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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM SEPTEMBER 10, 2007
The long-awaited Congressional testimony on the war in Iraq dominated the headlines. After a weeklong buildup, including President George Bush's surprise Labor Day visit to the al-Anbar desert and CBS anchor Katie Couric's five-day tour of the region, the payoff arrived in the form of House hearings. The star witnesses were the United States' military and diplomatic leaders in Baghdad: Gen David Petraeus and Amb Ryan Crocker. Each network treated the hearings as a military matter--as opposed to political or legislative--assigning its Pentagon correspondent to Capitol Hill to lead off each newscast. Altogether Iraq War coverage accounted for 53% of the three-network newshole, a 29 minute total. However, the Petraeus-Crocker combo was still outshone by the Iraq Study Group. Last December's report (text link) by James Baker and Lee Hamilton attracted 44 minutes when it was Story of the Day.
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PETRAEUS PAYOFF The long-awaited Congressional testimony on the war in Iraq dominated the headlines. After a weeklong buildup, including President George Bush's surprise Labor Day visit to the al-Anbar desert and CBS anchor Katie Couric's five-day tour of the region, the payoff arrived in the form of House hearings. The star witnesses were the United States' military and diplomatic leaders in Baghdad: Gen David Petraeus and Amb Ryan Crocker. Each network treated the hearings as a military matter--as opposed to political or legislative--assigning its Pentagon correspondent to Capitol Hill to lead off each newscast. Altogether Iraq War coverage accounted for 53% of the three-network newshole, a 29 minute total. However, the Petraeus-Crocker combo was still outshone by the Iraq Study Group. Last December's report (text link) by James Baker and Lee Hamilton attracted 44 minutes when it was Story of the Day.
Each correspondent selected his own Petraeus soundbite to headline his coverage. ABC's Jonathan Karl (subscription required) focused on success: "The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met." CBS' David Martin selected the promise of a troop pullout: "What I recommended was a very substantial withdrawal." NBC's Jim Miklaszewski chose Petraeus' defense against the charge that his professionalism was compromised. "I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or Congress." Miklaszewski was referring to moveon.org's anti-war full-page ad in The New York Times that punningly speculated whether his testimony would "betray us" by "playing politics with the war."
While Petraeus proclaimed success using charts showing fewer civilian deaths and sectarian attacks, CBS' Martin was underwhelmed: "Violence is still high running at levels comparable to 2005." At the White House, Martin's colleague Jim Axelrod reminded us that "the ultimate goal of the surge" had been to enable the Baghdad government to operate. Reporting on that had been Crocker's job and he "had a much tougher case to make" with "a paralyzed parliament unable, so far, to pass major laws that would foster Sunni-Shia reconciliation." In response, Crocker "floated a new definition of progress, diminishing the importance of the central government in Baghdad."
As for that promise of a troop drawdown, none of these military correspondents were impressed. "For all of the talk of withdrawal, the bottom line is that by next summer, some five years after the start of the war, there will still be more than 130,000 US forces in Iraq," ABC's Karl commented. That deployment would be "right where they were before the surge began," CBS' Martin calculated. NBC's Miklaszewski reflected that Petraeus' "new strategy…sounds pretty much like stay the course." He added: "Politically speaking this probably takes the whole debate back to square one."
DEFECTION PREVENTION Contradicting his colleague Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's White House correspondent David Gregory saw no status quo in Petraeus' plan. Instead his testimony "marks the start of a new phase of the war debate…the debate about how to end the war." George Bush, who plans a televised address to the nation, "is preparing to ask the country to take a fresh look at the war." Gregory was not only at odds with Miklaszewski but also with the Sunday morning talkshow hosts from NBC's rival networks. George Stephanopoulos of ABC's This Week characterized the politics of Petraeus' testimony as preventing "wholesale Republican defections" from the White House's current course: "He has not changed the minds of Democrats." And Bob Schieffer of CBS' Face the Nation noted that Democrats do not have enough votes to force Bush's hand: "From the President's point of view what is significant today is that the general gave Republicans who are still with the President an excuse to stay with him."
HELP FROM THE BEEB & GRAY LADY Back in Iraq, things seemed bleaker than the picture Petraeus was painting. CBS' Lara Logan (in the middle of the Bob Schieffer videostream), for example, offered an alternate explanation to reconciliation, inspired by the surge, as the cause for a decline in Baghdad's sectarian violence: in many neighborhoods "there are no Sunnis or Shia left to kill--the area has been ethnically cleansed." And traveling outside Baghdad with the USArmy's First Cavalry, NBC's Jim Maceda warned that civil war "is truly brewing."
Both ABC and NBC relied on outside news organizations to round out their reporting. ABC filed an update of its Where Things Stand nationwide opinion poll that it conducts with the BBC. The last poll was in March. This time Tim McCarthy pointed out that "as a sign of how divided Iraq has become many of our pollsters carried two forms of identification--with a Sunni and a Shiite sounding name--in case they were stopped by militias." This latest 2200-strong found that the surge had improved security somewhat: in Baghdad 58% felt "not safe at all"--an improvement from 84% six months ago; in al-Anbar Province, 38% felt "security is good," up from 0%.
NBC devoted a full five minutes of airtime to a videotape chronicle of Baghdad neighborhoods by reporter Damien Cave of The New York Times. He showed us children returning to Zawra Park zoo; the few surviving boutiques of Mansour; Huriyah, ethnically cleansed of Sunnis, now run by the Mahdi Army's mafia; the anti-American hotbed of Sadr City; the heavy military presence in Dora. "Baghdad remains a city still paralyzed by sectarianism and distrust," Cave concluded. "Trash is everywhere and millions have been displaced from their homes--a mass migration that has continued during the surge."
ROUND TRIP ABC had Chris Cuomo (subscription required) on hand in Islamabad to monitor the resurgence of the Pakistani political opposition to President Pervez Musharraf. An order from the Supreme Court allowed Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister, to return from exile and thousands of his supporters were rumored to be massing to welcome him. However, Cuomo observed, "the trip home was over before it barely started. The welcome wagon on the tarmac was a group of security forces acting on Musharraf's order to swiftly deport his political foe." Musharraf, Cuomo concluded "is having a tough enough time just trying to hold on to what power he has left."
GYM JAIL The plight of Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American scholar, has been a special beat for NBC's Andrea Mitchell. She covered Esfandiari's arrest in Teheran for espionage in May, the television airing of her purported confession in July and her release on bail in August. Finally, after three months of solitary confinement, the 67-year-old Esfandiari was allowed out of the country and Mitchell joined her for a stroll around her garden in suburban Maryland. "I was not a spy. I did not plot against them. I was not actually interested in overthrowing the regime. Absolutely not." Her technique for resisting her captors was exercise: "I would do one hundred pushups."
NO EVEN KEEL In campaign coverage, CBS News's poll showed Rudolph Giuliani's lead in the race for the Republican nomination shrink in the wake of last week's entry by Fred Thompson (27% v 22%). So CBS assigned Jeff Greenfield to check how New Yorkers, who know their former mayor best, would recommend Hizzoner. "A complicated figure," Greenfield concluded. He delivered a safer, cleaner city--but was combative, insensitive and exhausting. "Giuliani is not a man for all seasons. He is a man for a crisis. If the waters are smooth his oversized personality tends to capsize the ship of state"--and that was a soundbite from Fred Siegel, author of The Prince of the City, a self-confessed Giuliani admirer.
FEELING NO PAIN There was just one other story that was covered by reporters on more than one network: research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that prescription medication is killing at least 15,000 patients annually nationwide, a threefold increase in just seven years. NBC's Tom Costello noted that adverse drug reactions are increasing at four times the rate of the increase in the number of prescriptions: one theory for the accelerating death toll is that more drugs are being taken by more vulnerable elderly. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook fingered narcotic painkillers as "the biggest culprits."
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: Sen Chuck Hagel (R-NE) will not run for reelection…cosmetics retailer Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, died at age 64…actress Jane Wyman, first wife of Ronald Reagan, died at age 93.
Each correspondent selected his own Petraeus soundbite to headline his coverage. ABC's Jonathan Karl (subscription required) focused on success: "The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met." CBS' David Martin selected the promise of a troop pullout: "What I recommended was a very substantial withdrawal." NBC's Jim Miklaszewski chose Petraeus' defense against the charge that his professionalism was compromised. "I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or Congress." Miklaszewski was referring to moveon.org's anti-war full-page ad in The New York Times that punningly speculated whether his testimony would "betray us" by "playing politics with the war."
While Petraeus proclaimed success using charts showing fewer civilian deaths and sectarian attacks, CBS' Martin was underwhelmed: "Violence is still high running at levels comparable to 2005." At the White House, Martin's colleague Jim Axelrod reminded us that "the ultimate goal of the surge" had been to enable the Baghdad government to operate. Reporting on that had been Crocker's job and he "had a much tougher case to make" with "a paralyzed parliament unable, so far, to pass major laws that would foster Sunni-Shia reconciliation." In response, Crocker "floated a new definition of progress, diminishing the importance of the central government in Baghdad."
As for that promise of a troop drawdown, none of these military correspondents were impressed. "For all of the talk of withdrawal, the bottom line is that by next summer, some five years after the start of the war, there will still be more than 130,000 US forces in Iraq," ABC's Karl commented. That deployment would be "right where they were before the surge began," CBS' Martin calculated. NBC's Miklaszewski reflected that Petraeus' "new strategy…sounds pretty much like stay the course." He added: "Politically speaking this probably takes the whole debate back to square one."
DEFECTION PREVENTION Contradicting his colleague Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's White House correspondent David Gregory saw no status quo in Petraeus' plan. Instead his testimony "marks the start of a new phase of the war debate…the debate about how to end the war." George Bush, who plans a televised address to the nation, "is preparing to ask the country to take a fresh look at the war." Gregory was not only at odds with Miklaszewski but also with the Sunday morning talkshow hosts from NBC's rival networks. George Stephanopoulos of ABC's This Week characterized the politics of Petraeus' testimony as preventing "wholesale Republican defections" from the White House's current course: "He has not changed the minds of Democrats." And Bob Schieffer of CBS' Face the Nation noted that Democrats do not have enough votes to force Bush's hand: "From the President's point of view what is significant today is that the general gave Republicans who are still with the President an excuse to stay with him."
HELP FROM THE BEEB & GRAY LADY Back in Iraq, things seemed bleaker than the picture Petraeus was painting. CBS' Lara Logan (in the middle of the Bob Schieffer videostream), for example, offered an alternate explanation to reconciliation, inspired by the surge, as the cause for a decline in Baghdad's sectarian violence: in many neighborhoods "there are no Sunnis or Shia left to kill--the area has been ethnically cleansed." And traveling outside Baghdad with the USArmy's First Cavalry, NBC's Jim Maceda warned that civil war "is truly brewing."
Both ABC and NBC relied on outside news organizations to round out their reporting. ABC filed an update of its Where Things Stand nationwide opinion poll that it conducts with the BBC. The last poll was in March. This time Tim McCarthy pointed out that "as a sign of how divided Iraq has become many of our pollsters carried two forms of identification--with a Sunni and a Shiite sounding name--in case they were stopped by militias." This latest 2200-strong found that the surge had improved security somewhat: in Baghdad 58% felt "not safe at all"--an improvement from 84% six months ago; in al-Anbar Province, 38% felt "security is good," up from 0%.
NBC devoted a full five minutes of airtime to a videotape chronicle of Baghdad neighborhoods by reporter Damien Cave of The New York Times. He showed us children returning to Zawra Park zoo; the few surviving boutiques of Mansour; Huriyah, ethnically cleansed of Sunnis, now run by the Mahdi Army's mafia; the anti-American hotbed of Sadr City; the heavy military presence in Dora. "Baghdad remains a city still paralyzed by sectarianism and distrust," Cave concluded. "Trash is everywhere and millions have been displaced from their homes--a mass migration that has continued during the surge."
ROUND TRIP ABC had Chris Cuomo (subscription required) on hand in Islamabad to monitor the resurgence of the Pakistani political opposition to President Pervez Musharraf. An order from the Supreme Court allowed Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister, to return from exile and thousands of his supporters were rumored to be massing to welcome him. However, Cuomo observed, "the trip home was over before it barely started. The welcome wagon on the tarmac was a group of security forces acting on Musharraf's order to swiftly deport his political foe." Musharraf, Cuomo concluded "is having a tough enough time just trying to hold on to what power he has left."
GYM JAIL The plight of Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American scholar, has been a special beat for NBC's Andrea Mitchell. She covered Esfandiari's arrest in Teheran for espionage in May, the television airing of her purported confession in July and her release on bail in August. Finally, after three months of solitary confinement, the 67-year-old Esfandiari was allowed out of the country and Mitchell joined her for a stroll around her garden in suburban Maryland. "I was not a spy. I did not plot against them. I was not actually interested in overthrowing the regime. Absolutely not." Her technique for resisting her captors was exercise: "I would do one hundred pushups."
NO EVEN KEEL In campaign coverage, CBS News's poll showed Rudolph Giuliani's lead in the race for the Republican nomination shrink in the wake of last week's entry by Fred Thompson (27% v 22%). So CBS assigned Jeff Greenfield to check how New Yorkers, who know their former mayor best, would recommend Hizzoner. "A complicated figure," Greenfield concluded. He delivered a safer, cleaner city--but was combative, insensitive and exhausting. "Giuliani is not a man for all seasons. He is a man for a crisis. If the waters are smooth his oversized personality tends to capsize the ship of state"--and that was a soundbite from Fred Siegel, author of The Prince of the City, a self-confessed Giuliani admirer.
FEELING NO PAIN There was just one other story that was covered by reporters on more than one network: research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that prescription medication is killing at least 15,000 patients annually nationwide, a threefold increase in just seven years. NBC's Tom Costello noted that adverse drug reactions are increasing at four times the rate of the increase in the number of prescriptions: one theory for the accelerating death toll is that more drugs are being taken by more vulnerable elderly. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook fingered narcotic painkillers as "the biggest culprits."
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: Sen Chuck Hagel (R-NE) will not run for reelection…cosmetics retailer Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, died at age 64…actress Jane Wyman, first wife of Ronald Reagan, died at age 93.
