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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 24, 2008
Kudos to Bill Moyers of PBS. His current affairs magazine program Journal snared an interview with Jeremiah Wright, the longtime pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. Moyers' sitdown was Wright's first public appearance since incendiary soundbites from his sermons were used to raise questions about Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama. The Obama campaign was Story of the Day and the lead item on ABC. NBC led with the continuing decline in the housing market and CBS chose the aftermath of last fall's raid by Israeli warplanes on a suspected nuclear weapons facility in Syria.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 24, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
FREE PUBLICITY FOR PBS SCOOP Kudos to Bill Moyers of PBS. His current affairs magazine program Journal snared an interview with Jeremiah Wright, the longtime pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. Moyers' sitdown was Wright's first public appearance since incendiary soundbites from his sermons were used to raise questions about Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama. The Obama campaign was Story of the Day and the lead item on ABC. NBC led with the continuing decline in the housing market and CBS chose the aftermath of last fall's raid by Israeli warplanes on a suspected nuclear weapons facility in Syria.
All three networks had their correspondents introduce soundbites from the promotional clip of the Moyers-Wright interview: Jim Axelrod on CBS, Andrea Mitchell on NBC and David Wright on ABC. Obama has worshipped at Trinity United for 20 years and Moyers asked Wright about Obama's speech in Philadelphia in which Obama called some of Wright's comments "not only wrong but divisive." Replied Wright: "He is a politician; I am a pastor. I do what I do; he does what politicians do."
As for that phrase he does what politicians do none of the three correspondents delved into its meaning. It could have been derogatory, implying that Obama's disavowal of Wright's words was insincere and expedient, a form of words to provide political cover. It could have been an allusion to the Biblical injunction to keep the political and spiritual spheres separate: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Render unto God the things that are God's." More reporting is required. Perhaps Moyers, himself an ordained minister, will provide.
Coverage of Barack Obama's campaign was rounded out by a profile of his "backroom warriors" at their Chicago headquarters by CBS anchor Katie Couric. Couric promised that this would be the first of three behind-scenes Presidential pieces, with John McCain's machine and Hillary Rodham Clinton's operation still to come. Couric checked on campaign strategy, logistics, organizing, speechwriting, fundraising, press relations--and was struck by how young the Obama team is. "When a meeting adjourns it looks like classes are out on a college campus. Most of these staffers are in the twenties."
Only NBC covered Republican John McCain as he paid attention to poverty "in places from Appalachia to Alabama," as Kelly O'Donnell put it. "McCain has visited poor, rural and minority communities trying to appeal to the same voters Democrats are counting on in November." The tour ended in New Orleans where he focused on those catastrophic floods caused by levee failures during Hurricane Katrina. McCain castigated President George Bush for the "terrible and disgraceful way" in which the Katrina disaster was handled and he dismissed the theory by evangelist John Hagee that Katrina was God's punishment for New Orleans' sins. McCain called Hagee's attitude "nonsense" yet did not disavow his endorsement: "I did not attend pastor Hagee's church for 20 years."
SPIES SPILL SYRIAN SECRETS Both CBS and ABC sent their Pentagon correspondents to the CIA's Virginia headquarters in Langley to view "a highly unusual release of sensitive intelligence information," as ABC's Jonathan Karl put it. CBS' David Martin explained that he was showing us clips from "a videotape produced and narrated by US intelligence" laying out its case that a building in Syria that was bombed and destroyed last fall by Israeli warplanes had been constructed with help from North Korea to house a nuclear reactor to produce weapons grade plutonium.
The wording by both CBS' Martin and ABC's Karl was careful, even convoluted. "Somebody had spies on the ground" while the building was being constructed, Karl surmised. "It is a mystery how these ground level photos of a top secret site in Syria were obtained," declared Martin. Both focused on the photographic comparison between the destroyed building and facilities constructed in North Korea. ABC's Karl called vertical tube openings a "similar arrangement." CBS' Martin said the buildings were "exactly" alike.
Interestingly, NBC decided that the CIA's evidence was not newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a correspondent and that its provenance was no mystery at all. The photographs and satellite images were "provided by Israel," stated anchor Brian Williams flatly. They purport to be "proof" that the facility was nuclear and that North Korea had a role yet "many nuclear experts are taking issue with the administration's claims." He quoted Syria's reaction to the videotape: "Fantasy."
ASSIGNMENT IDYLL NBC's Mark Potter landed what should have been an idyllic trip to Vieques, eight miles off Puerto Rico, for an In Depth report--except that public health officials find that islanders are dying from cancer at a 50% greater rate than their fellow Ricans. Residents are suing the USNavy, which operated a firing range on the eastern half of the island for 60 years, alleging that "bomb-related toxins" including arsenic, lead and mercury are killing them. They want the Pentagon to pay for their healthcare. Potter showed us distant explosions as bombs and debris continued to be cleared from the disused range, now "turned into a wildlife refuge."
Yet how bad a life can it really be at NBC News? Not only was Potter in Vieques but Wednesday Anne Thompson was in the rain forest of Costa Rica. Now Ian Williams reports for NBC's Greening the Earth in scuba gear from the Phi Phi Islands off Thailand. He showed us the bubbly underwater class photo of a team of marine biologists from the University of Missouri building a coral nursery to regrow reefs.
DOWNS AND UPS Both CBS and NBC covered the continuing travails of the housing market. NBC led off its newscast with Diana Olick, real estate correspondent for financial news cable channel CNBC. Olick covered the growing inventory of unsold homes. "Too much supply and too little demand," she worried, as the volume of new home sales fell in March to the lowest level in 16 years and fewer applications for mortgages were filed. This lack of buyers occurs despite the fact that homes are ever cheaper: the year-to-year 13% fall in prices is the steepest in 38 years, she calculated. The stock of unsold homes is also growing because of foreclosures. CBS had Ben Tracy cover that angle for its Hitting Home series. He followed the building code enforcement squad in one Sacramento neighborhood, policing vandalism and evicting squatters in vacant bank-owned housing. Blight is a growing problem in a third of all cities, Tracy told us.
House prices may be falling but food and fuel continue to get more expensive. NBC's Anne Thompson illustrated the global impact of higher costs for rice and grain and pasta by visiting the single neighborhood of Jackson Heights in the New York borough of Queens where all the world's major cuisines can be found cheek by jowl. On ABC, Bill Weir (embargoed link) showed us tortilla protests in Mexico and bread riots in Egypt to dramatize the decisions by Illinois farmers to switch from food production to corn for ethanol: "India's finance minister calls biofuels a crime against humanity" while the ethanol industry "blames soaring food prices on bad weather, a weak dollar and Chinese demand." ABC's Betsy Stark looked at the best-selling vehicle on America's roads, the Ford F-150 pick-up truck, to show how high oil prices have climbed: the price of a full tank of a truck's gasoline now exceeds $100. CBS' Nancy Cordes examined the pass along costs for airline travel. High aviation fuel prices have triggered eight separate fare hikes so far this year and a host of surcharges: extra leg room $35; book by telephone $25; check a second bag $25; change a ticket $150.
SEE CLEARLY NOW The Food & Drug Administration approved lasik eye surgery in 1995 and since then some 12m people have been able to throw away those silly little glasses at a cost of up to $5,000 for both eyes. Yet "there has been no comprehensive look at quality of life," after the procedure, ABC's Lisa Stark (embargoed link) told us. Both she and NBC's Robert Bazell covered the FDA's decision to launch such a study. Bazell warned that some patients need constant eye drops because of dryness. Stark used distorted video footage to dramatize other adverse risks: double vision, night blindness, star bursts and haloes.
TREAD LIGHTLY CBS continued its Energy Savers series inspired by Earth Day by giving free publicity to carbonfund.org, an online interactive calculator to tell us if we exceed the average American's annual footprint of 26K lbs of greenhouse gas emissions. Daniel Sieberg told us all we need is five pieces of information to find our footprint: kilowatt hours of electricity, volume burned of domestic heating oil or natural gas, miles driven in one's car; the car's average fuel efficiency; and the number of miles flown by jetliner. "Some changes are obvious" for making that footprint lighter, he stated: adjust that thermostat; switch lighting to fluorescent; wash clothes in cold water; walk around the neighborhood.
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: NASA published photographs of colliding galaxies to mark the 18th anniversary of the Hubble space telescope…Ford Motors posted unexpected profits in the first quarter of 2008…the air in Alaska is hazy from a combination of forest fires in Russia and sandstorms in the Gobi Desert…child welfare authorities in Texas suspect that some of the mothers at the Yearning for Zion ranch are lying about their age, being minors themselves not adults…Actor Wesley Snipes was sent to prison for failure to pay income taxes…Boston Red Sox memorabilia, buried in concrete to put a hex on the new Yankee Stadium, has been retrieved and sold at auction for charity.
All three networks had their correspondents introduce soundbites from the promotional clip of the Moyers-Wright interview: Jim Axelrod on CBS, Andrea Mitchell on NBC and David Wright on ABC. Obama has worshipped at Trinity United for 20 years and Moyers asked Wright about Obama's speech in Philadelphia in which Obama called some of Wright's comments "not only wrong but divisive." Replied Wright: "He is a politician; I am a pastor. I do what I do; he does what politicians do."
As for that phrase he does what politicians do none of the three correspondents delved into its meaning. It could have been derogatory, implying that Obama's disavowal of Wright's words was insincere and expedient, a form of words to provide political cover. It could have been an allusion to the Biblical injunction to keep the political and spiritual spheres separate: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Render unto God the things that are God's." More reporting is required. Perhaps Moyers, himself an ordained minister, will provide.
Coverage of Barack Obama's campaign was rounded out by a profile of his "backroom warriors" at their Chicago headquarters by CBS anchor Katie Couric. Couric promised that this would be the first of three behind-scenes Presidential pieces, with John McCain's machine and Hillary Rodham Clinton's operation still to come. Couric checked on campaign strategy, logistics, organizing, speechwriting, fundraising, press relations--and was struck by how young the Obama team is. "When a meeting adjourns it looks like classes are out on a college campus. Most of these staffers are in the twenties."
Only NBC covered Republican John McCain as he paid attention to poverty "in places from Appalachia to Alabama," as Kelly O'Donnell put it. "McCain has visited poor, rural and minority communities trying to appeal to the same voters Democrats are counting on in November." The tour ended in New Orleans where he focused on those catastrophic floods caused by levee failures during Hurricane Katrina. McCain castigated President George Bush for the "terrible and disgraceful way" in which the Katrina disaster was handled and he dismissed the theory by evangelist John Hagee that Katrina was God's punishment for New Orleans' sins. McCain called Hagee's attitude "nonsense" yet did not disavow his endorsement: "I did not attend pastor Hagee's church for 20 years."
SPIES SPILL SYRIAN SECRETS Both CBS and ABC sent their Pentagon correspondents to the CIA's Virginia headquarters in Langley to view "a highly unusual release of sensitive intelligence information," as ABC's Jonathan Karl put it. CBS' David Martin explained that he was showing us clips from "a videotape produced and narrated by US intelligence" laying out its case that a building in Syria that was bombed and destroyed last fall by Israeli warplanes had been constructed with help from North Korea to house a nuclear reactor to produce weapons grade plutonium.
The wording by both CBS' Martin and ABC's Karl was careful, even convoluted. "Somebody had spies on the ground" while the building was being constructed, Karl surmised. "It is a mystery how these ground level photos of a top secret site in Syria were obtained," declared Martin. Both focused on the photographic comparison between the destroyed building and facilities constructed in North Korea. ABC's Karl called vertical tube openings a "similar arrangement." CBS' Martin said the buildings were "exactly" alike.
Interestingly, NBC decided that the CIA's evidence was not newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a correspondent and that its provenance was no mystery at all. The photographs and satellite images were "provided by Israel," stated anchor Brian Williams flatly. They purport to be "proof" that the facility was nuclear and that North Korea had a role yet "many nuclear experts are taking issue with the administration's claims." He quoted Syria's reaction to the videotape: "Fantasy."
ASSIGNMENT IDYLL NBC's Mark Potter landed what should have been an idyllic trip to Vieques, eight miles off Puerto Rico, for an In Depth report--except that public health officials find that islanders are dying from cancer at a 50% greater rate than their fellow Ricans. Residents are suing the USNavy, which operated a firing range on the eastern half of the island for 60 years, alleging that "bomb-related toxins" including arsenic, lead and mercury are killing them. They want the Pentagon to pay for their healthcare. Potter showed us distant explosions as bombs and debris continued to be cleared from the disused range, now "turned into a wildlife refuge."
Yet how bad a life can it really be at NBC News? Not only was Potter in Vieques but Wednesday Anne Thompson was in the rain forest of Costa Rica. Now Ian Williams reports for NBC's Greening the Earth in scuba gear from the Phi Phi Islands off Thailand. He showed us the bubbly underwater class photo of a team of marine biologists from the University of Missouri building a coral nursery to regrow reefs.
DOWNS AND UPS Both CBS and NBC covered the continuing travails of the housing market. NBC led off its newscast with Diana Olick, real estate correspondent for financial news cable channel CNBC. Olick covered the growing inventory of unsold homes. "Too much supply and too little demand," she worried, as the volume of new home sales fell in March to the lowest level in 16 years and fewer applications for mortgages were filed. This lack of buyers occurs despite the fact that homes are ever cheaper: the year-to-year 13% fall in prices is the steepest in 38 years, she calculated. The stock of unsold homes is also growing because of foreclosures. CBS had Ben Tracy cover that angle for its Hitting Home series. He followed the building code enforcement squad in one Sacramento neighborhood, policing vandalism and evicting squatters in vacant bank-owned housing. Blight is a growing problem in a third of all cities, Tracy told us.
House prices may be falling but food and fuel continue to get more expensive. NBC's Anne Thompson illustrated the global impact of higher costs for rice and grain and pasta by visiting the single neighborhood of Jackson Heights in the New York borough of Queens where all the world's major cuisines can be found cheek by jowl. On ABC, Bill Weir (embargoed link) showed us tortilla protests in Mexico and bread riots in Egypt to dramatize the decisions by Illinois farmers to switch from food production to corn for ethanol: "India's finance minister calls biofuels a crime against humanity" while the ethanol industry "blames soaring food prices on bad weather, a weak dollar and Chinese demand." ABC's Betsy Stark looked at the best-selling vehicle on America's roads, the Ford F-150 pick-up truck, to show how high oil prices have climbed: the price of a full tank of a truck's gasoline now exceeds $100. CBS' Nancy Cordes examined the pass along costs for airline travel. High aviation fuel prices have triggered eight separate fare hikes so far this year and a host of surcharges: extra leg room $35; book by telephone $25; check a second bag $25; change a ticket $150.
SEE CLEARLY NOW The Food & Drug Administration approved lasik eye surgery in 1995 and since then some 12m people have been able to throw away those silly little glasses at a cost of up to $5,000 for both eyes. Yet "there has been no comprehensive look at quality of life," after the procedure, ABC's Lisa Stark (embargoed link) told us. Both she and NBC's Robert Bazell covered the FDA's decision to launch such a study. Bazell warned that some patients need constant eye drops because of dryness. Stark used distorted video footage to dramatize other adverse risks: double vision, night blindness, star bursts and haloes.
TREAD LIGHTLY CBS continued its Energy Savers series inspired by Earth Day by giving free publicity to carbonfund.org, an online interactive calculator to tell us if we exceed the average American's annual footprint of 26K lbs of greenhouse gas emissions. Daniel Sieberg told us all we need is five pieces of information to find our footprint: kilowatt hours of electricity, volume burned of domestic heating oil or natural gas, miles driven in one's car; the car's average fuel efficiency; and the number of miles flown by jetliner. "Some changes are obvious" for making that footprint lighter, he stated: adjust that thermostat; switch lighting to fluorescent; wash clothes in cold water; walk around the neighborhood.
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: NASA published photographs of colliding galaxies to mark the 18th anniversary of the Hubble space telescope…Ford Motors posted unexpected profits in the first quarter of 2008…the air in Alaska is hazy from a combination of forest fires in Russia and sandstorms in the Gobi Desert…child welfare authorities in Texas suspect that some of the mothers at the Yearning for Zion ranch are lying about their age, being minors themselves not adults…Actor Wesley Snipes was sent to prison for failure to pay income taxes…Boston Red Sox memorabilia, buried in concrete to put a hex on the new Yankee Stadium, has been retrieved and sold at auction for charity.
