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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 25, 2008
The week ended on a light day of news when no single story was considered newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a reporter from each of the three networks. All three newscasts included some Campaign 2008 coverage with NBC selecting the upcoming Indiana primary as its lead. On the day that President George Bush announced the release of federal payments to households in his bid to inject fiscal stimulus, ABC and CBS both chose to kick off with the economy. ABC led with the state-by-state prospects of a recession and CBS' wheel-format coverage singlehandedly made oil prices qualify as the Story of the Day economy as the cost of a barrel of crude rose to $118.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 25, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
FEDERAL CHECK GOES TO PUMP GAS The week ended on a light day of news when no single story was considered newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a reporter from each of the three networks. All three newscasts included some Campaign 2008 coverage with NBC selecting the upcoming Indiana primary as its lead. On the day that President George Bush announced the release of federal payments to households in his bid to inject fiscal stimulus, ABC and CBS both chose to kick off with the economy. ABC led with the state-by-state prospects of a recession and CBS' wheel-format coverage singlehandedly made oil prices qualify as the Story of the Day economy as the cost of a barrel of crude rose to $118.
CBS anchor Katie Couric introduced a trio of correspondents to cover the high price of gasoline. Jeff Glor covered energy politics from the New Jersey Turnpike: George Bush wants households to use their federal payments to offset the high price of fuel; John McCain wants a summer vacation from federal gasoline taxes; Hillary Rodham Clinton believes the tax holiday "may be in order;" Barack Obama blames 30 years of federal inaction on fuel efficiency standards for the high cost of driving. Cynthia Bowers illustrated the ripple effects of the high price of diesel for trucks by describing the trade off at a Chicago food bank: an annual increase of $40,000 for fuel means 30 fewer tons of food to give away. From Los Angeles, Ben Tracy saw its carcentric population "considering a very radical idea--public transportation." Annual expenditure on gasoline for an average household has risen from $1,600 to $3,800 since 2001, he noted.
Besides oil, falling home prices and rising food prices have been the other two economic preoccupations in the news this spring. ABC's Bill Weir (embargoed link) covered a survey by the National Conference for State Legislatures. It found that nine states--in the west, the industrial north and Florida, which account for fully one third of the national economy--are in an economic recession, with housing being "the common factor in all their struggles…foreclosures in California, unsold developments in Nevada, sinking condo prices in Florida." Meanwhile states that produce food and fuel are still growing: Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska and Louisiana.
As the price of rice is rising, the UN's World Food Program has had to cut back on deliveries. CBS' Allen Pizzey traveled to Palwong, a Ugandan village where the civil war is "still simmering," to find a tin-roofed schoolhouse where WFP has had to eliminate breakfast, now serving only lunch. The food it can distribute is provided by freerice.com, the online vocabulary Website that doubles as food fundraiser. CBS' Daniel Sieberg and NBC's Kevin Tibbles have already publicized the site's developer in Indiana. Now Pizzey shows us the recipients: "The kids who learn words in freerice can no more imagine where their rice goes than those who receive it can understand where it comes from--two ways of learning, worlds apart, joined by lunch."
TAPPER PUNTS ON SIZE OF GOP BIG TENT Ron Allen led off NBC's newscast by handicapping the Democratic Presidential primary in Indiana. Citing opinion polls he called "the Hoosier State a jump ball" yet one that Hillary Rodham Clinton must win, according to her operatives. Just as Jeff Greenfield had done for CBS on Wednesday, Allen diagramed the state's demographics as "predominately white, with income and education levels similar to Pennsylvania and Ohio," which favors Rodham Clinton. Yet Indianapolis and Gary have "large black communities" and the state's "northwestern corner, bordering Illinois, watches Chicago TV," which favors Barack Obama.
When Obama started boasting of a childhood diet of "pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds," CBS' Jim Axelrod played interpreter. He deciphered Obama's strategy as reminding blue collar workers that "he was raised like them." On ABC, Jake Tapper narrowed that blue collar demographic somewhat, emphasizing just those members of the white working class who are alienated by Obama's "cool cerebral style." Tapper quoted from Pennsylvania exit polls that found that a small proportion of Rodham Clinton's white support may opt for John McCain over Obama in November. Some told pollsters that "race was an important factor" in their selection on primary day.
Tapper then repeated, without comment, a quote from Obama's campaign manager in National Journal: "The vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain's camp already." Is it proper, journalistically, for Tapper to let that quote hang there unexamined? In effect, the Obama campaign was asserting that white racists are a component of McCain's electoral coalition. Tapper should have offered McCain a comment in reply. Is his big tent really big enough to include white racists? Or does McCain prefer to disavow racist support? Or does he refute Obama's analysis, insisting that white racists are not firmly in the GOP camp but are up for grabs?
The need for Tapper to ask such follow-up questions was especially pressing because of the news McCain himself was making this week. Thursday NBC's Kelly O'Donnell filed from the candidate's tour of poverty-stricken regions in Appalachia and the Deep South. Now Tapper's colleague Ron Claiborne (embargoed link) covers McCain's Time for Action Tour. Claiborne followed him to places "where Republicans running for President are seldom seen" including Alabama's poor rural Black Belt where McCain called Selma's civil rights marchers "patriots, the best kind of patriots."
EYES HAVE IT The Food & Drug Administration held hearings into the safety of the lasik system, the elective laser eye surgery procedure that, when successful, allows people to dispose of their eyeglasses. Thursday ABC's Lisa Stark (embargoed link) and NBC's Robert Bazell previewed the hearings, warning of the potential problems of dry eyes, double vision, haloes, starbursts and nighttime visibility. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook waited until the actual hearings to file his report, pointing out that even though 95% of the procedures are successful, a 5% dissatisfaction rate, when 700,000 laser surgeries are performed each year, multiplies to "thousands of unhappy patients." NBC brought Bazell back a second day for an In Depth report: he mentioned the USArmy as a satisfied customer, calling lasik "terrific for helicopter pilots."
INVESTIGATION VINDICATED Monday, CBS' investigative reporter Armen Keteyian gave himself a deserved pat on the back when internal e-mails at the Veterans Administration vindicated his Exclusive of last November of an unacknowledged epidemic of suicide attempts by mentally ill former members of the military. Those e-mails surfaced as evidence in a federal lawsuit against the VA being filed in San Francisco. Now more vindication is on offer, Keteyian reports from the courtroom, as Michael Kussman, the VA's head of healthcare testified. Even though the VA's public position was that the CBS News' analysis was not accurate, its e-mails found "no flaw in the way they calculated their data" and found that "the methodology appears to be correct."
BRIDEGROOM KILLED WITH IMPUNITY "How could an unarmed innocent man die in a hail of 50 bullets and no one be found guilty of anything?" inquired ABC's John Berman (embargoed link) at a courthouse in Queens NY where a trio of undercover New York City detectives was acquitted of murdering Sean Bell in the fall of 2006. Bell, then aged 23, was killed as he was "leaving his bachelor party at a strip club the night before his wedding," Berman reminded us. CBS mentioned the verdict in passing while NBC assigned a reporter to the case. Mike Taibbi explained the acquittal on the ground that the cops "could reasonably have believed that someone in Bell's group had a gun" even though none did. Detective Marc Cooper apologized to the Bell family "for the tragedy." Taibbi pointed out that the detectives "still face civil suits, departmental hearings and possible federal civil rights charges."
WHEN SHARKS ATTACK Both CBS' Sandra Hughes and ABC's Miguel Marquez agreed that the great white shark attack that killed a 66-year-old triathlete as he trained in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego was a freakish rarity. They could not quite agree on how rare. The shark attacked the swimmer from below, as it would a seal, with a massive bite across both legs leaving Dave Martin to bleed to death. Hughes told us that it was 14 years since a great white had killed a Californian swimmer. Marquez found no fatalities since 1959.
NO GAY AMNESTY Only NBC filed from Baghdad on the upshot of the Sunni-Shiite reconciliation law that grants amnesty to prisoners. Ned Colt described the 24,000 inmates who are about to go free: "Some are criminals; others suspected insurgents; many swept up by security forces without evidence to charge them; more than 80% are Sunnis." Colt told us that some categories of inmates will stay locked up: corrupt official embezzlers, kidnappers, murderers, rapists and homosexuals. Those who are getting out most quickly are "politically connected militia members."
Can that be true? Are homosexuals really categorized with murderers and rapists? A follow up, please.
ROLLING ON FLOOR INEBRIATED For weekend fun, NBC's Mika Brzezinski hung out with instant messagers for some generational therapy. Acronyms and emoticons are creeping into the language, even formal writing assignments--so a primer is in order for those of us of a certain age. It was a little weird, though, for a bunch of nine-year-olds to share with Brzezinski that %-} means "drunk."
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 USNavy cargo ship feared it was being buzzed by Iranian speedboats in the Persian Gulf…Communist Party authorities in China may hold talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader…the federal farm bill will pay $280bn in subsidies to agribusiness and nutrition programs…CBS News pioneer Edward Murrow was born 100 years ago…all of the children taken from their fundamentalist Mormon parents at the Yearning for Zion ranch are now in foster care…the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica pier has been sold on eBay.com for $132.4K.
CBS anchor Katie Couric introduced a trio of correspondents to cover the high price of gasoline. Jeff Glor covered energy politics from the New Jersey Turnpike: George Bush wants households to use their federal payments to offset the high price of fuel; John McCain wants a summer vacation from federal gasoline taxes; Hillary Rodham Clinton believes the tax holiday "may be in order;" Barack Obama blames 30 years of federal inaction on fuel efficiency standards for the high cost of driving. Cynthia Bowers illustrated the ripple effects of the high price of diesel for trucks by describing the trade off at a Chicago food bank: an annual increase of $40,000 for fuel means 30 fewer tons of food to give away. From Los Angeles, Ben Tracy saw its carcentric population "considering a very radical idea--public transportation." Annual expenditure on gasoline for an average household has risen from $1,600 to $3,800 since 2001, he noted.
Besides oil, falling home prices and rising food prices have been the other two economic preoccupations in the news this spring. ABC's Bill Weir (embargoed link) covered a survey by the National Conference for State Legislatures. It found that nine states--in the west, the industrial north and Florida, which account for fully one third of the national economy--are in an economic recession, with housing being "the common factor in all their struggles…foreclosures in California, unsold developments in Nevada, sinking condo prices in Florida." Meanwhile states that produce food and fuel are still growing: Texas, North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska and Louisiana.
As the price of rice is rising, the UN's World Food Program has had to cut back on deliveries. CBS' Allen Pizzey traveled to Palwong, a Ugandan village where the civil war is "still simmering," to find a tin-roofed schoolhouse where WFP has had to eliminate breakfast, now serving only lunch. The food it can distribute is provided by freerice.com, the online vocabulary Website that doubles as food fundraiser. CBS' Daniel Sieberg and NBC's Kevin Tibbles have already publicized the site's developer in Indiana. Now Pizzey shows us the recipients: "The kids who learn words in freerice can no more imagine where their rice goes than those who receive it can understand where it comes from--two ways of learning, worlds apart, joined by lunch."
TAPPER PUNTS ON SIZE OF GOP BIG TENT Ron Allen led off NBC's newscast by handicapping the Democratic Presidential primary in Indiana. Citing opinion polls he called "the Hoosier State a jump ball" yet one that Hillary Rodham Clinton must win, according to her operatives. Just as Jeff Greenfield had done for CBS on Wednesday, Allen diagramed the state's demographics as "predominately white, with income and education levels similar to Pennsylvania and Ohio," which favors Rodham Clinton. Yet Indianapolis and Gary have "large black communities" and the state's "northwestern corner, bordering Illinois, watches Chicago TV," which favors Barack Obama.
When Obama started boasting of a childhood diet of "pot roasts and potatoes and Jell-O molds," CBS' Jim Axelrod played interpreter. He deciphered Obama's strategy as reminding blue collar workers that "he was raised like them." On ABC, Jake Tapper narrowed that blue collar demographic somewhat, emphasizing just those members of the white working class who are alienated by Obama's "cool cerebral style." Tapper quoted from Pennsylvania exit polls that found that a small proportion of Rodham Clinton's white support may opt for John McCain over Obama in November. Some told pollsters that "race was an important factor" in their selection on primary day.
Tapper then repeated, without comment, a quote from Obama's campaign manager in National Journal: "The vast, vast majority of voters who would not vote for Barack Obama in November based on race are probably firmly in John McCain's camp already." Is it proper, journalistically, for Tapper to let that quote hang there unexamined? In effect, the Obama campaign was asserting that white racists are a component of McCain's electoral coalition. Tapper should have offered McCain a comment in reply. Is his big tent really big enough to include white racists? Or does McCain prefer to disavow racist support? Or does he refute Obama's analysis, insisting that white racists are not firmly in the GOP camp but are up for grabs?
The need for Tapper to ask such follow-up questions was especially pressing because of the news McCain himself was making this week. Thursday NBC's Kelly O'Donnell filed from the candidate's tour of poverty-stricken regions in Appalachia and the Deep South. Now Tapper's colleague Ron Claiborne (embargoed link) covers McCain's Time for Action Tour. Claiborne followed him to places "where Republicans running for President are seldom seen" including Alabama's poor rural Black Belt where McCain called Selma's civil rights marchers "patriots, the best kind of patriots."
EYES HAVE IT The Food & Drug Administration held hearings into the safety of the lasik system, the elective laser eye surgery procedure that, when successful, allows people to dispose of their eyeglasses. Thursday ABC's Lisa Stark (embargoed link) and NBC's Robert Bazell previewed the hearings, warning of the potential problems of dry eyes, double vision, haloes, starbursts and nighttime visibility. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook waited until the actual hearings to file his report, pointing out that even though 95% of the procedures are successful, a 5% dissatisfaction rate, when 700,000 laser surgeries are performed each year, multiplies to "thousands of unhappy patients." NBC brought Bazell back a second day for an In Depth report: he mentioned the USArmy as a satisfied customer, calling lasik "terrific for helicopter pilots."
INVESTIGATION VINDICATED Monday, CBS' investigative reporter Armen Keteyian gave himself a deserved pat on the back when internal e-mails at the Veterans Administration vindicated his Exclusive of last November of an unacknowledged epidemic of suicide attempts by mentally ill former members of the military. Those e-mails surfaced as evidence in a federal lawsuit against the VA being filed in San Francisco. Now more vindication is on offer, Keteyian reports from the courtroom, as Michael Kussman, the VA's head of healthcare testified. Even though the VA's public position was that the CBS News' analysis was not accurate, its e-mails found "no flaw in the way they calculated their data" and found that "the methodology appears to be correct."
BRIDEGROOM KILLED WITH IMPUNITY "How could an unarmed innocent man die in a hail of 50 bullets and no one be found guilty of anything?" inquired ABC's John Berman (embargoed link) at a courthouse in Queens NY where a trio of undercover New York City detectives was acquitted of murdering Sean Bell in the fall of 2006. Bell, then aged 23, was killed as he was "leaving his bachelor party at a strip club the night before his wedding," Berman reminded us. CBS mentioned the verdict in passing while NBC assigned a reporter to the case. Mike Taibbi explained the acquittal on the ground that the cops "could reasonably have believed that someone in Bell's group had a gun" even though none did. Detective Marc Cooper apologized to the Bell family "for the tragedy." Taibbi pointed out that the detectives "still face civil suits, departmental hearings and possible federal civil rights charges."
WHEN SHARKS ATTACK Both CBS' Sandra Hughes and ABC's Miguel Marquez agreed that the great white shark attack that killed a 66-year-old triathlete as he trained in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego was a freakish rarity. They could not quite agree on how rare. The shark attacked the swimmer from below, as it would a seal, with a massive bite across both legs leaving Dave Martin to bleed to death. Hughes told us that it was 14 years since a great white had killed a Californian swimmer. Marquez found no fatalities since 1959.
NO GAY AMNESTY Only NBC filed from Baghdad on the upshot of the Sunni-Shiite reconciliation law that grants amnesty to prisoners. Ned Colt described the 24,000 inmates who are about to go free: "Some are criminals; others suspected insurgents; many swept up by security forces without evidence to charge them; more than 80% are Sunnis." Colt told us that some categories of inmates will stay locked up: corrupt official embezzlers, kidnappers, murderers, rapists and homosexuals. Those who are getting out most quickly are "politically connected militia members."
Can that be true? Are homosexuals really categorized with murderers and rapists? A follow up, please.
ROLLING ON FLOOR INEBRIATED For weekend fun, NBC's Mika Brzezinski hung out with instant messagers for some generational therapy. Acronyms and emoticons are creeping into the language, even formal writing assignments--so a primer is in order for those of us of a certain age. It was a little weird, though, for a bunch of nine-year-olds to share with Brzezinski that %-} means "drunk."
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 USNavy cargo ship feared it was being buzzed by Iranian speedboats in the Persian Gulf…Communist Party authorities in China may hold talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader…the federal farm bill will pay $280bn in subsidies to agribusiness and nutrition programs…CBS News pioneer Edward Murrow was born 100 years ago…all of the children taken from their fundamentalist Mormon parents at the Yearning for Zion ranch are now in foster care…the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica pier has been sold on eBay.com for $132.4K.
