structurally Deficient in 1990, a rating that applies to 13% of all bridges nationwide. ABC's Lisa Stark (subscription required) pointed out that maintenance work was under way on the bridge at the time it collapsed: four lanes were closed; the deck was being resurfaced; and joints were being repaired. "Engineers say 40 years and 141,000 vehicles a day take a toll."
MID-LIFE CRISIS Only three weeks ago CBS had filed a four-part series The Road Ahead on problems with the highway system, including a report by Nancy Cordes on repair shortfalls. Back then she concentrated on potholes; now Cordes recycled some of the same footage to focus on bridges--those "built in the boom years of the Eisenhower era have entered middle age and, thanks to neglect, they are not aging gracefully," she generalized. NBC's Lisa Myers estimated that the bill for repairing the nation's entire stock of substandard bridges at $65bn--the states with the worst problems being Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Age is not the only problem, Myers reported; they are also used by heavier traffic than their designers envisaged.
ABC's Ned Potter (subscription required) took A Closer Look at infrastructure in general, citing a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Potter quoted the statistics that fully one third of the 40,000 annual traffic deaths "can be blamed at least in part on the nation's crumbling bridges and roads." The engineers assess the electricity grid and water and sewage systems as in an even worse state of repair than bridges.
PAINTED PLASTIC The Minneapolis bridge was so heavily covered that only one other completely unrelated story warranted the assignment of correspondents. Both CBS and NBC reported on the recall of almost one million plastic toys by Fisher-Price, a division of Mattel--300,000 of the Elmos, Cookie Monsters, Big Birds and Doras the Explorer have already been sold. The toys were produced in China using paint that contains lead. NBC's Andrea Mitchell noted that a similar recall had previously been announced for a lead-tainted Thomas the Tank Engine--ABC's Dan Harris covered that six weeks ago--and "toy companies say there is no foolproof system to prevent this from happening again." CBS' Sandra Hughes quoted Mattel's excuse that it instructed its supplier in China to use approved paint. Hughes asserted that the effort to make sure that imports are safe "remains a parental responsibility"--a proposition that, if true, will be a great relief to Mattel's lawyers.
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: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is discouraged by the lack of political progress in Iraq…Russia used a submarine to stake a territorial claim to Arctic Ocean waters…on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had a 100 point rebound from last week's losses.
CBS and ABC each led its newscasts with its anchor's own reporting. ABC's Charles Gibson took us along on a helicopter ride to view the destruction from the air. CBS' Katie Couric--who used a crisper than usual newsy style in her newscasts earlier in the week--reverted to morning-show-style human interest for her lead. She concentrated on the "night of unimaginable anxiety" suffered by a pair of sisters who feared that their sibling was one of the unidentified motorists who had plummeted to her death--only to reveal lamely at the end of her story that their fears were unfounded and the sister was alive.
There are two markers of a really big news story. The first is when it is given a logo: ABC chose Disaster on the River; CBS Twin Cities Tragedy; NBC Tragedy in Minnesota. The second is that network anchors feel compelled to close their newscasts with reflection, a commentary on the day's events. All three complied: NBC's Brian Williams speculated on whether infrastructure, "not a sexy topic," would become an issue in Campaign 2008 as a result of this bridge collapse; ABC's Gibson (no link) touched on weighty questions of theodicy by citing Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey; CBS' Couric concluded that it is just not right that bridges fall down: "When we are driving over a bridge, we should be able to think about what we are going to do that night, not whether we will live to see another day."
NOT NICE ABC anchor Charles Gibson followed up with the eyewitness accounts of Joe Chapman, a passing jogger, and Kimberly Brown, a motorist who was on the bridge at the time. Brown chillingly described falling in her car through the air before just walking away: "I pretty much closed my eyes until we landed." NBC anchor Brian Williams illustrated the poignancy of the suffering of the twin cities' "Minnesota Nice" residents by focusing on Assistant Fire Chief John Fruetel, an early first responder on the scene. Fruetel was literally at a loss for words to describe his grief.
HAPPY CAMPERS Couric's anxiety-ridden pair of sisters notwithstanding, the major human interest story of the collapse concerned the day camp school bus of 52 children returning from an excursion to a local water park. The bus slammed against the side of the roadway as it trembled but was not on the portion that fell into the river. ABC's Mike von Fremd (subscription required) played the cell phone message home by ten-year-old Kaleigh Swift, one of the campers: "Momma! Momma! The bridge broke when we were crossing it." All three networks honored Jeremy Hernandez, the 20-year-old camp counselor who kicked the back door open and ushered all the campers to safety, with only two of his charges requiring hospitalization. "He did not have time to think. He just knew to start a human chain out the emergency door," recounted CBS' Tracy Smith. Hernandez relived the rescue for NBC's Ron Mott: "My heart was beating fast."
BIG MUDDY The reason that the full death toll is unknown is that the rubble is under water. "The dangers divers face are extreme, avoiding mountains of twisted steel and concrete and cars," CBS' Byron Pitts explained. The debris field has "created pockets of fast moving water, small whirlpools that can pull a diver to his death." A rescuer described it to NBC's Lee Cowan like this: "Imagine the search for victims at Ground Zero in New York--only under water." Cowan went out on the water of the Mississippi in a canoe to demonstrate its strong current and limited visibility: "Add to that concrete, sharp edges, debris, gas, oil." And above ground, ABC's Dan Harris warned, "those huge slabs of concrete are incredibly unstable."
FEELING FATIGUED The disaster was epic enough for NBC to invite veteran correspondent Robert Hager out of retirement to preview the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB will start with Army Corps of Engineers videotape of the actual collapse. All three networks shared that footage with us. Hager reminded us that it was metal fatigue that caused the failure of an Ohio River bridge in West Virginia in 1967 that killed 46 and of an interstate highway bridge in Connecticut in 1983.
CBS had Ben Tracy of its Minneapolis affiliate WCCO-TV recount the history of the I-35 span. He stated that the bridge was "state of the art" when it was built 40 years ago but "was designed without the extra support common to later designs, which meant if one component failed, the whole bridge was likely to fall." The federal Department of Transportation designated it as Structurally Deficient in 1990, a rating that applies to 13% of all bridges nationwide. ABC's Lisa Stark (subscription required) pointed out that maintenance work was under way on the bridge at the time it collapsed: four lanes were closed; the deck was being resurfaced; and joints were being repaired. "Engineers say 40 years and 141,000 vehicles a day take a toll."
MID-LIFE CRISIS Only three weeks ago CBS had filed a four-part series The Road Ahead on problems with the highway system, including a report by Nancy Cordes on repair shortfalls. Back then she concentrated on potholes; now Cordes recycled some of the same footage to focus on bridges--those "built in the boom years of the Eisenhower era have entered middle age and, thanks to neglect, they are not aging gracefully," she generalized. NBC's Lisa Myers estimated that the bill for repairing the nation's entire stock of substandard bridges at $65bn--the states with the worst problems being Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. Age is not the only problem, Myers reported; they are also used by heavier traffic than their designers envisaged.
ABC's Ned Potter (subscription required) took A Closer Look at infrastructure in general, citing a recent report by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Potter quoted the statistics that fully one third of the 40,000 annual traffic deaths "can be blamed at least in part on the nation's crumbling bridges and roads." The engineers assess the electricity grid and water and sewage systems as in an even worse state of repair than bridges.
PAINTED PLASTIC The Minneapolis bridge was so heavily covered that only one other completely unrelated story warranted the assignment of correspondents. Both CBS and NBC reported on the recall of almost one million plastic toys by Fisher-Price, a division of Mattel--300,000 of the Elmos, Cookie Monsters, Big Birds and Doras the Explorer have already been sold. The toys were produced in China using paint that contains lead. NBC's Andrea Mitchell noted that a similar recall had previously been announced for a lead-tainted Thomas the Tank Engine--ABC's Dan Harris covered that six weeks ago--and "toy companies say there is no foolproof system to prevent this from happening again." CBS' Sandra Hughes quoted Mattel's excuse that it instructed its supplier in China to use approved paint. Hughes asserted that the effort to make sure that imports are safe "remains a parental responsibility"--a proposition that, if true, will be a great relief to Mattel's lawyers.
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: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is discouraged by the lack of political progress in Iraq…Russia used a submarine to stake a territorial claim to Arctic Ocean waters…on Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had a 100 point rebound from last week's losses.
