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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 11, 2008
The Presidential election campaign was Story of the Day for the first time this month. Former President Bill Clinton's clumsy attempts to defend his candidate wife's fibs about sniper fire in Bosnia attracted coverage from reporters at all three networks and made the lead on CBS, where Harry Smith was substitute anchor. Funnily enough, the last time the Story of the Day was generated from the campaign trail was March 25th, when Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted that those "sniper fire" comments were a mistake. ABC's lead was a follow-up on the mass child abuse investigation into that fundamentalist Mormon ranch in Texas. NBC, for the third straight day, led with the disruption to American Airlines' schedule caused by the FAA's safety directive, as Brian Williams anchored from Washington DC in preparation for MSNBC's Conversation about Race town hall meeting at Howard University.
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HILLARY'S SNIPER FIRE RESURFACES The Presidential election campaign was Story of the Day for the first time this month. Former President Bill Clinton's clumsy attempts to defend his candidate wife's fibs about sniper fire in Bosnia attracted coverage from reporters at all three networks and made the lead on CBS, where Harry Smith was substitute anchor. Funnily enough, the last time the Story of the Day was generated from the campaign trail was March 25th, when Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted that those "sniper fire" comments were a mistake. ABC's lead was a follow-up on the mass child abuse investigation into that fundamentalist Mormon ranch in Texas. NBC, for the third straight day, led with the disruption to American Airlines' schedule caused by the FAA's safety directive, as Brian Williams anchored from Washington DC in preparation for MSNBC's Conversation about Race town hall meeting at Howard University.
ABC's Jake Tapper (embargoed link) demolished Bill's defense of his wife by quoting it in full: "Hillary, one time at night, when she was exhausted, misstated, and immediately apologized, for what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995." Tapper called it "a sniper fire of falsehoods" noting that the story was told "more than once" but "never late at night," that her correction was not immediate but came "days" later and that "she never apologized." Tapper could have piled on that the visit in question was in 1996 not 1995 but he let the former President off the hook on that one.
For CBS, Jim Axelrod jumped on the excuse Bill used to explain his wife's error: "Some of them when they are sixty, they will forget something when they are tired at eleven o'clock at night too." Yes, Axelrod replayed a clip from that red telephone spot: her "best known ad this campaign has been about her ability to think straight in the middle of the night." Axelrod consulted Barack Obama's campaign for a response to the former President's remarks. The answer of No Comment observes "a cardinal rule of politics: never kick your opponents when your opponents are already kicking themselves."
NBC's Andrea Mitchell noted that Rodham Clinton had sent her husband to the "woodshed" for his remarks as "her aides cringed." She saw him emerged "duly admonished but unchastened" as her launched into media criticism. He addressed the traveling campaign press corps: "I regret that people like you care more about that"--the sniper fire fibs--"than whether she served the troops and I also regret that there appears to be a double standard about misstatements." Mitchell did not elaborate as to what that double standard might be or which misstatements it concerned.
Both CBS and ABC followed up on their campaign coverage to promote their Sunday morning political talk shows. George Stephanopoulos (no link) of ABC's This Week offered a free plug to the newly opened Newseum of Journalism, which will be his show's new home. Bob Schieffer played a soundbite from his sitdown with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for CBS' Face the Nation in which she called Bill Clinton's comment "a late night adult moment." Schieffer reported that Pelosi's joke was a symptom of Rodham Clinton's fading clout with party leaders. "She would not have said that if Hillary Clinton were the frontrunner right now," Schieffer's unnamed source, a Democratic operative, told him.
PANTS ON FIRE President George Bush admitted deception to ABC's Martha Raddatz (embargoed link) that was far more serious than fantasy sniper fire. During the spring and early summer of 2006, he admitted he constantly insisted that the US military was winning the war in Iraq when "I thought it was failing. Yes I did." Raddatz asked him whether he thought he "lost credibility with the American people" because of those lies. "The quickest way to lose credibility with the American people is for them to think the President makes decisions upon the latest public opinion poll." Raddatz pointed out that there have been no "fluctuations in the polls. The fact is those polls have not fluctuated over the years. They have been solidly saying that the war was a mistake." Bush's response: "Obviously I care about what the American people think."
The President stated that he insisted the United States was winning a war he believed it was losing in order to "bolster the spirits of the people in the field…look you cannot have the Commander in Chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing that either 'It is not worth it' or 'You are losing.' I mean, what does that do for morale?"
POLITICS OR SAFETY? American Airlines is "limping back to normal after a four-day travel nightmare," NBC's Tom Costello stated, as fewer than 600 flights were canceled Friday in order to fix the wiring on its MD-80 jetliners. As he did Thursday, ABC anchor Charles Gibson (no link) continued to blame the disruption on pedantic bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration--"safety regulation run amok"--rather than on sloppy maintenance at American Airlines. He called on John Nance, his network's aviation consultant to back him up. Nance called the FAA's rigidity "a gross overreaction" finding no evidence that the defective wiring bundles were "safety critical."
At CBS, Nancy Cordes suggested that the disruptions had "more to do with politics than safety" after "Congress pushed the FAA to get tougher" following its expose of excessive leniency for Southwest Airlines. "That get-tough approach cost American Airlines an estimated $40m to $50m." NBC's Costello was not convinced that the airline was being treated unfairly, calling the canceled flights "the result of American's failure to properly comply with an FAA airworthiness directive that expired in early March." The directives are nothing unusual, Costello explained: 88 are on file for MD-80s, 275 for A-320s, 518 for 737s.
WAS RANCH SEARCH LEGAL? ABC focused on the fundamentalist Mormon followers of Warren Jeffs, currently imprisoned on a statutory rape conspiracy for organizing his adult male followers to take polygamous child brides. ABC's Mike von Fremd (embargoed link) led from San Angelo Tex, where the confinement of 400-or-so children from the Yearning For Zion ranch may turn out to be illegal if authorities fail to identify the teenage mother whose complaint was the basis for their search warrant. Officials "seem more encouraged than ever" that they may be able to locate her. Both von Fremd and NBC's Don Teague listed the property that was confiscated as a result of the search. Most of it was innocuous--records of births and marriages, computers, pregnancy test kits; one thing von Fremd found "disturbing" was "papers police refer to as 'cyanide poisoning documents.'"
ABC also played a preview of Dan Harris' report for Nightline on the sect's compound in Colorado City along the Arizona-Utah line. It was from that community that Jeffs selected the "most extreme members" to set up the compound in Texas. He reported allegations that "a lot of underage girls" in Colorado City are pregnant. If true, "there is a major question for law enforcement--whether the extraordinary raid that took place in Texas should now be repeated."
In the meantime, ABC's von Fremd found "despair" among Texan parents separated from their children. He quoted complaints published in Salt Lake City's Deseret News from Mormon mothers that their children had been "kidnapped for no reason" and were being "held prisoner."
MY BOSSES TOOK A HAIRCUT It is hard to know whether NBC was being scrupulous or self-serving when it was the only newscast to consult a correspondent when General Electric made almost $750m less than it expected in the first quarter of 2008 and its value fell in "the worst one-day loss for that stock since the 1987 crash," as Scott Cohn put it. Cohn comes from CNBC, the sibling financial news cable channel of NBC--both owned by General Electric. The bad news at GE was mentioned in passing by ABC and CBS to account for a sell off in the financial markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 256 points. CNBC's Cohn offered the details, conveniently excusing GE's NBC Universal media operation as the prime cause of his bosses' shortfall. He named a commercial real estate credit crunch, a slowdown in sales of household appliances and hospitals failing to pay for medical equipment as the major problems.
DOWN THE TOILET Last month both NBC's Tom Costello and CBS' Nancy Cordes covered an investigation by the Associated Press that found that trace elements of pharmaceuticals end up in our municipal water supplies. Curiously, Sharyl Attkisson reported on the same phenomenon for her Follow the Money investigation on CBS, but because her beat is money not the environment, she completely ignored its public health consequences. Attkisson was only interested in the fiscal implications of the rule by the Food & Drug Administration that nursing homes must dispose of pharmaceuticals for its patients when they happen to die or leave or have their prescriptions change. Attkisson showed us how pills are shucked out of their bubble wrap and flushed by the handful down the toilet. The discarded drugs may be worth $378m annually but their entry into waste water treatment did not interest her.
TODDLERS AND TANZANIANS The environment was the focus of NBC's weekending Making a Difference feature and ABC's preview of a National Geographic cable documentary hosted by its own Elizabeth Vargas. NBC's Roger O'Neil visited the sustainable mozzarella farm of the Crave brothers in Wisconsin. The manure their cows produce is converted into methane which powers the generator that runs their milking machines leaving a residue that is used as "odor free potting soil and a new liquid fertilizer." Vargas' documentary is called The Human Footprint and it dramatizes the resources that Americans use in water and wood and oil and so on: "If everyone else lived like we do we would need four planets to supply the resources and store the massive amount of waste." Disposable diapers, for example, use so much pulp and oil that "an American at the age of one already has a bigger carbon footprint than a Tanzanian will have in a lifetime."
PENAL QUESTIONS SIDETRACKED The trip by NBC anchor Brian Williams to Washington DC to host MSNBC's Conversation about Race served to publicize another documentary, MSNBC's Meeting David Wilson about the descendents of slaves and the descendents of slaveholders. Williams had Rehema Ellis in Philadelphia preview one of the major racial issues in his conversation--crime. Ellis appeared to be heading towards controversy in her report, focusing on racial disparity in the penal system, where black men undergo high levels of incarceration and are targeted by narcotics laws more stringently than whites. Then she veered away from public policy towards neighborhood uplift, profiling Men United for a Better Philadelphia, an African-American street patrol that has helped reduce the city's homicide rate by 30% in the last year.
A SIMPLE MONK NBC claimed an Exclusive for Ann Curry's sitdown with the Dalai Lama, whom she identified as "the exiled spiritual leader of some 13m Tibetans worldwide." He called himself "a simple Buddhist monk." The Dalai Lama supported this summer's Olympic Games of Beijing and opposed secession of Tibet from the People's Republic of China. As someone committed to "freedom of expression, freedom of speech" he could not oppose protests against the global relay of Olympic Torch as long as they were peaceful. "Is violence ever justified?" "No." "Never?" "No. Even the United States, superpower, is too much using violence or force--not very successful in Iraq and Afghanistan."
THE CAT WHO WALKED BY HIMSELF CBS rounded off the week with Steve Hartman's Assignment America. He asked us to imagine "if you take the speed and thrill of dog agility and remove the speed, the thrill, the dogs." The result would be cat agility obstacle courses. "Cats will run the course flawlessly one day and then just refuse to cooperate the next."
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 top aide to Iraqi opposition leader Muqtada al-Sadr was murdered in Najaf…Cuba's economic reforms now include transfer of ownership to property to tenants and a lifting of salary caps…consumer confidence statistics fell to a 26-year low…President George Bush filed his taxes, with an annual income of $719K…major league baseball has tightened its testing regime for steroids…the decimation of the honey bee population may be caused by pollution deadening the fragrance of pollens.
ABC's Jake Tapper (embargoed link) demolished Bill's defense of his wife by quoting it in full: "Hillary, one time at night, when she was exhausted, misstated, and immediately apologized, for what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995." Tapper called it "a sniper fire of falsehoods" noting that the story was told "more than once" but "never late at night," that her correction was not immediate but came "days" later and that "she never apologized." Tapper could have piled on that the visit in question was in 1996 not 1995 but he let the former President off the hook on that one.
For CBS, Jim Axelrod jumped on the excuse Bill used to explain his wife's error: "Some of them when they are sixty, they will forget something when they are tired at eleven o'clock at night too." Yes, Axelrod replayed a clip from that red telephone spot: her "best known ad this campaign has been about her ability to think straight in the middle of the night." Axelrod consulted Barack Obama's campaign for a response to the former President's remarks. The answer of No Comment observes "a cardinal rule of politics: never kick your opponents when your opponents are already kicking themselves."
NBC's Andrea Mitchell noted that Rodham Clinton had sent her husband to the "woodshed" for his remarks as "her aides cringed." She saw him emerged "duly admonished but unchastened" as her launched into media criticism. He addressed the traveling campaign press corps: "I regret that people like you care more about that"--the sniper fire fibs--"than whether she served the troops and I also regret that there appears to be a double standard about misstatements." Mitchell did not elaborate as to what that double standard might be or which misstatements it concerned.
Both CBS and ABC followed up on their campaign coverage to promote their Sunday morning political talk shows. George Stephanopoulos (no link) of ABC's This Week offered a free plug to the newly opened Newseum of Journalism, which will be his show's new home. Bob Schieffer played a soundbite from his sitdown with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for CBS' Face the Nation in which she called Bill Clinton's comment "a late night adult moment." Schieffer reported that Pelosi's joke was a symptom of Rodham Clinton's fading clout with party leaders. "She would not have said that if Hillary Clinton were the frontrunner right now," Schieffer's unnamed source, a Democratic operative, told him.
PANTS ON FIRE President George Bush admitted deception to ABC's Martha Raddatz (embargoed link) that was far more serious than fantasy sniper fire. During the spring and early summer of 2006, he admitted he constantly insisted that the US military was winning the war in Iraq when "I thought it was failing. Yes I did." Raddatz asked him whether he thought he "lost credibility with the American people" because of those lies. "The quickest way to lose credibility with the American people is for them to think the President makes decisions upon the latest public opinion poll." Raddatz pointed out that there have been no "fluctuations in the polls. The fact is those polls have not fluctuated over the years. They have been solidly saying that the war was a mistake." Bush's response: "Obviously I care about what the American people think."
The President stated that he insisted the United States was winning a war he believed it was losing in order to "bolster the spirits of the people in the field…look you cannot have the Commander in Chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing that either 'It is not worth it' or 'You are losing.' I mean, what does that do for morale?"
POLITICS OR SAFETY? American Airlines is "limping back to normal after a four-day travel nightmare," NBC's Tom Costello stated, as fewer than 600 flights were canceled Friday in order to fix the wiring on its MD-80 jetliners. As he did Thursday, ABC anchor Charles Gibson (no link) continued to blame the disruption on pedantic bureaucrats at the Federal Aviation Administration--"safety regulation run amok"--rather than on sloppy maintenance at American Airlines. He called on John Nance, his network's aviation consultant to back him up. Nance called the FAA's rigidity "a gross overreaction" finding no evidence that the defective wiring bundles were "safety critical."
At CBS, Nancy Cordes suggested that the disruptions had "more to do with politics than safety" after "Congress pushed the FAA to get tougher" following its expose of excessive leniency for Southwest Airlines. "That get-tough approach cost American Airlines an estimated $40m to $50m." NBC's Costello was not convinced that the airline was being treated unfairly, calling the canceled flights "the result of American's failure to properly comply with an FAA airworthiness directive that expired in early March." The directives are nothing unusual, Costello explained: 88 are on file for MD-80s, 275 for A-320s, 518 for 737s.
WAS RANCH SEARCH LEGAL? ABC focused on the fundamentalist Mormon followers of Warren Jeffs, currently imprisoned on a statutory rape conspiracy for organizing his adult male followers to take polygamous child brides. ABC's Mike von Fremd (embargoed link) led from San Angelo Tex, where the confinement of 400-or-so children from the Yearning For Zion ranch may turn out to be illegal if authorities fail to identify the teenage mother whose complaint was the basis for their search warrant. Officials "seem more encouraged than ever" that they may be able to locate her. Both von Fremd and NBC's Don Teague listed the property that was confiscated as a result of the search. Most of it was innocuous--records of births and marriages, computers, pregnancy test kits; one thing von Fremd found "disturbing" was "papers police refer to as 'cyanide poisoning documents.'"
ABC also played a preview of Dan Harris' report for Nightline on the sect's compound in Colorado City along the Arizona-Utah line. It was from that community that Jeffs selected the "most extreme members" to set up the compound in Texas. He reported allegations that "a lot of underage girls" in Colorado City are pregnant. If true, "there is a major question for law enforcement--whether the extraordinary raid that took place in Texas should now be repeated."
In the meantime, ABC's von Fremd found "despair" among Texan parents separated from their children. He quoted complaints published in Salt Lake City's Deseret News from Mormon mothers that their children had been "kidnapped for no reason" and were being "held prisoner."
MY BOSSES TOOK A HAIRCUT It is hard to know whether NBC was being scrupulous or self-serving when it was the only newscast to consult a correspondent when General Electric made almost $750m less than it expected in the first quarter of 2008 and its value fell in "the worst one-day loss for that stock since the 1987 crash," as Scott Cohn put it. Cohn comes from CNBC, the sibling financial news cable channel of NBC--both owned by General Electric. The bad news at GE was mentioned in passing by ABC and CBS to account for a sell off in the financial markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 256 points. CNBC's Cohn offered the details, conveniently excusing GE's NBC Universal media operation as the prime cause of his bosses' shortfall. He named a commercial real estate credit crunch, a slowdown in sales of household appliances and hospitals failing to pay for medical equipment as the major problems.
DOWN THE TOILET Last month both NBC's Tom Costello and CBS' Nancy Cordes covered an investigation by the Associated Press that found that trace elements of pharmaceuticals end up in our municipal water supplies. Curiously, Sharyl Attkisson reported on the same phenomenon for her Follow the Money investigation on CBS, but because her beat is money not the environment, she completely ignored its public health consequences. Attkisson was only interested in the fiscal implications of the rule by the Food & Drug Administration that nursing homes must dispose of pharmaceuticals for its patients when they happen to die or leave or have their prescriptions change. Attkisson showed us how pills are shucked out of their bubble wrap and flushed by the handful down the toilet. The discarded drugs may be worth $378m annually but their entry into waste water treatment did not interest her.
TODDLERS AND TANZANIANS The environment was the focus of NBC's weekending Making a Difference feature and ABC's preview of a National Geographic cable documentary hosted by its own Elizabeth Vargas. NBC's Roger O'Neil visited the sustainable mozzarella farm of the Crave brothers in Wisconsin. The manure their cows produce is converted into methane which powers the generator that runs their milking machines leaving a residue that is used as "odor free potting soil and a new liquid fertilizer." Vargas' documentary is called The Human Footprint and it dramatizes the resources that Americans use in water and wood and oil and so on: "If everyone else lived like we do we would need four planets to supply the resources and store the massive amount of waste." Disposable diapers, for example, use so much pulp and oil that "an American at the age of one already has a bigger carbon footprint than a Tanzanian will have in a lifetime."
PENAL QUESTIONS SIDETRACKED The trip by NBC anchor Brian Williams to Washington DC to host MSNBC's Conversation about Race served to publicize another documentary, MSNBC's Meeting David Wilson about the descendents of slaves and the descendents of slaveholders. Williams had Rehema Ellis in Philadelphia preview one of the major racial issues in his conversation--crime. Ellis appeared to be heading towards controversy in her report, focusing on racial disparity in the penal system, where black men undergo high levels of incarceration and are targeted by narcotics laws more stringently than whites. Then she veered away from public policy towards neighborhood uplift, profiling Men United for a Better Philadelphia, an African-American street patrol that has helped reduce the city's homicide rate by 30% in the last year.
A SIMPLE MONK NBC claimed an Exclusive for Ann Curry's sitdown with the Dalai Lama, whom she identified as "the exiled spiritual leader of some 13m Tibetans worldwide." He called himself "a simple Buddhist monk." The Dalai Lama supported this summer's Olympic Games of Beijing and opposed secession of Tibet from the People's Republic of China. As someone committed to "freedom of expression, freedom of speech" he could not oppose protests against the global relay of Olympic Torch as long as they were peaceful. "Is violence ever justified?" "No." "Never?" "No. Even the United States, superpower, is too much using violence or force--not very successful in Iraq and Afghanistan."
THE CAT WHO WALKED BY HIMSELF CBS rounded off the week with Steve Hartman's Assignment America. He asked us to imagine "if you take the speed and thrill of dog agility and remove the speed, the thrill, the dogs." The result would be cat agility obstacle courses. "Cats will run the course flawlessly one day and then just refuse to cooperate the next."
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 top aide to Iraqi opposition leader Muqtada al-Sadr was murdered in Najaf…Cuba's economic reforms now include transfer of ownership to property to tenants and a lifting of salary caps…consumer confidence statistics fell to a 26-year low…President George Bush filed his taxes, with an annual income of $719K…major league baseball has tightened its testing regime for steroids…the decimation of the honey bee population may be caused by pollution deadening the fragrance of pollens.
