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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 25, 2008
The Supreme Court grabbed Story of the Day honors with a 5-4 decision that prohibited states from executing those convicted of raping a child. CBS and ABC both led with the ruling. ABC alone, anchored by substitute George Stephanopoulos, followed up with a report on the court's second major decision of the day, which reduced the punitive damages against ExxonMobil for its 1989 oil spill in Alaska. NBC led with an environmental story originating from the Department of Energy. The DoE predicted that global energy consumption in 2030 will be 50% greater than today, almost all from the fossil fuels coal, natural gas and oil. Those greenhouse gas emissions will turn global warming into a national security crisis for the United States, the National Intelligence Council warned.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 25, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
THOU SHALT NOT KILL NON-KILLERS The Supreme Court grabbed Story of the Day honors with a 5-4 decision that prohibited states from executing those convicted of raping a child. CBS and ABC both led with the ruling. ABC alone, anchored by substitute George Stephanopoulos, followed up with a report on the court's second major decision of the day, which reduced the punitive damages against ExxonMobil for its 1989 oil spill in Alaska. NBC led with an environmental story originating from the Department of Energy. The DoE predicted that global energy consumption in 2030 will be 50% greater than today, almost all from the fossil fuels coal, natural gas and oil. Those greenhouse gas emissions will turn global warming into a national security crisis for the United States, the National Intelligence Council warned.
NBC's Pete Williams zeroed in on the words "cruel and unusual" in the court's decision to confine the death penalty to inmates who themselves have killed. Williams noted that only six state legislatures have approved that penalty for child rape and that no one has been executed for the crime since 1964. Thus the punishment is "unusual." On ABC, Jan Crawford Greenburg pointed to a trend on the court to "narrow the scope" of the death penalty, having already rejected it as a punishment for killers who happen to be juveniles or to suffer from mental retardation. CBS' Wyatt Andrews predicted that executions for drug trafficking and kidnapping would likely now be prohibited too: "This ruling, however, makes no mention of using capital punishment for crimes against the country. That is important, because it means the federal death penalty for treason and espionage is still legal."
ABC's veteran correspondent Ned Potter (embargoed link) covered the Exxon Valdez spill when it happened 19 years ago. ExxonMobil claims it has already spent $3.5bn in clean-up costs, fines and penalties. A civil lawsuit ordered it to pay an additional $2.5bn in punitive damages. The Supreme Court called the award "unpredictable in its severity" and reduced that portion to $500m. Potter quoted the Big Oil conglomerate as claiming that Prince William Sound "now looks as beautiful as ever." Disgruntled local residents told him "looks can be deceiving."
PUMP IT UP Both CBS and NBC turned global. NBC's Anne Thompson was the only correspondent to file on the DoE's International Energy Outlook. She quoted national security planners on the upshot of all that extra carbon in the atmosphere--"increased immigration pressures, as rising sea levels, famine and drought create environmental refugees" and a harm to military readiness if the United States "must respond to humanitarian crisis in Africa and Asia created by a lack of adequate food and water." On CBS, Nancy Cordes followed up on the Federal Reserve Board's decision to stop lowering short term interest rates for fear of pumping too much inflationary money into the economy. "The Fed is banking on a slowing economy to force prices back down," Cordes explained, yet prices are rising in China and Europe and Japan too so "an historic wave of inflation powered by pricey oil" may nullify the central bank's domestic strategy.
HARARE, MOSUL, KABUL There were plenty of international hotspots in the news. NBC's Andrea Mitchell (no link) followed Katie Couric's example on CBS Tuesday and updated us on the crisis in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe's longtime ally Nelson Mandela chose his 90th birthday party as the occasion to switch sides, denouncing his "tragic failure of leadership." She quoted Newsweek's Rod Nordland as reporting that government forces are no longer using violence to keep opposition voters away from the polls; they are now "brutalizing to make sure that they show up and vote for Mugabe."
On ABC, Terry McCarthy (embargoed link) followed 25,000 Iraqi troops into Mosul on their anti-al-Qaeda sweep dubbed Operation Lion's Roar that claimed to have arrested 12,000 militants. It is now "quiet as a graveyard," McCarthy found, even though a downtown carbomb killed two on Tuesday. The "newly confident" Iraqi Army has "pretty much got militias and insurgents on the run."
The secret services in Afghanistan are flexing their public relations muscle. Last week they issued videotape that CBS' Sheila MacVicar narrated from London of a teenager from a Pakistani madrassah whose suicide bomb plot they said they had foiled. Now Martin Fletcher gets to sit down with another failed suicide in the secret service's Kabul jail for NBC's In Depth. Abdul Marruf described being inspired to kill American construction workers when he saw videotape of a GI in Iraq using the Holy Koran as target for shooting practice. Afghan agents arrested Marruf before he even took delivery of his 600lb carbomb.
CBS' Investigation had Armen Keteyian look at the failed opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan. Contractors like DynCorp have been paid $1bn since 2004 to put a stop to the poppy harvest yet production is up "300% in the last six years" and peasants who have had their crop destroyed have switched sympathies to back Taliban guerrillas. Keteyian told us about the Senlis Council, a European activist group that opposes eradication and proposes legalizing opium instead for the manufacture of medicinal morphine.
OBAMA & HIS SENATE COLLEAGUES On the campaign trail, ABC's Jake Tapper filed A Closer Look into what Barack Obama will need to do to win the full backing of erstwhile rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. He noted that Bill Clinton's backing of Obama is "tepid" and that many of Rodham Clinton's supporters are "still angry" about her defeat. Obama had promised to have his top fundraisers help pay off Rodham Clinton's $10m campaign debt, Tapper pointed out, but drew the line at soliciting funds for her from his 1.5m smaller donors. Looking forward to November, Jeff Greenfield on CBS advised us to relax about the significance of June opinion polls, even those that show a double digit gap between Obama and John McCain. Instead he cited Gordon Smith, the incumbent Republican senator running for reelection in Oregon, as a straw in the wind. Greenfield called it "highly unusual" that Smith should run pro-Obama advertising.
ON THE FIRE LINES The forest fires stretching from Monterey County to Butte County in California attracted attention from correspondents on all three networks. NBC used a reporter for the first time this week, with Michael Okwu catching us up on the drought conditions and the dry lightning storms. ABC's Laura Marquez (embargoed link) and CBS' Sandra Hughes had already covered that territory Tuesday, so they both updated us on the fifth day of firefighting with heavy smoke blocking relief from the air. Here is Marquez' report; here is Hughes'.
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: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage lender, has been sued for abusive practices by the states of Illinois and California…the Mississippi River plain has not seen the end of this year's floods as eight further inches of rain fell…ostentatious blueprints for a nifty rotating skyscraper were unveiled in Dubai.
NBC's Pete Williams zeroed in on the words "cruel and unusual" in the court's decision to confine the death penalty to inmates who themselves have killed. Williams noted that only six state legislatures have approved that penalty for child rape and that no one has been executed for the crime since 1964. Thus the punishment is "unusual." On ABC, Jan Crawford Greenburg pointed to a trend on the court to "narrow the scope" of the death penalty, having already rejected it as a punishment for killers who happen to be juveniles or to suffer from mental retardation. CBS' Wyatt Andrews predicted that executions for drug trafficking and kidnapping would likely now be prohibited too: "This ruling, however, makes no mention of using capital punishment for crimes against the country. That is important, because it means the federal death penalty for treason and espionage is still legal."
ABC's veteran correspondent Ned Potter (embargoed link) covered the Exxon Valdez spill when it happened 19 years ago. ExxonMobil claims it has already spent $3.5bn in clean-up costs, fines and penalties. A civil lawsuit ordered it to pay an additional $2.5bn in punitive damages. The Supreme Court called the award "unpredictable in its severity" and reduced that portion to $500m. Potter quoted the Big Oil conglomerate as claiming that Prince William Sound "now looks as beautiful as ever." Disgruntled local residents told him "looks can be deceiving."
PUMP IT UP Both CBS and NBC turned global. NBC's Anne Thompson was the only correspondent to file on the DoE's International Energy Outlook. She quoted national security planners on the upshot of all that extra carbon in the atmosphere--"increased immigration pressures, as rising sea levels, famine and drought create environmental refugees" and a harm to military readiness if the United States "must respond to humanitarian crisis in Africa and Asia created by a lack of adequate food and water." On CBS, Nancy Cordes followed up on the Federal Reserve Board's decision to stop lowering short term interest rates for fear of pumping too much inflationary money into the economy. "The Fed is banking on a slowing economy to force prices back down," Cordes explained, yet prices are rising in China and Europe and Japan too so "an historic wave of inflation powered by pricey oil" may nullify the central bank's domestic strategy.
HARARE, MOSUL, KABUL There were plenty of international hotspots in the news. NBC's Andrea Mitchell (no link) followed Katie Couric's example on CBS Tuesday and updated us on the crisis in Zimbabwe. President Robert Mugabe's longtime ally Nelson Mandela chose his 90th birthday party as the occasion to switch sides, denouncing his "tragic failure of leadership." She quoted Newsweek's Rod Nordland as reporting that government forces are no longer using violence to keep opposition voters away from the polls; they are now "brutalizing to make sure that they show up and vote for Mugabe."
On ABC, Terry McCarthy (embargoed link) followed 25,000 Iraqi troops into Mosul on their anti-al-Qaeda sweep dubbed Operation Lion's Roar that claimed to have arrested 12,000 militants. It is now "quiet as a graveyard," McCarthy found, even though a downtown carbomb killed two on Tuesday. The "newly confident" Iraqi Army has "pretty much got militias and insurgents on the run."
The secret services in Afghanistan are flexing their public relations muscle. Last week they issued videotape that CBS' Sheila MacVicar narrated from London of a teenager from a Pakistani madrassah whose suicide bomb plot they said they had foiled. Now Martin Fletcher gets to sit down with another failed suicide in the secret service's Kabul jail for NBC's In Depth. Abdul Marruf described being inspired to kill American construction workers when he saw videotape of a GI in Iraq using the Holy Koran as target for shooting practice. Afghan agents arrested Marruf before he even took delivery of his 600lb carbomb.
CBS' Investigation had Armen Keteyian look at the failed opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan. Contractors like DynCorp have been paid $1bn since 2004 to put a stop to the poppy harvest yet production is up "300% in the last six years" and peasants who have had their crop destroyed have switched sympathies to back Taliban guerrillas. Keteyian told us about the Senlis Council, a European activist group that opposes eradication and proposes legalizing opium instead for the manufacture of medicinal morphine.
OBAMA & HIS SENATE COLLEAGUES On the campaign trail, ABC's Jake Tapper filed A Closer Look into what Barack Obama will need to do to win the full backing of erstwhile rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. He noted that Bill Clinton's backing of Obama is "tepid" and that many of Rodham Clinton's supporters are "still angry" about her defeat. Obama had promised to have his top fundraisers help pay off Rodham Clinton's $10m campaign debt, Tapper pointed out, but drew the line at soliciting funds for her from his 1.5m smaller donors. Looking forward to November, Jeff Greenfield on CBS advised us to relax about the significance of June opinion polls, even those that show a double digit gap between Obama and John McCain. Instead he cited Gordon Smith, the incumbent Republican senator running for reelection in Oregon, as a straw in the wind. Greenfield called it "highly unusual" that Smith should run pro-Obama advertising.
ON THE FIRE LINES The forest fires stretching from Monterey County to Butte County in California attracted attention from correspondents on all three networks. NBC used a reporter for the first time this week, with Michael Okwu catching us up on the drought conditions and the dry lightning storms. ABC's Laura Marquez (embargoed link) and CBS' Sandra Hughes had already covered that territory Tuesday, so they both updated us on the fifth day of firefighting with heavy smoke blocking relief from the air. Here is Marquez' report; here is Hughes'.
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: Countrywide Financial, the mortgage lender, has been sued for abusive practices by the states of Illinois and California…the Mississippi River plain has not seen the end of this year's floods as eight further inches of rain fell…ostentatious blueprints for a nifty rotating skyscraper were unveiled in Dubai.
