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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 15, 2008
For the fourth straight day this week the earthquake in China's southwestern Sichuan Province was Story of the Day. Official statistics put the known death toll at 20,000 with another estimated 40,000 trapped or missing and feared dead. Yet none of the three network newscasts made the disaster its lead. CBS and ABC both chose the ruling by the Supreme Court of California striking down that state's ban on same-sex marriages. In 30 days gay and lesbian couples in the Golden State will be able to start tying the knot. On NBC, with Brian Williams anchoring from Atlanta, that rare event happened in George Bush's lame duck year: the President set the news agenda. During his state visit to Israel in a speech to the Knesset, the President exemplified Godwin's Law, seeming to equate diplomatic outreach to Iran with appeasement of Nazi Germany.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 15, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
GODWIN’S LAW AT THE KNESSET For the fourth straight day this week the earthquake in China's southwestern Sichuan Province was Story of the Day. Official statistics put the known death toll at 20,000 with another estimated 40,000 trapped or missing and feared dead. Yet none of the three network newscasts made the disaster its lead. CBS and ABC both chose the ruling by the Supreme Court of California striking down that state's ban on same-sex marriages. In 30 days gay and lesbian couples in the Golden State will be able to start tying the knot. On NBC, with Brian Williams anchoring from Atlanta, that rare event happened in George Bush's lame duck year: the President set the news agenda. During his state visit to Israel in a speech to the Knesset, the President exemplified Godwin's Law, seeming to equate diplomatic outreach to Iran with appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Of the traveling White House press corps, John Yang of NBC was the only network correspondent to file from Jerusalem. Bush warned of the "false comfort of appeasement" in order to criticize contemporary politicians who "believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals." Yang noted that the President "did not name any names" and his aides insisted that the speech "was not political. It was just stating longstanding policy." They told Yang that Bush's criticism applied to former President Jimmy Carter. If Bush was referring to Hamas, the Palestinian government of the Gaza Strip, when he mentioned "terrorists," Yang noted that his own former Secretary of State Colin Powell is on the record as contradicting him: "Hamas has to be engaged, I do not think you can cast them into outer darkness." If Bush was referring to the Islamic Republic of Iran when he mentioned "radicals," Yang offered his own current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' suggestion that "unofficial contacts with Iran would be a good thing."
Carter, Powell and Gates aside, Yang noted that "privately" the President's aides intimated "the shoe fits the Democratic frontrunner." Sure enough, both CBS and ABC covered the controversy as a campaign story not a diplomatic one--even though CBS' Chip Reid repeated a flat out denial from the White House that the President was referring to Barack Obama. On ABC, David Wright (no link) saw equivocation--White House officials denied the President was taking a swipe "solely" at Obama--and used a soundbite of Bush criticizing "an American senator" for "foolish delusion." No matter that the President did not name that senator--William Borah, a 1939 Republican from Idaho--he did use his quote referring to the invasion of Poland: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided."
As for Obama, ABC's Wright repeated the candidate's assertion that he has "never supported engagement with terrorists." CBS' Reid reminded us that his proposal has been to conduct diplomacy with leaders of states instead--Iran, Syria, Cuba--quoting Republican John McCain as making that same distinction, referring to Iran as a "state sponsor" of terrorism. McCain dismissed such diplomacy as evincing "naivete and inexperience" but did not join the President in a Godwin moment by equating it with appeasement of the Third Reich. "The focus on Obama yet again overshadowed his own campaign," observed Reid. McCain made a speech envisaging the world in 2013 at the end of his imaginary first term. So long a critic of timetables for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, McCain offered a timeline that five years from now the United States will already have "welcomed home most of the servicemen and women…the Iraq War has been won."
NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, too, picked up on McCain's five-year plan for troops to come home from Iraq. She explained McCain's distinction: his opponents' timeline for military disengagement amounts to "surrender;" his would follow the achievement of "victory." O'Donnell noted that in McCain's entire "sweeping set of goals for a first term" he never once uttered the word "Republican." Following Democratic victories in special elections in House districts in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi, McCain's unidentified operatives openly described George Bush's brand of Republicanism as "broken," O'Donnell observed.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ "Second class citizens." That was the key phrase ABC's Brian Rooney isolated from the ruling by the Supreme Court of California that struck down the ban on marriages by gay couples. Rooney retraced the history of wedding ceremonies performed at City Hall in San Francisco in 2004 followed by their annulment and a statewide referendum that insisted that all marriages be heterosexual: "It is that law that was overturned today." On NBC, Pete Williams pointed out that California allowed gay couples to register as domestic partners with "the same legal rights as marriage" so it was not a lack of rights but the separate designation that perpetuated "the premise that gay individuals…can be treated less favorably."
The court's decision invoked California's constitution so it can only be overturned by a constitutional amendment. Such an initiative will be on the ballot in November, CBS' John Blackstone predicted, but in the meantime "a rush of gay weddings is expected" that will be "unquestionably legal." Blackstone asked CBS' in-house legal analyst Andrew Cohen to imagine what might happen if the constitutional amendment were to pass: "As a practical matter," Cohen reflected, "undoing those marriages is a headache." Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor, urged defeat of the amendment.
So now same-sex marriage is protected by the constitutions of Massachusetts and California and prohibited by the constitutions of 26 states. Both ABC's George Stephanopoulos and CBS' Jeff Greenfield reminded us that ballot initiatives energized voter turnout among conservatives in the 2004 election. Greenfield reminded us that 13 states voted back then and the issue "might have made the difference in getting Ohio and therefore the White House" to George Bush. Stephanopoulos agreed, calling it a "game-changing issue" four years ago but not now since "so many states have already banned gay marriage." Besides California, CBS' Greenfield suggested the issue may be active in Florida and Arizona while NBC's Williams added Connecticut and Iowa.
SINGLE CHILD IN SHODDY SCHOOL Earthquake coverage from China's Sichuan Province saw CBS' Celia Hatton in the city of Mianyang; ABC's Neal Karlinsky split his time between Wudu and Hanwang; NBC's Ian Williams was in Hanwang. Karlinsky called Hanwang "a bustling metropolis of misery" while Williams checked apartments, offices, a hospital "all collapsed." Williams showed us "numbed parents" sit in silence on a bank across a small creek as bodies were extracted from the rubble of a school. He noted that China's one child policy was "intensifying the pain;" Hatton called it "a tragedy magnified."
Mark Mullen, NBC's man in Beijing, saw the news media operating "like never before. China is broadcasting reality TV, 24/7 coverage of the devastation, the bloody injured, the homeless and the profound grief." He contrasted it with the downplaying of previous crisis, such as the secrecy that surrounded a 1976 earthquake that killed 240,000 or the denial about the epidemic of SARS in 2004 or the recent censorship of independence protests in Tibet. He even heard "straight talk from Premier Wen Jinbao." The angle CBS' Hatton picked up on was the school collapses: "The Chinese people are pushing their own state media to investigate why so many schools were badly constructed."
SICKENING INACTION Only ABC, of the three nightly newscasts, has continued to devote assign correspondents to the cyclone relief crisis in the Irrawaddy Delta. Wednesday, Joohee Cho made a clandestine trip to the refugee center of Labutta. Now Penatgon correspondent Jonathan Karl asks Adm Timothy Keating, head of the Pacific Command, why four USNavy ships stationed 50 miles offshore cannot deliver aid. Keating described his offer to Myanmar's military junta, which is wary of invasion and occupation. "I did my personal and professional best to assure them that we will leave no fingerprints and as soon as our work is done we will leave." Karl's unnamed sources in the US military were less polite, describing the junta's inaction as "sickening." Publicly, Keating predicted imminent permission to deliver airborne relief from cargo nets sling-loaded under helicopters.
SEAL SHORTAGE ABC did not have a reporter join NBC's Anne Thompson and CBS' Daniel Sieberg in covering Wednesday's decision by the Interior Department to designate Alaska's polar bears as a threatened species. Clarissa Ward now compensates with A Closer Look at the entire Arctic Ocean ecosystem from the breathtaking scenery of Svalbard on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. "Receding glaciers and sea ice have devastating consequences for the wildlife." Polar bears are in trouble, sometimes resorting to cannibalism, because of the shortage of seals to eat. She showed us just a handful in the island's King's Bay "where a few years ago there would have been hundreds."
CSI ROBOTS A routine background feature on a federal crimefighting bill--the so-called Debbie Smith Act after a woman whose rapist went unidentified for six years because of delays in forensic analysis of DNA--had that extra something for CBS because it could function as crosspromotion for its primetime CSI entertainment series. "DNA is not a magic bullet as it is portrayed on television," Bob Orr asserted, accomplishing the tie-in even as he disavowed it. Absent federal funding, forensic crime labs have a backlog of 300,000 untested evidence samples, Orr explained. The FBI is "now working overtime to clear its own two year inventory" by switching to automated technology. Hand analysis by technicians worked through 400 samples each month; now in the same timeframe the feds' new robots will process 30,000.
CRIMINALIZING TEENAGE HEARTLESSNESS When a 16-year-old boy writes a Dear Jane e-mail to a 13-year-old girl--"The world would be a better place without you"--the sentiment is undeniably heartless, but can it be called criminal? Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles certainly think so, even though the teenage heartbreak occurred in suburban St Louis. They brought a felony indictment against the alleged author of the cruel note because it was sent on myspace.com, the social networking site whose headquarters is in their city. The charge is "using a computer to inflict emotional distress," ABC's Deborah Roberts (no link) told us. CBS' Sandra Hughes characterized it as creating a "fictitious" account and using it "to harass, humiliate and embarrass." CBS' Hughes explained that Josh Evans, the 16-year-old boy, was allegedly a pseudonym for Lori Drew, the 49-year-old mother of the girl's classmate. Megan Meier, the girl who received the hoax rejection letter, hanged herself. Drew is the one at risk of incarceration. "It was the kind of justice that Tina Meier…has been praying for," stated ABC's Roberts about Megan's mother.
Teenage distress and humiliation are indeed horrible…and impersonating the heartless boyfriend of one's daughter's classmate certainly sounds perverse--but there seem no grounds for making a federal case out of it.
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: Toyota's hybrid Prius model has logged more than one million sales worldwide…NBC anchor Brian Williams, in Atlanta to pay tribute to recipients of the Medal of Honor, updated us on tornado damage to its downtown business district…a photograph of a signing ceremony dramatized the disability suffered by David Paterson, the blind governor of New York State.
Of the traveling White House press corps, John Yang of NBC was the only network correspondent to file from Jerusalem. Bush warned of the "false comfort of appeasement" in order to criticize contemporary politicians who "believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals." Yang noted that the President "did not name any names" and his aides insisted that the speech "was not political. It was just stating longstanding policy." They told Yang that Bush's criticism applied to former President Jimmy Carter. If Bush was referring to Hamas, the Palestinian government of the Gaza Strip, when he mentioned "terrorists," Yang noted that his own former Secretary of State Colin Powell is on the record as contradicting him: "Hamas has to be engaged, I do not think you can cast them into outer darkness." If Bush was referring to the Islamic Republic of Iran when he mentioned "radicals," Yang offered his own current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' suggestion that "unofficial contacts with Iran would be a good thing."
Carter, Powell and Gates aside, Yang noted that "privately" the President's aides intimated "the shoe fits the Democratic frontrunner." Sure enough, both CBS and ABC covered the controversy as a campaign story not a diplomatic one--even though CBS' Chip Reid repeated a flat out denial from the White House that the President was referring to Barack Obama. On ABC, David Wright (no link) saw equivocation--White House officials denied the President was taking a swipe "solely" at Obama--and used a soundbite of Bush criticizing "an American senator" for "foolish delusion." No matter that the President did not name that senator--William Borah, a 1939 Republican from Idaho--he did use his quote referring to the invasion of Poland: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided."
As for Obama, ABC's Wright repeated the candidate's assertion that he has "never supported engagement with terrorists." CBS' Reid reminded us that his proposal has been to conduct diplomacy with leaders of states instead--Iran, Syria, Cuba--quoting Republican John McCain as making that same distinction, referring to Iran as a "state sponsor" of terrorism. McCain dismissed such diplomacy as evincing "naivete and inexperience" but did not join the President in a Godwin moment by equating it with appeasement of the Third Reich. "The focus on Obama yet again overshadowed his own campaign," observed Reid. McCain made a speech envisaging the world in 2013 at the end of his imaginary first term. So long a critic of timetables for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, McCain offered a timeline that five years from now the United States will already have "welcomed home most of the servicemen and women…the Iraq War has been won."
NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, too, picked up on McCain's five-year plan for troops to come home from Iraq. She explained McCain's distinction: his opponents' timeline for military disengagement amounts to "surrender;" his would follow the achievement of "victory." O'Donnell noted that in McCain's entire "sweeping set of goals for a first term" he never once uttered the word "Republican." Following Democratic victories in special elections in House districts in Illinois, Louisiana and Mississippi, McCain's unidentified operatives openly described George Bush's brand of Republicanism as "broken," O'Donnell observed.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ "Second class citizens." That was the key phrase ABC's Brian Rooney isolated from the ruling by the Supreme Court of California that struck down the ban on marriages by gay couples. Rooney retraced the history of wedding ceremonies performed at City Hall in San Francisco in 2004 followed by their annulment and a statewide referendum that insisted that all marriages be heterosexual: "It is that law that was overturned today." On NBC, Pete Williams pointed out that California allowed gay couples to register as domestic partners with "the same legal rights as marriage" so it was not a lack of rights but the separate designation that perpetuated "the premise that gay individuals…can be treated less favorably."
The court's decision invoked California's constitution so it can only be overturned by a constitutional amendment. Such an initiative will be on the ballot in November, CBS' John Blackstone predicted, but in the meantime "a rush of gay weddings is expected" that will be "unquestionably legal." Blackstone asked CBS' in-house legal analyst Andrew Cohen to imagine what might happen if the constitutional amendment were to pass: "As a practical matter," Cohen reflected, "undoing those marriages is a headache." Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor, urged defeat of the amendment.
So now same-sex marriage is protected by the constitutions of Massachusetts and California and prohibited by the constitutions of 26 states. Both ABC's George Stephanopoulos and CBS' Jeff Greenfield reminded us that ballot initiatives energized voter turnout among conservatives in the 2004 election. Greenfield reminded us that 13 states voted back then and the issue "might have made the difference in getting Ohio and therefore the White House" to George Bush. Stephanopoulos agreed, calling it a "game-changing issue" four years ago but not now since "so many states have already banned gay marriage." Besides California, CBS' Greenfield suggested the issue may be active in Florida and Arizona while NBC's Williams added Connecticut and Iowa.
SINGLE CHILD IN SHODDY SCHOOL Earthquake coverage from China's Sichuan Province saw CBS' Celia Hatton in the city of Mianyang; ABC's Neal Karlinsky split his time between Wudu and Hanwang; NBC's Ian Williams was in Hanwang. Karlinsky called Hanwang "a bustling metropolis of misery" while Williams checked apartments, offices, a hospital "all collapsed." Williams showed us "numbed parents" sit in silence on a bank across a small creek as bodies were extracted from the rubble of a school. He noted that China's one child policy was "intensifying the pain;" Hatton called it "a tragedy magnified."
Mark Mullen, NBC's man in Beijing, saw the news media operating "like never before. China is broadcasting reality TV, 24/7 coverage of the devastation, the bloody injured, the homeless and the profound grief." He contrasted it with the downplaying of previous crisis, such as the secrecy that surrounded a 1976 earthquake that killed 240,000 or the denial about the epidemic of SARS in 2004 or the recent censorship of independence protests in Tibet. He even heard "straight talk from Premier Wen Jinbao." The angle CBS' Hatton picked up on was the school collapses: "The Chinese people are pushing their own state media to investigate why so many schools were badly constructed."
SICKENING INACTION Only ABC, of the three nightly newscasts, has continued to devote assign correspondents to the cyclone relief crisis in the Irrawaddy Delta. Wednesday, Joohee Cho made a clandestine trip to the refugee center of Labutta. Now Penatgon correspondent Jonathan Karl asks Adm Timothy Keating, head of the Pacific Command, why four USNavy ships stationed 50 miles offshore cannot deliver aid. Keating described his offer to Myanmar's military junta, which is wary of invasion and occupation. "I did my personal and professional best to assure them that we will leave no fingerprints and as soon as our work is done we will leave." Karl's unnamed sources in the US military were less polite, describing the junta's inaction as "sickening." Publicly, Keating predicted imminent permission to deliver airborne relief from cargo nets sling-loaded under helicopters.
SEAL SHORTAGE ABC did not have a reporter join NBC's Anne Thompson and CBS' Daniel Sieberg in covering Wednesday's decision by the Interior Department to designate Alaska's polar bears as a threatened species. Clarissa Ward now compensates with A Closer Look at the entire Arctic Ocean ecosystem from the breathtaking scenery of Svalbard on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. "Receding glaciers and sea ice have devastating consequences for the wildlife." Polar bears are in trouble, sometimes resorting to cannibalism, because of the shortage of seals to eat. She showed us just a handful in the island's King's Bay "where a few years ago there would have been hundreds."
CSI ROBOTS A routine background feature on a federal crimefighting bill--the so-called Debbie Smith Act after a woman whose rapist went unidentified for six years because of delays in forensic analysis of DNA--had that extra something for CBS because it could function as crosspromotion for its primetime CSI entertainment series. "DNA is not a magic bullet as it is portrayed on television," Bob Orr asserted, accomplishing the tie-in even as he disavowed it. Absent federal funding, forensic crime labs have a backlog of 300,000 untested evidence samples, Orr explained. The FBI is "now working overtime to clear its own two year inventory" by switching to automated technology. Hand analysis by technicians worked through 400 samples each month; now in the same timeframe the feds' new robots will process 30,000.
CRIMINALIZING TEENAGE HEARTLESSNESS When a 16-year-old boy writes a Dear Jane e-mail to a 13-year-old girl--"The world would be a better place without you"--the sentiment is undeniably heartless, but can it be called criminal? Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles certainly think so, even though the teenage heartbreak occurred in suburban St Louis. They brought a felony indictment against the alleged author of the cruel note because it was sent on myspace.com, the social networking site whose headquarters is in their city. The charge is "using a computer to inflict emotional distress," ABC's Deborah Roberts (no link) told us. CBS' Sandra Hughes characterized it as creating a "fictitious" account and using it "to harass, humiliate and embarrass." CBS' Hughes explained that Josh Evans, the 16-year-old boy, was allegedly a pseudonym for Lori Drew, the 49-year-old mother of the girl's classmate. Megan Meier, the girl who received the hoax rejection letter, hanged herself. Drew is the one at risk of incarceration. "It was the kind of justice that Tina Meier…has been praying for," stated ABC's Roberts about Megan's mother.
Teenage distress and humiliation are indeed horrible…and impersonating the heartless boyfriend of one's daughter's classmate certainly sounds perverse--but there seem no grounds for making a federal case out of it.
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: Toyota's hybrid Prius model has logged more than one million sales worldwide…NBC anchor Brian Williams, in Atlanta to pay tribute to recipients of the Medal of Honor, updated us on tornado damage to its downtown business district…a photograph of a signing ceremony dramatized the disability suffered by David Paterson, the blind governor of New York State.
