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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 2, 2008
Smoking cigarettes is harmful to one's health. That truth was illuminated by the Story of the Day. Research published in Nature has isolated a series of genes that are responsible for potentially deadly proteins in the lungs. Those proteins do two things: they are more powerful receptors for nicotine, making it harder for an addicted smoker to quit; and they foster the growth of tumors, making that smoker even more cancer-prone. No one knows yet what proportion of smokers possesses these dangerous genes. Both CBS and NBC led with the research. ABC, the network whose longtime anchor Peter Jennings died of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, did not even mention the research. It led with airline safety instead.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 2, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
NICOTINE GENES ISOLATED Smoking cigarettes is harmful to one's health. That truth was illuminated by the Story of the Day. Research published in Nature has isolated a series of genes that are responsible for potentially deadly proteins in the lungs. Those proteins do two things: they are more powerful receptors for nicotine, making it harder for an addicted smoker to quit; and they foster the growth of tumors, making that smoker even more cancer-prone. No one knows yet what proportion of smokers possesses these dangerous genes. Both CBS and NBC led with the research. ABC, the network whose longtime anchor Peter Jennings died of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, did not even mention the research. It led with airline safety instead.
CBS' Emily Senay calculated that smokers with the nicotine-receptor genes have a 25% chance of contracting lung cancer, compared with a 16% chance for all other smokers. "Many people think if they do not have the gene they can smoke riskfree," Senay suggested. "Of course that is not true." The tar in cigarettes is a carcinogen, she pointed out--without even mentioning the danger cigarettes pose to one's heart. NBC's Robert Bazell came up with a pair of possible benefits from the genetic research: it may help select those who would be most helped by early CT scan screening for lesions; and it may help understand the genetic mechanism for absorbing nicotine in the lungs--and therefore the development of nicotine blocking medicines to assist would-be quitters.
Many of those CT scans are performed by machines manufactured by Bazell's corporate boss, General Electric, but unlike last time (text link) that lung cancer screening came up, Bazell did not go into those details on this occasion.
EUROPE’S AFGHAN WAR On the foreign policy front, only NBC sent a reporter to cover President George Bush's recruitment speech to his NATO allies in Bucharest. John Yang called it "a stern message" urging European powers to dispatch reinforcements to Afghanistan. Yang told us that NATO has been in charge of the counterinsurgency since 2003 with a current force of 47,000, of which 19,000 come from the United States, the balance mostly from Great Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy--and "some cannot go where the fighting is heaviest; some cannot leave secure bases. They focus on humanitarian efforts that, Europeans say, are just as important as fighting." The United States has a further 12,000 troops in Afghanistan not part of NATO's counterinsurgency. They are "independently hunting al-Qaeda."
WHO INSPECTS THE INSPECTORS? ABC's lead by Lisa Stark was a preview of House committee hearings into the Federal Aviation Administration. It is an investigation that broke last month with the revelation that FAA inspectors turned a blind eye to lax routine maintenance inspections of the Being 737 fleet at Southwest Airlines. Since then American, Delta and now United have had to play catch-up with scheduling-disrupting checks of MD-80s and 777s. Stark told us that whistleblower inspectors will testify to Congress that their FAA supervisors have been "too cozy with the airlines" putting pressure on them to "downplay problems, soften reports, drop enforcement actions." For its part, the FAA admitted to Stark that "inspectors did fall down on the job in the case of Southwest Airlines" but that a "spot audit found high compliance with safety directives."
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT The Senate saw a couple of developments on the economy. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board testified before a Senate committee--and said the R-word. "It is a rare day when you hear a Fed Chairman utter the word 'recession'" remarked CNBC's Trish Regan for NBC, although admittedly the actual phrase was: "A recession is possible." Bernanke also called "the housing crisis the most serious problem facing the American economy," noted ABC's Betsy Stark (embargoed link), "and he told lawmakers it was up to them to do something about it."
Accordingly, both ABC's Stark and Wyatt Andrews on CBS covered a $15bn Senate package of proposals to cushion the shock for the 5m-or-so defaulting homeowners who face eviction in the near future. CBS' Andrews called the package "damage control--because both parties in Congress are taking heat over their inaction…while losses at Bear Stearns, $29bn worth, were being absorbed by the Fed." The plan would extend $4bn to municipalities to help resell homes or turn them into rentals; and offer $11bn either to help refinance existing mortgages or to give a $7,000 subsidy to those who buy foreclosed homes to live in. Andrews called it a "drastic reduction from what Democrats first proposed" and Stark noted that a provision allowing bankruptcy judges to force subprime lenders to give money back had been rejected: "The banking industry has opposed the idea."
RECOUNT PLEASE For part two of CBS' Life and Debt in America, Anthony Mason snared a trip to Kuwait City where he sat down with Bader al-Saad, the head of the emirate's investment fund who "has never spoken to American television before." The Kuwait Investment Authority is "flush with cash from Kuwait's oil profits." Mason put assets at around $215bn. "When Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were hemorrhaging money because of the subprime crisis they needed quick cash" and al-Saad ponied up a combined $5bn.
Most of Kuwait's assets are in Treasury bonds, with the United States $1.7tr in the hole to just six Persian Gulf states: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Dubai and abu-Dhabi. Yet Mason's math is confusing. He says that foreign investors hold 44% of US public debt, stating the total of foreign-held Treasury assets at $2.2tr. Yet Tuesday he told us that the United States' National Debt amounts to $9.3tr. You do the sums: subtract $2.2tr from 44% of $9.3tr and you still have $1.9tr to play with.
STUDY THAT FRUIT FLY Next to Anthony Mason's mindboggling amounts on CBS, the celebration of the annual Pig Book on ABC seemed trivial. The book is the annual summary of earmarked Congressional spending from the anti-porkbarrel activist group Citizens Against Government Waste. Jake Tapper leafed through its 11,610 member's pet projects costing $17.2bn. He checked off wine research, wild turkey lovers, lobster study, character-building golf and Parisian fruit flies. When a Senate motion for a year's moratorium on earmarks was defeated, House members "overloaded the House Appropriations Committee Website with their requests, causing the Website to seize up." As a result this year's pork costs 30% more than last year's.
By the way Hillary Rodham Clinton earmarked $300m in spending, Barack Obama $100m, John McCain $0m.
NOT DISCUSSED ABC's Ron Claiborne and NBC's Kelly O'Donnell filed on John McCain's autobiographical nostalgia tour Tuesday. Now Chip Reid catches up for CBS. The Republican Presidential candidate arrived at the United States Naval Academy and yet more tales of his youthful follies surfaced. As a midshipman "he was known more for insubordination than heroism," Reid recounted. McCain "graduated near the very bottom of his class; some were surprised he graduated at all." That reputation for heroism, of course, was earned later at the Hanoi Hilton, the nickname for the camp when McCain was imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War. NBC's O'Donnell continued her network's Family Ties series on the candidates' kin. She sat down with Roberta Wright McCain, the 71-year-old candidate's 96-year-old mother: "We did not discuss his captivity at all. It never did come up." "Had you later? Did you ever talk about it?" "Never--and it is too late now."
NEGATIVES & NOSES NBC's Lee Cowan offered a Pennsylvania primary progress report as Democratic candidate Barack Obama completed his six-day bus tour with a live MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball. Both Cowan and ABC's George Stephanopoulos played an update of Hillary Rodham Clinton's 3am telephone call ad. This time the ad's call concerns home foreclosures not a foreign policy emergency. It goes unanswered because McCain, who opposes federal intervention would "let the phone keep ringing." Stephanopoulos explained why the ad targets McCain not Obama: "Superdelegates are going to lose patience" if Rodham Clinton stays in the race and attacks Obama. She would be "going too negative. By going after John McCain she avoids that."
On CBS, anchor Katie Couric offered one more follow-up on the coup by her network's Sharyl Attkisson, who exposed Rodham Clinton's sniper fire fib with news videotape from Bosnia last week. "These days every single thing they say is analyzed and dissected so when stories fall apart you cannot help but wonder: 'Why do they do that?'" Couric drew a comparison with Campaign 2000, dubbed Dumbo vs Pinocchio by author Roger Simon. In that contest it was Al Gore who was tagged as misleading, while George Bush was seen as simply making mistakes. In this year's contest, Couric theorized, Rodham Clinton is the one who risks the phony, untrustworthy label whereas Obama's Achilles Heel is not his honesty but his experience.
CALLING ALL ADVENTISTS Debunking research from the University of Pennsylvania proved irresistible to CBS' Nancy Cordes and ABC's Ned Potter (embargoed link). "In fairness, your mom was not wrong but there is no proof that she was right either," Potter pointed out. If one drinks eight glasses of water a day, does it fill the stomach to aid dieting? "No conclusive studies." Flush toxins from ones kidneys? "No conclusive studies." Improve skin tone? "No conclusive studies." CBS' Cordes could not resist: the study "throws cold water" on long-held beliefs…that "just do not hold water"…"the findings may be hard to swallow"…cherished beliefs "could be all wet."
"Where did the idea of eight glasses a day even come from?" Cordes wondered. "Nobody really knows." Tyndall Report's understanding is that this is a pro-abstinence teaching of the Seventh Day Adventist Church on the theory that a quenched thirst would not be tempted by the demon booze. Are there any Adventists out there in our readership? Is all that water really your idea?
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: the Pentagon declassified a 2003 memorandum on interrogation that offered such a narrow definition of torture that several questionable harsh techniques became sanctioned…the opposition to President Robert Mugabe may have won control of parliament in Zimbabwe's protracted election.
CBS' Emily Senay calculated that smokers with the nicotine-receptor genes have a 25% chance of contracting lung cancer, compared with a 16% chance for all other smokers. "Many people think if they do not have the gene they can smoke riskfree," Senay suggested. "Of course that is not true." The tar in cigarettes is a carcinogen, she pointed out--without even mentioning the danger cigarettes pose to one's heart. NBC's Robert Bazell came up with a pair of possible benefits from the genetic research: it may help select those who would be most helped by early CT scan screening for lesions; and it may help understand the genetic mechanism for absorbing nicotine in the lungs--and therefore the development of nicotine blocking medicines to assist would-be quitters.
Many of those CT scans are performed by machines manufactured by Bazell's corporate boss, General Electric, but unlike last time (text link) that lung cancer screening came up, Bazell did not go into those details on this occasion.
EUROPE’S AFGHAN WAR On the foreign policy front, only NBC sent a reporter to cover President George Bush's recruitment speech to his NATO allies in Bucharest. John Yang called it "a stern message" urging European powers to dispatch reinforcements to Afghanistan. Yang told us that NATO has been in charge of the counterinsurgency since 2003 with a current force of 47,000, of which 19,000 come from the United States, the balance mostly from Great Britain, Canada, Germany and Italy--and "some cannot go where the fighting is heaviest; some cannot leave secure bases. They focus on humanitarian efforts that, Europeans say, are just as important as fighting." The United States has a further 12,000 troops in Afghanistan not part of NATO's counterinsurgency. They are "independently hunting al-Qaeda."
WHO INSPECTS THE INSPECTORS? ABC's lead by Lisa Stark was a preview of House committee hearings into the Federal Aviation Administration. It is an investigation that broke last month with the revelation that FAA inspectors turned a blind eye to lax routine maintenance inspections of the Being 737 fleet at Southwest Airlines. Since then American, Delta and now United have had to play catch-up with scheduling-disrupting checks of MD-80s and 777s. Stark told us that whistleblower inspectors will testify to Congress that their FAA supervisors have been "too cozy with the airlines" putting pressure on them to "downplay problems, soften reports, drop enforcement actions." For its part, the FAA admitted to Stark that "inspectors did fall down on the job in the case of Southwest Airlines" but that a "spot audit found high compliance with safety directives."
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT The Senate saw a couple of developments on the economy. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board testified before a Senate committee--and said the R-word. "It is a rare day when you hear a Fed Chairman utter the word 'recession'" remarked CNBC's Trish Regan for NBC, although admittedly the actual phrase was: "A recession is possible." Bernanke also called "the housing crisis the most serious problem facing the American economy," noted ABC's Betsy Stark (embargoed link), "and he told lawmakers it was up to them to do something about it."
Accordingly, both ABC's Stark and Wyatt Andrews on CBS covered a $15bn Senate package of proposals to cushion the shock for the 5m-or-so defaulting homeowners who face eviction in the near future. CBS' Andrews called the package "damage control--because both parties in Congress are taking heat over their inaction…while losses at Bear Stearns, $29bn worth, were being absorbed by the Fed." The plan would extend $4bn to municipalities to help resell homes or turn them into rentals; and offer $11bn either to help refinance existing mortgages or to give a $7,000 subsidy to those who buy foreclosed homes to live in. Andrews called it a "drastic reduction from what Democrats first proposed" and Stark noted that a provision allowing bankruptcy judges to force subprime lenders to give money back had been rejected: "The banking industry has opposed the idea."
RECOUNT PLEASE For part two of CBS' Life and Debt in America, Anthony Mason snared a trip to Kuwait City where he sat down with Bader al-Saad, the head of the emirate's investment fund who "has never spoken to American television before." The Kuwait Investment Authority is "flush with cash from Kuwait's oil profits." Mason put assets at around $215bn. "When Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were hemorrhaging money because of the subprime crisis they needed quick cash" and al-Saad ponied up a combined $5bn.
Most of Kuwait's assets are in Treasury bonds, with the United States $1.7tr in the hole to just six Persian Gulf states: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Dubai and abu-Dhabi. Yet Mason's math is confusing. He says that foreign investors hold 44% of US public debt, stating the total of foreign-held Treasury assets at $2.2tr. Yet Tuesday he told us that the United States' National Debt amounts to $9.3tr. You do the sums: subtract $2.2tr from 44% of $9.3tr and you still have $1.9tr to play with.
STUDY THAT FRUIT FLY Next to Anthony Mason's mindboggling amounts on CBS, the celebration of the annual Pig Book on ABC seemed trivial. The book is the annual summary of earmarked Congressional spending from the anti-porkbarrel activist group Citizens Against Government Waste. Jake Tapper leafed through its 11,610 member's pet projects costing $17.2bn. He checked off wine research, wild turkey lovers, lobster study, character-building golf and Parisian fruit flies. When a Senate motion for a year's moratorium on earmarks was defeated, House members "overloaded the House Appropriations Committee Website with their requests, causing the Website to seize up." As a result this year's pork costs 30% more than last year's.
By the way Hillary Rodham Clinton earmarked $300m in spending, Barack Obama $100m, John McCain $0m.
NOT DISCUSSED ABC's Ron Claiborne and NBC's Kelly O'Donnell filed on John McCain's autobiographical nostalgia tour Tuesday. Now Chip Reid catches up for CBS. The Republican Presidential candidate arrived at the United States Naval Academy and yet more tales of his youthful follies surfaced. As a midshipman "he was known more for insubordination than heroism," Reid recounted. McCain "graduated near the very bottom of his class; some were surprised he graduated at all." That reputation for heroism, of course, was earned later at the Hanoi Hilton, the nickname for the camp when McCain was imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War. NBC's O'Donnell continued her network's Family Ties series on the candidates' kin. She sat down with Roberta Wright McCain, the 71-year-old candidate's 96-year-old mother: "We did not discuss his captivity at all. It never did come up." "Had you later? Did you ever talk about it?" "Never--and it is too late now."
NEGATIVES & NOSES NBC's Lee Cowan offered a Pennsylvania primary progress report as Democratic candidate Barack Obama completed his six-day bus tour with a live MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews on Hardball. Both Cowan and ABC's George Stephanopoulos played an update of Hillary Rodham Clinton's 3am telephone call ad. This time the ad's call concerns home foreclosures not a foreign policy emergency. It goes unanswered because McCain, who opposes federal intervention would "let the phone keep ringing." Stephanopoulos explained why the ad targets McCain not Obama: "Superdelegates are going to lose patience" if Rodham Clinton stays in the race and attacks Obama. She would be "going too negative. By going after John McCain she avoids that."
On CBS, anchor Katie Couric offered one more follow-up on the coup by her network's Sharyl Attkisson, who exposed Rodham Clinton's sniper fire fib with news videotape from Bosnia last week. "These days every single thing they say is analyzed and dissected so when stories fall apart you cannot help but wonder: 'Why do they do that?'" Couric drew a comparison with Campaign 2000, dubbed Dumbo vs Pinocchio by author Roger Simon. In that contest it was Al Gore who was tagged as misleading, while George Bush was seen as simply making mistakes. In this year's contest, Couric theorized, Rodham Clinton is the one who risks the phony, untrustworthy label whereas Obama's Achilles Heel is not his honesty but his experience.
CALLING ALL ADVENTISTS Debunking research from the University of Pennsylvania proved irresistible to CBS' Nancy Cordes and ABC's Ned Potter (embargoed link). "In fairness, your mom was not wrong but there is no proof that she was right either," Potter pointed out. If one drinks eight glasses of water a day, does it fill the stomach to aid dieting? "No conclusive studies." Flush toxins from ones kidneys? "No conclusive studies." Improve skin tone? "No conclusive studies." CBS' Cordes could not resist: the study "throws cold water" on long-held beliefs…that "just do not hold water"…"the findings may be hard to swallow"…cherished beliefs "could be all wet."
"Where did the idea of eight glasses a day even come from?" Cordes wondered. "Nobody really knows." Tyndall Report's understanding is that this is a pro-abstinence teaching of the Seventh Day Adventist Church on the theory that a quenched thirst would not be tempted by the demon booze. Are there any Adventists out there in our readership? Is all that water really your idea?
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: the Pentagon declassified a 2003 memorandum on interrogation that offered such a narrow definition of torture that several questionable harsh techniques became sanctioned…the opposition to President Robert Mugabe may have won control of parliament in Zimbabwe's protracted election.
