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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 19, 2008
In the contemporary world of video newsgathering, jaw dropping images do not have to be recorded by the news organization that airs them, or even by journalists. If the scenes are compelling enough sooner or later they can be packaged together as a news story. So NBC kicked off its newscast with four minutes of week-old footage taken by an unidentified citizen of Beichuan in Sichuan Province. It showed the first few minutes after that earthquake struck. The scenes were narrated not by an NBC staffer but by a British journalist working for ITN, NBC's newsgathering partner. They may not be current. They may be amateur. They are riveting, deservedly the Story of the Day. Anchor Brian Williams recounted the reaction at NBC News: "It brought the place to a standstill." At Tyndall Report it brought tears to the eyes.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 19, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
AMATEUR EYEWITNESS NEWS In the contemporary world of video newsgathering, jaw dropping images do not have to be recorded by the news organization that airs them, or even by journalists. If the scenes are compelling enough sooner or later they can be packaged together as a news story. So NBC kicked off its newscast with four minutes of week-old footage taken by an unidentified citizen of Beichuan in Sichuan Province. It showed the first few minutes after that earthquake struck. The scenes were narrated not by an NBC staffer but by a British journalist working for ITN, NBC's newsgathering partner. They may not be current. They may be amateur. They are riveting, deservedly the Story of the Day. Anchor Brian Williams recounted the reaction at NBC News: "It brought the place to a standstill." At Tyndall Report it brought tears to the eyes.
ITN's Bill Neely provided the voiceover to the video. Check out the reaction just 20 seconds after the earthquake struck as citizens look off in horror to the cameraman's left as buildings start collapsing. Later look at the three boys screaming for help in an upper window of a primary school whose stairwells are blocked by rubble. Look at the volunteers forming ad hoc rescue squads.
On ABC, Stephanie Sy profiled a shattered village that had "lost a large part of an entire generation." Because the earthquake struck in the middle of the afternoon, the schools were full of children. "In most of them there were very few survivors. Everywhere we turned in Wudu we met childless parents who had dutifully obeyed China's one child policies."
RODHAM CLINTON FADES FROM VIEW Campaign 2008 continues with Democratic primaries in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday. The contest was CBS' pick to lead off its newscast. Hillary Rodham Clinton's strategy "seems simple," CBS' Jim Axelrod told us. "Emphasize Kentucky; ignore Oregon, where Barack Obama is expected to win; and then hope other Democrats do the same." Yet she is getting no traction. While all three newscasts had a correspondent cover Republican John McCain and all three filed a story Obama, who attracted a crowd of more than 70,000 in Oregon on Sunday, Axelrod was the lone reporter with air time on Rodham Clinton. He heard her pitch on her electability: "She can argue that all she wants but the fact of the matter is the superdelegates are not buying."
When Obama appeared on ABC's Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts asked him about a Republican video posted online that criticizes Michelle Obama for being a late-in-life patriot when she declared: "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country." All three newscasts--ABC's David Wright, NBC's Lee Cowan, CBS' Dean Reynolds--quoted candidate Obama's soundbite in response: "These folks should lay off my wife."
The three reporters were not so unanimous when reporting on McCain's continued criticism of Obama's attitude towards Iran as betraying a depth of "inexperience and reckless judgment…very serious deficiencies for an American President." CBS' Reynolds made McCain's disdain seem reasonable, characterizing it as being directed towards Obama's assessment of Iran as "a tiny threat." The paraphrase of Obama by NBC's Cowan was less tendentious, saying that Iran "poses only a tiny threat compared with that of the former Soviet Union." ABC's Wright used a formulation--"the threat posed by Iran is not as serious as once posed by the former Soviet Union"--that was so reasonable that it made McCain appear to be the one whose judgment was unhinged.
As for John McCain's campaign, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Chip Reid both reported on its latest internal shake-up. NBC's O'Donnell called it a "staff housecleaning over lobbying, conflicts of interest and past work for foreign governments" when five aides departed. Reid noted that "his reputation as a reformer took a hit." The headlines made by Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta made those inside-the-Beltway ties look worse, since two of the five had been paid to represent the military junta of Myanmar. On ABC, Jake Tapper looked at McCain's policy positions instead. He has tried to separate himself from George Bush's administration by disagreeing with the President on such issues as global warming and Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. Tapper noted that McCain's latest rhetoric, against federal subsidies for agribusiness, "may hurt Republicans running for reelection."
Both ABC's Tapper and CBS' Reid played clips from McCain's self-deprecating comedy on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Curiously, NBC's O'Donnell did not use the opportunity for cross-promotion.
CBS SCOOPS CBS made a big effort with a couple of Exclusives. Byron Pitts followed up his heartrending January story of Carmelo Rodriguez, the 29-year-old USMC sergeant. Pitts was at his bedside ready to interview him when he died of cancer. His expose concerned the Feres Doctrine, a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that prohibits active service military for suing for military doctors for malpractice. Pitts' follow-up examined a bill by Rep Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), inspired by Rodriguez' plight, to repeal Feres. Hinchey went further, claiming that the Marine Corps ignored the melanoma because it needed a "clear leader." "Congressman, those are awfully damning allegations that the military overlooked this man's medical condition because they needed bodies to fight the war in Iraq?" "That is correct."
Wyatt Andrews' Exclusive looked into DecaBDE, a fire retardant chemical manufactured by Chemtura that is being examined by toxicologists at the EPA for its potential damage to infants. So much of the chemical is used in furniture and consumer products that activists at Friends of the Earth claim Americans have ten times its levels in their bodies than other nationalities. Andrews introduced us to Hannah Pingree, the majority leader in the legislature in Maine, which is phasing out the use of polybrominated diphenyl ethers after studies found them in mother's milk. The bromine industry's response is a TV ad: "We cannot take a chance on fire safety."
MENTAL ARITHMETIC ABC's selection for its lead story was the high price of gasoline. Dan Harris (embargoed link) told us that a gallon now costs over $4 in Chicago, offering a couple of vignettes submitted by viewers on resulting hard times. Ben Tracy's four-dollar-gasoline story for CBS was quirkier. He told us that the filling station pumps made before the digital age had a dial for setting the price by hand. There are 17,000 of these C20th pumps still in use around the country: they "top out at $3.99 the highest price imaginable when they were made in the '90s." Tracy introduced us to the unfortunate Lou Engel, who now has to resort to mental arithmetic when selling gasoline at his repair-and-towing station on the Island of Vashon in Puget Sound. ABC's second energy story was A Closer Look at windmills by Barbara Pinto. She traveled to the blustery hills of Rockport Mo where a farm of four Suzlon turbines supplies all the electricity the town of 1300 needs, plus extra juice to sell onto the grid. The local utility has promised the town's residents and businesses that electric rates can now be frozen at current levels for the next 25 years.
SOME POLYGAMISTS ARE MONOGAMOUS Not all of those fundamentalist Mormon fathers on the Yearning For Zion ranch near San Angelo Tex have four wives. CBS anchor Katie Couric offered the statistics about the 463 children currently in state custody pending welfare hearings. Together they have 168 mothers and 69 fathers--so if the polygamist husbands averaged four wives each, more than half the sect's marriages would have to be monogamous. Those numbers showed the extent of the five-courtroom proceedings under way to negotiate conditions under which the children would be reunited with their families. CBS and NBC had correspondents on the scene, Mark Strassmann and Don Teague respectively. Jim Avila (embargoed link) covered the story for ABC from New York. The parents were asked to agree to parenting classes and psychological counseling. CBS' Strassmann added that DNA testing, "which most fathers have refused," was also required. Such tests could lead to "criminal prosecution," if they implicated them in underage pregnancies.
MINORITY STATUS College commencement season is in full swing and so NBC chose Morehouse College in Atlanta for its closing feature. The college is the alma mater of Samuel L Jackson and Spike Lee and Edwin Moses and Martin Luther King Jr, Martin Savidge reminded us, and now its valedictorian is Joshua Packwood: "He does not want to be remembered as just the first white valedictorian" in the 96% African-American school. "He would rather be known as something far more important--a Morehouse Man."
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: Sen Edward Kennedy (D-MA) is in hospital having his brain examined after suffering a seizure over the weekend…the military junta of Myanmar has told the Pentagon's Pacific Command hat it will never grant permission to USNavy helicopters to deliver relief aid after the cyclone...the White House has protested the broadcast edits made by NBC News of a Richard Engel interview with George Bush about his Knesset speech on appeasement; NBC responded by posting the unedited q-&-a online…the police beating of a trio of suspects videotaped by the local TV news helicopter of a FOX affiliate in Philadelphia has led to four of the cops being fired, maybe prosecuted…the brush fires in Florida have spread to the Everglades.
ITN's Bill Neely provided the voiceover to the video. Check out the reaction just 20 seconds after the earthquake struck as citizens look off in horror to the cameraman's left as buildings start collapsing. Later look at the three boys screaming for help in an upper window of a primary school whose stairwells are blocked by rubble. Look at the volunteers forming ad hoc rescue squads.
On ABC, Stephanie Sy profiled a shattered village that had "lost a large part of an entire generation." Because the earthquake struck in the middle of the afternoon, the schools were full of children. "In most of them there were very few survivors. Everywhere we turned in Wudu we met childless parents who had dutifully obeyed China's one child policies."
RODHAM CLINTON FADES FROM VIEW Campaign 2008 continues with Democratic primaries in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday. The contest was CBS' pick to lead off its newscast. Hillary Rodham Clinton's strategy "seems simple," CBS' Jim Axelrod told us. "Emphasize Kentucky; ignore Oregon, where Barack Obama is expected to win; and then hope other Democrats do the same." Yet she is getting no traction. While all three newscasts had a correspondent cover Republican John McCain and all three filed a story Obama, who attracted a crowd of more than 70,000 in Oregon on Sunday, Axelrod was the lone reporter with air time on Rodham Clinton. He heard her pitch on her electability: "She can argue that all she wants but the fact of the matter is the superdelegates are not buying."
When Obama appeared on ABC's Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts asked him about a Republican video posted online that criticizes Michelle Obama for being a late-in-life patriot when she declared: "For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country." All three newscasts--ABC's David Wright, NBC's Lee Cowan, CBS' Dean Reynolds--quoted candidate Obama's soundbite in response: "These folks should lay off my wife."
The three reporters were not so unanimous when reporting on McCain's continued criticism of Obama's attitude towards Iran as betraying a depth of "inexperience and reckless judgment…very serious deficiencies for an American President." CBS' Reynolds made McCain's disdain seem reasonable, characterizing it as being directed towards Obama's assessment of Iran as "a tiny threat." The paraphrase of Obama by NBC's Cowan was less tendentious, saying that Iran "poses only a tiny threat compared with that of the former Soviet Union." ABC's Wright used a formulation--"the threat posed by Iran is not as serious as once posed by the former Soviet Union"--that was so reasonable that it made McCain appear to be the one whose judgment was unhinged.
As for John McCain's campaign, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Chip Reid both reported on its latest internal shake-up. NBC's O'Donnell called it a "staff housecleaning over lobbying, conflicts of interest and past work for foreign governments" when five aides departed. Reid noted that "his reputation as a reformer took a hit." The headlines made by Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta made those inside-the-Beltway ties look worse, since two of the five had been paid to represent the military junta of Myanmar. On ABC, Jake Tapper looked at McCain's policy positions instead. He has tried to separate himself from George Bush's administration by disagreeing with the President on such issues as global warming and Hurricane Katrina disaster relief. Tapper noted that McCain's latest rhetoric, against federal subsidies for agribusiness, "may hurt Republicans running for reelection."
Both ABC's Tapper and CBS' Reid played clips from McCain's self-deprecating comedy on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Curiously, NBC's O'Donnell did not use the opportunity for cross-promotion.
CBS SCOOPS CBS made a big effort with a couple of Exclusives. Byron Pitts followed up his heartrending January story of Carmelo Rodriguez, the 29-year-old USMC sergeant. Pitts was at his bedside ready to interview him when he died of cancer. His expose concerned the Feres Doctrine, a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that prohibits active service military for suing for military doctors for malpractice. Pitts' follow-up examined a bill by Rep Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), inspired by Rodriguez' plight, to repeal Feres. Hinchey went further, claiming that the Marine Corps ignored the melanoma because it needed a "clear leader." "Congressman, those are awfully damning allegations that the military overlooked this man's medical condition because they needed bodies to fight the war in Iraq?" "That is correct."
Wyatt Andrews' Exclusive looked into DecaBDE, a fire retardant chemical manufactured by Chemtura that is being examined by toxicologists at the EPA for its potential damage to infants. So much of the chemical is used in furniture and consumer products that activists at Friends of the Earth claim Americans have ten times its levels in their bodies than other nationalities. Andrews introduced us to Hannah Pingree, the majority leader in the legislature in Maine, which is phasing out the use of polybrominated diphenyl ethers after studies found them in mother's milk. The bromine industry's response is a TV ad: "We cannot take a chance on fire safety."
MENTAL ARITHMETIC ABC's selection for its lead story was the high price of gasoline. Dan Harris (embargoed link) told us that a gallon now costs over $4 in Chicago, offering a couple of vignettes submitted by viewers on resulting hard times. Ben Tracy's four-dollar-gasoline story for CBS was quirkier. He told us that the filling station pumps made before the digital age had a dial for setting the price by hand. There are 17,000 of these C20th pumps still in use around the country: they "top out at $3.99 the highest price imaginable when they were made in the '90s." Tracy introduced us to the unfortunate Lou Engel, who now has to resort to mental arithmetic when selling gasoline at his repair-and-towing station on the Island of Vashon in Puget Sound. ABC's second energy story was A Closer Look at windmills by Barbara Pinto. She traveled to the blustery hills of Rockport Mo where a farm of four Suzlon turbines supplies all the electricity the town of 1300 needs, plus extra juice to sell onto the grid. The local utility has promised the town's residents and businesses that electric rates can now be frozen at current levels for the next 25 years.
SOME POLYGAMISTS ARE MONOGAMOUS Not all of those fundamentalist Mormon fathers on the Yearning For Zion ranch near San Angelo Tex have four wives. CBS anchor Katie Couric offered the statistics about the 463 children currently in state custody pending welfare hearings. Together they have 168 mothers and 69 fathers--so if the polygamist husbands averaged four wives each, more than half the sect's marriages would have to be monogamous. Those numbers showed the extent of the five-courtroom proceedings under way to negotiate conditions under which the children would be reunited with their families. CBS and NBC had correspondents on the scene, Mark Strassmann and Don Teague respectively. Jim Avila (embargoed link) covered the story for ABC from New York. The parents were asked to agree to parenting classes and psychological counseling. CBS' Strassmann added that DNA testing, "which most fathers have refused," was also required. Such tests could lead to "criminal prosecution," if they implicated them in underage pregnancies.
MINORITY STATUS College commencement season is in full swing and so NBC chose Morehouse College in Atlanta for its closing feature. The college is the alma mater of Samuel L Jackson and Spike Lee and Edwin Moses and Martin Luther King Jr, Martin Savidge reminded us, and now its valedictorian is Joshua Packwood: "He does not want to be remembered as just the first white valedictorian" in the 96% African-American school. "He would rather be known as something far more important--a Morehouse Man."
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: Sen Edward Kennedy (D-MA) is in hospital having his brain examined after suffering a seizure over the weekend…the military junta of Myanmar has told the Pentagon's Pacific Command hat it will never grant permission to USNavy helicopters to deliver relief aid after the cyclone...the White House has protested the broadcast edits made by NBC News of a Richard Engel interview with George Bush about his Knesset speech on appeasement; NBC responded by posting the unedited q-&-a online…the police beating of a trio of suspects videotaped by the local TV news helicopter of a FOX affiliate in Philadelphia has led to four of the cops being fired, maybe prosecuted…the brush fires in Florida have spread to the Everglades.
