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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 21, 2008
After six weeks on the stump in Pennsylvania, the two surviving Democratic Presidential candidates put in their last day before Tuesday's primary election. CBS (12 min v ABC 7, NBC 5) offered the most comprehensive coverage, supplementing updates from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton with demographic vignettes of key sectors of the Keystone State: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, plus working class Scranton and the college towns of the Lehigh Valley. NBC led with Pennsylvania, too, as the Story of the Day occupied 38% (24 min out of 62) of the three-network newshole. Yet ABC, whose debate last Wednesday in Philadelphia made such waves, did not rate the primary as worthy of its lead. Instead, on a day when Big Pharma's Pfizer paid for Lyrica to be its sole sponsor, ABC led off its expanded newscast (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 20) with the high price of oil.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 21, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CBS’ PENNSYLVANIA PRIMARY PRIMER After six weeks on the stump in Pennsylvania, the two surviving Democratic Presidential candidates put in their last day before Tuesday's primary election. CBS (12 min v ABC 7, NBC 5) offered the most comprehensive coverage, supplementing updates from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton with demographic vignettes of key sectors of the Keystone State: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, plus working class Scranton and the college towns of the Lehigh Valley. NBC led with Pennsylvania, too, as the Story of the Day occupied 38% (24 min out of 62) of the three-network newshole. Yet ABC, whose debate last Wednesday in Philadelphia made such waves, did not rate the primary as worthy of its lead. Instead, on a day when Big Pharma's Pfizer paid for Lyrica to be its sole sponsor, ABC led off its expanded newscast (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 20) with the high price of oil.
Both candidates tried last-ditch publicity gimmicks. Both ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Andrea Mitchell played clips from their pre-recorded pitches on USA Network's WWE Raw pro-wrestling. "The last man standing may just be a woman" and "Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" All three networks snared prerecorded sitdowns with the candidates for their morning news programs. Rodham Clinton boasted of her determination to "totally obliterate" Iran on ABC's Good Morning America if Teheran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. CBS' Dean Reynolds ran Obama's attempt to play the expectations game on his network's The Early Show: "She has, you know, got to be heavily favored to win."
CBS' Reynolds reckoned that Obama outspent Rodham Clinton by a three-to-one ratio on advertising in the state. NBC's Mitchell put the ratio at two-to-one, yet even after those bills she reckoned Obama has $42m on hand in cash while Rodham Clinton is "still in the red." Mitchell pointed out that Rodham Clinton has a secret weapon: her daughter Chelsea and Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania, "spent Friday night on a pub crawl in Philadelphia's gay bars."
NFL NOT NATIONAL LEAGUE CBS anchor Katie Couric set the scene for her correspondents' demographic of Pennsylvania by introducing us to the commonwealth as a "kind of mini-America, urban and suburban, blue collar and professional, conservative and liberal, black and white and Hispanic." Disdaining the national pastime's Pirates and Phillies, Couric recommended a football metaphor for understanding the state. The Steelers' west is Rodham Clinton country, Roman Catholic and blue collar, culturally conservative. The Eagles' east is "more educated, affluent and liberal" with Philadelphia "evenly split between black and white."
Couric cautioned us not to confuse Pennsylvania with Ohio: "They are really more cousins than siblings" with Pennsylvania's population being more Catholic, more heavily unionized, older and more female.
Going round the state, CBS' Bill Whitaker saw Philadelphia, with its college students, wealthy suburbs and large black population, as "Obama's kind of a place." CBS' Nancy Cordes called Pittsburgh "whiter and older" than most urban areas and noted that many of the city's public schools close on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, "the first day of hunting season." Scranton, where Rodham Clinton claims family ties, "may not be Hillary country after all," warned CBS' Chip Reid after conducting vox pop, "and her roots may not be as deep as she thinks." And CBS' Kelly Cobiella looked at the surge in voter registration on the campuses of the Lehigh Valley and anticipated that "Muhlenberg College should be Obama country."
WHEN IS A WIN NOT A WIN? As for handicapping the result, CBS' Jim Axelrod was definitive that "all polls show" a Rodham Clinton victory. He framed "the real question: how big a win does she need to have a real shot at the nomination?" On that, there was a difference of opinion at NBC. Andrea Mitchell inquired of Philadelphia's Mayor Michael Nutter whether, if Rodham Clinton "does not win by a big enough margin, should she get out?" Mitchell's bureau chief Tim Russert would have none of it: "She needs a win, just a plain old simple victory." Russert argued that her margin of victory would make no difference to Rodham Clinton's decision to continue campaigning. Instead it would affect her fundraising clout: "Her campaign desperately needs money." George Stephanopoulos, Russert's Sunday morning rival at ABC, argued that her victory needs to be "double digit" otherwise "the superdelegates will keep trickling towards Obama."
So what are the keys to watch? ABC's Stephanopoulos isolated the areas where each candidate needs a high turnout: the elderly for Rodham Clinton; young voters for Obama. NBC's Mitchell isolated the 8% of the electorate that opinion polls say are still undecided. She did not give Obama a chance with them: "The big question" is whether they will trend towards Rodham Clinton "as she hopes" or "just stay home." ABC's Kate Snow's (embargoed link) identified the enthusiasm of suburban mothers as key to deciding the magnitude of a Rodham Clinton victory. Snow filed from the most aptly named town in the state for that task: Media Pa.
RICE PRICE HIKE ABC decided to lead with skyrocketing commodity prices--crude oil and cereal grains--instead of Campaign 2008. Neither CBS nor NBC thought either financial story worthy of a reporter. ABC's David Muir, covering the 141% increase in the global price of rice just since January, repeated an excellent technique he deployed that last time he surveyed worldwide food shortages. He narrated a wheel report as ABC correspondents Nick Schifrin and Margaret Conley and Clarissa Ward filed updates from India and Indonesia and Moscow about the restrictions on agricultural exports to keep domestic food staples affordable. ABC's Dan Harris (embargoed link) covered the record high price of oil--$117 for a barrel of crude, $3.51 for a gallon of gasoline--by warning that $4 prices at the pump are on the way. Mexico and Russia cannot produce any more crude; Nigeria's pipelines are under guerrilla attack; and hurricane season is about to start in the Gulf of Mexico, a "danger to refineries."
E-MAIL EVIDENCE Last November, CBS' Armen Keteyian filed a blistering expose of the Veterans Administration that claimed that the VA was failing to monitor the suicide rate of its mentally ill patients. Now a federal lawsuit against the VA by veterans rights groups corroborates Keteyian's reporting in spades. Keteyian filed an Investigation follow-up, citing internal VA e-mails that are evidence in the case. The memos were sent by Ira Katz, the VA's head of mental health, to his public relations team.
Shortly after Katz told Keteyian that the VA had 790 patients attempt suicide each year, Katz' memo revealed the larger number of "about 1,000 suicide attempts per month." Just three days after Katz stated that Keteyian's statistic of 6,200 annual suicides was "not, in fact, an accurate reflection in the rate," Katz wrote an e-mail citing a daily average of 18 suicides, which works out at 6,570 annually. Keteyian quoted from the e-mail title: "Not for the CBS News interview request." Its first line was: "Shhh!" It ended: "Is this something we should carefully address before someone stumbles on it?"
Katz denied any cover-up. He explained that the suicide data were not published "because of questions over the reliability and consistency of the findings."
FEAR OF RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION The child custody chaos in San Angelo Texas continues and all three newscasts kept a correspondent on the case. CBS' Randall Pinkston sat down with members of the fundamentalist Mormon sect to ask about the state's allegations of child brides. "If I understood right, a few years back the law in Texas allowed a girl to be married when she was 14," answered one husband named Edson. The men of the Yearning for Zion ranch were sitting down for interviews "for the first time," noted NBC's Don Teague, but they appeared to have their talking points straight. Another husband, Leland, referred to the recent raise in the age of consent: "You move to a place and somebody passes a law that says what you do is wrong and then, all of a sudden, when you came there you were not a criminal and then, all of a sudden now, you may be a criminal." Teague noted that the sect's secrecy derives from "what they consider a well-founded fear of religious persecution." Meanwhile the family court ordered DNA tests on all 419 children to determine their parentage. ABC's Neal Karlinsky (embargoed link) commented that the genetic science will be "challenging" since "the polygamist sect is made up of only a handful of families who have intermarried for generations."
KENYAN THESPIAN ABC is expanding its newshole each Monday in April, allowing it to make room for its 21 and the World is Yours feature, a profile of global twentysomethings. Jim Sciutto introduced us to Mwai Ngugi, a peasant farmer in the mornings and a thespian in the Nakura Players Theater Group in the afternoons. Life expectancy in Kenya is 46 years, so at 21 Ngugi is already middle-aged. His troupe visits slums to dramatize the dangers of alcohol, drugs and HIV/AIDS. His house has no running water or gas cooking, its toilet is an outhouse yet he belongs to Kenya's middle class and his family is living proof: among his six siblings, the actor counts a schoolteacher, an accountant, an electrician and an IT specialist.
ELSEWHERE… The first warmth of spring on the streets of Chicago saw more young people outside of an evening, some after curfew, NBC's Kevin Tibbles told us. Mix in firearms and they face "a volatile, often deadly combination." A string of weekend shootings left eight dead, including an 18-year-old caught in the crossfire during a botched robbery: "Police say at least seven of the shootings involved juveniles"…the standard medication for Attention Deficit Disorder is a stimulant, NBC's Robert Bazell warned, that can aggravate some forms of heart disease. As many as one child in 50 has an undiagnosed heart condition. Since "an amazing 2.5m children in this country take stimulant medications," the American Heart Association recommends an electrocardiagram before Ritalin…to observe Earth Day, NBC launched its Greening the Earth series by sending Anne Thompson to Sweden, a country that plans to burn no fossil fuel by 2020. Stockholm streets are turned into pedestrian malls. Swedes leave their cars to ride bicycles. Oil will be replaced by "gasified wood."
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 criticized the United States Air Force for an understock of unmanned surveillance drones… recruiters are allowing more felons than ever into military ranks…President George Bush arrived in New Orleans for the annual NAFTA Summit with leaders of Canada and Mexico…former President Jimmy Carter held talks with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist party that controls the Gaza Strip; Carter claimed that Hamas agreed to accept Israel as a neighbor but without formal recognition…melanoma is most dangerous when cancers are found on the head or neck…the FDA warned of tainted production techniques in China for the medication Heparin…Danica Patrick became the first female driver to win an Indy car race…the Boston Marathon was held on Patriots Day.
Both candidates tried last-ditch publicity gimmicks. Both ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Andrea Mitchell played clips from their pre-recorded pitches on USA Network's WWE Raw pro-wrestling. "The last man standing may just be a woman" and "Do you smell what Barack is cooking?" All three networks snared prerecorded sitdowns with the candidates for their morning news programs. Rodham Clinton boasted of her determination to "totally obliterate" Iran on ABC's Good Morning America if Teheran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. CBS' Dean Reynolds ran Obama's attempt to play the expectations game on his network's The Early Show: "She has, you know, got to be heavily favored to win."
CBS' Reynolds reckoned that Obama outspent Rodham Clinton by a three-to-one ratio on advertising in the state. NBC's Mitchell put the ratio at two-to-one, yet even after those bills she reckoned Obama has $42m on hand in cash while Rodham Clinton is "still in the red." Mitchell pointed out that Rodham Clinton has a secret weapon: her daughter Chelsea and Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania, "spent Friday night on a pub crawl in Philadelphia's gay bars."
NFL NOT NATIONAL LEAGUE CBS anchor Katie Couric set the scene for her correspondents' demographic of Pennsylvania by introducing us to the commonwealth as a "kind of mini-America, urban and suburban, blue collar and professional, conservative and liberal, black and white and Hispanic." Disdaining the national pastime's Pirates and Phillies, Couric recommended a football metaphor for understanding the state. The Steelers' west is Rodham Clinton country, Roman Catholic and blue collar, culturally conservative. The Eagles' east is "more educated, affluent and liberal" with Philadelphia "evenly split between black and white."
Couric cautioned us not to confuse Pennsylvania with Ohio: "They are really more cousins than siblings" with Pennsylvania's population being more Catholic, more heavily unionized, older and more female.
Going round the state, CBS' Bill Whitaker saw Philadelphia, with its college students, wealthy suburbs and large black population, as "Obama's kind of a place." CBS' Nancy Cordes called Pittsburgh "whiter and older" than most urban areas and noted that many of the city's public schools close on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, "the first day of hunting season." Scranton, where Rodham Clinton claims family ties, "may not be Hillary country after all," warned CBS' Chip Reid after conducting vox pop, "and her roots may not be as deep as she thinks." And CBS' Kelly Cobiella looked at the surge in voter registration on the campuses of the Lehigh Valley and anticipated that "Muhlenberg College should be Obama country."
WHEN IS A WIN NOT A WIN? As for handicapping the result, CBS' Jim Axelrod was definitive that "all polls show" a Rodham Clinton victory. He framed "the real question: how big a win does she need to have a real shot at the nomination?" On that, there was a difference of opinion at NBC. Andrea Mitchell inquired of Philadelphia's Mayor Michael Nutter whether, if Rodham Clinton "does not win by a big enough margin, should she get out?" Mitchell's bureau chief Tim Russert would have none of it: "She needs a win, just a plain old simple victory." Russert argued that her margin of victory would make no difference to Rodham Clinton's decision to continue campaigning. Instead it would affect her fundraising clout: "Her campaign desperately needs money." George Stephanopoulos, Russert's Sunday morning rival at ABC, argued that her victory needs to be "double digit" otherwise "the superdelegates will keep trickling towards Obama."
So what are the keys to watch? ABC's Stephanopoulos isolated the areas where each candidate needs a high turnout: the elderly for Rodham Clinton; young voters for Obama. NBC's Mitchell isolated the 8% of the electorate that opinion polls say are still undecided. She did not give Obama a chance with them: "The big question" is whether they will trend towards Rodham Clinton "as she hopes" or "just stay home." ABC's Kate Snow's (embargoed link) identified the enthusiasm of suburban mothers as key to deciding the magnitude of a Rodham Clinton victory. Snow filed from the most aptly named town in the state for that task: Media Pa.
RICE PRICE HIKE ABC decided to lead with skyrocketing commodity prices--crude oil and cereal grains--instead of Campaign 2008. Neither CBS nor NBC thought either financial story worthy of a reporter. ABC's David Muir, covering the 141% increase in the global price of rice just since January, repeated an excellent technique he deployed that last time he surveyed worldwide food shortages. He narrated a wheel report as ABC correspondents Nick Schifrin and Margaret Conley and Clarissa Ward filed updates from India and Indonesia and Moscow about the restrictions on agricultural exports to keep domestic food staples affordable. ABC's Dan Harris (embargoed link) covered the record high price of oil--$117 for a barrel of crude, $3.51 for a gallon of gasoline--by warning that $4 prices at the pump are on the way. Mexico and Russia cannot produce any more crude; Nigeria's pipelines are under guerrilla attack; and hurricane season is about to start in the Gulf of Mexico, a "danger to refineries."
E-MAIL EVIDENCE Last November, CBS' Armen Keteyian filed a blistering expose of the Veterans Administration that claimed that the VA was failing to monitor the suicide rate of its mentally ill patients. Now a federal lawsuit against the VA by veterans rights groups corroborates Keteyian's reporting in spades. Keteyian filed an Investigation follow-up, citing internal VA e-mails that are evidence in the case. The memos were sent by Ira Katz, the VA's head of mental health, to his public relations team.
Shortly after Katz told Keteyian that the VA had 790 patients attempt suicide each year, Katz' memo revealed the larger number of "about 1,000 suicide attempts per month." Just three days after Katz stated that Keteyian's statistic of 6,200 annual suicides was "not, in fact, an accurate reflection in the rate," Katz wrote an e-mail citing a daily average of 18 suicides, which works out at 6,570 annually. Keteyian quoted from the e-mail title: "Not for the CBS News interview request." Its first line was: "Shhh!" It ended: "Is this something we should carefully address before someone stumbles on it?"
Katz denied any cover-up. He explained that the suicide data were not published "because of questions over the reliability and consistency of the findings."
FEAR OF RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION The child custody chaos in San Angelo Texas continues and all three newscasts kept a correspondent on the case. CBS' Randall Pinkston sat down with members of the fundamentalist Mormon sect to ask about the state's allegations of child brides. "If I understood right, a few years back the law in Texas allowed a girl to be married when she was 14," answered one husband named Edson. The men of the Yearning for Zion ranch were sitting down for interviews "for the first time," noted NBC's Don Teague, but they appeared to have their talking points straight. Another husband, Leland, referred to the recent raise in the age of consent: "You move to a place and somebody passes a law that says what you do is wrong and then, all of a sudden, when you came there you were not a criminal and then, all of a sudden now, you may be a criminal." Teague noted that the sect's secrecy derives from "what they consider a well-founded fear of religious persecution." Meanwhile the family court ordered DNA tests on all 419 children to determine their parentage. ABC's Neal Karlinsky (embargoed link) commented that the genetic science will be "challenging" since "the polygamist sect is made up of only a handful of families who have intermarried for generations."
KENYAN THESPIAN ABC is expanding its newshole each Monday in April, allowing it to make room for its 21 and the World is Yours feature, a profile of global twentysomethings. Jim Sciutto introduced us to Mwai Ngugi, a peasant farmer in the mornings and a thespian in the Nakura Players Theater Group in the afternoons. Life expectancy in Kenya is 46 years, so at 21 Ngugi is already middle-aged. His troupe visits slums to dramatize the dangers of alcohol, drugs and HIV/AIDS. His house has no running water or gas cooking, its toilet is an outhouse yet he belongs to Kenya's middle class and his family is living proof: among his six siblings, the actor counts a schoolteacher, an accountant, an electrician and an IT specialist.
ELSEWHERE… The first warmth of spring on the streets of Chicago saw more young people outside of an evening, some after curfew, NBC's Kevin Tibbles told us. Mix in firearms and they face "a volatile, often deadly combination." A string of weekend shootings left eight dead, including an 18-year-old caught in the crossfire during a botched robbery: "Police say at least seven of the shootings involved juveniles"…the standard medication for Attention Deficit Disorder is a stimulant, NBC's Robert Bazell warned, that can aggravate some forms of heart disease. As many as one child in 50 has an undiagnosed heart condition. Since "an amazing 2.5m children in this country take stimulant medications," the American Heart Association recommends an electrocardiagram before Ritalin…to observe Earth Day, NBC launched its Greening the Earth series by sending Anne Thompson to Sweden, a country that plans to burn no fossil fuel by 2020. Stockholm streets are turned into pedestrian malls. Swedes leave their cars to ride bicycles. Oil will be replaced by "gasified wood."
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 criticized the United States Air Force for an understock of unmanned surveillance drones… recruiters are allowing more felons than ever into military ranks…President George Bush arrived in New Orleans for the annual NAFTA Summit with leaders of Canada and Mexico…former President Jimmy Carter held talks with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist party that controls the Gaza Strip; Carter claimed that Hamas agreed to accept Israel as a neighbor but without formal recognition…melanoma is most dangerous when cancers are found on the head or neck…the FDA warned of tainted production techniques in China for the medication Heparin…Danica Patrick became the first female driver to win an Indy car race…the Boston Marathon was held on Patriots Day.
