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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JULY 8, 2008
Into the vacuum of a very light day of news entered T Boone Pickens. Not a single development this day was deemed newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a reporter on all three newscasts. President George Bush may have been at the G8 Summit in Japan but no White House correspondent filed on global diplomacy. Instead oilman Pickens qualified as Story of the Day as he unveiled his plan to end imports of crude oil by building windmills. ABC led with Pickens while CBS and NBC each chose a lead that no other network even mentioned. NBC selected breast cancer; CBS chose low tar cigarettes.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JULY 8, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
BOONE PICKENS BLOWS A MIGHTY WIND Into the vacuum of a very light day of news entered T Boone Pickens. Not a single development this day was deemed newsworthy enough to warrant coverage by a reporter on all three newscasts. President George Bush may have been at the G8 Summit in Japan but no White House correspondent filed on global diplomacy. Instead oilman Pickens qualified as Story of the Day as he unveiled his plan to end imports of crude oil by building windmills. ABC led with Pickens while CBS and NBC each chose a lead that no other network even mentioned. NBC selected breast cancer; CBS chose low tar cigarettes.
Pickens' plan is to end the national dependence on gasoline by converting cars to natural gas. Where would the natural gas come from? The fuel that is currently used to generate electricity would not be required by power stations because it would be replaced by wind-generated power. ABC's Betsy Stark led with Pickens' scheme and CBS invited the billionaire into the studio to be interviewed by anchor Katie Couric. NBC did not even mention Pickens but it did assign its environmental correspondent Anne Thompson to assess the agreement by the G8 Summit to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since the pact was non-binding, Thompson observed that "the planet shrugged."
TOUR DE PEACOCK Speaking of saving on fossil fuels, NBC filed its second What Works feature on pedal power. Monday, Tom Costello told us how Portland Ore is leading the nation in turning car commuters into bicyclists. Now Savannah Guthrie follows up with advice on how the exercise that cycling provides is good for one's health and improves one's mood.
MILKING MALIA AND SASHA CBS did not cover any developments on the campaign trail--with warped priorities, John Blackstone showed us a lost sea lion in Silicon Valley instead and Kelly Wallace told us that teenagers know about it when their peers are dating disastrously. ABC kept on the energy theme for its Campaign 2008 coverage as Jake Tapper (embargoed link) filed an issues analysis. For its In Depth report, NBC aired clips from Maria Menounos' saccharine Fourth of July interview with Barack Obama en famille. The candidate was apparently willing to exploit his daughters Malia and Sasha for the sake of advancing his own regular guy image by allowing Access Hollywood to treat them as pre-teen celebrities. As for John McCain, NBC's political director Chuck Todd parsed his latest advertisement that ridicules 1968's Summer of Love by calling it an Obamaesque "time of hope and change."
FUMES, SMOKES, TUMORS In domestic news, CBS' Armen Keteyian extended coverage of his longstanding scoop about FEMA's toxic housing trailers after Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Stream Coach factory in Indiana was in such a hurry, cranking them out at three times the normal rate, that it cut corners, using cheap formaldehyde, Keteyian revealed in his Exclusive. The Federal Trade Commission will no longer allow its name to be used on cigarettes that are marketed as low tar or light, CBS' Nancy Cordes reported. NBC's Robert Bazell told us about a breast cancer study from Duke University that found that younger patients suffer from tumors that are more virulent than those in their seniors.
HAITI HORRORS ABC filed a "horrifying" A Closer Look feature from Haiti as Dan Harris traveled to Port-au-Prince for Nightline with an undercover camera to document the trafficking in orphans and poor children as slave labor. Harris bargained a broker down to $150 as the price to own an eleven-year-old girl. Only ABC had a reporter cover the demand by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the United States commit to a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. At the White House, Martha Raddatz (embargoed link) predicted that President George Bush would never agree. Elizabeth Palmer was in Baghdad at the Khadimiyah Hospital for CBS. The high price Iraq is obtaining for its oil exports have not filtered down as spending on healthcare, she discovered.
DEAD TREES And in media notes, NBC's Mike Taibbi discovered that newspapers are "an industry in freefall." The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, is losing money at the rate of $1m each week. Newspaper journalism is switching from ink and paper to online except at the New York Daily News where a new $150m printing press seeks to attract new readers with better color reproduction.
Pickens' plan is to end the national dependence on gasoline by converting cars to natural gas. Where would the natural gas come from? The fuel that is currently used to generate electricity would not be required by power stations because it would be replaced by wind-generated power. ABC's Betsy Stark led with Pickens' scheme and CBS invited the billionaire into the studio to be interviewed by anchor Katie Couric. NBC did not even mention Pickens but it did assign its environmental correspondent Anne Thompson to assess the agreement by the G8 Summit to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Since the pact was non-binding, Thompson observed that "the planet shrugged."
TOUR DE PEACOCK Speaking of saving on fossil fuels, NBC filed its second What Works feature on pedal power. Monday, Tom Costello told us how Portland Ore is leading the nation in turning car commuters into bicyclists. Now Savannah Guthrie follows up with advice on how the exercise that cycling provides is good for one's health and improves one's mood.
MILKING MALIA AND SASHA CBS did not cover any developments on the campaign trail--with warped priorities, John Blackstone showed us a lost sea lion in Silicon Valley instead and Kelly Wallace told us that teenagers know about it when their peers are dating disastrously. ABC kept on the energy theme for its Campaign 2008 coverage as Jake Tapper (embargoed link) filed an issues analysis. For its In Depth report, NBC aired clips from Maria Menounos' saccharine Fourth of July interview with Barack Obama en famille. The candidate was apparently willing to exploit his daughters Malia and Sasha for the sake of advancing his own regular guy image by allowing Access Hollywood to treat them as pre-teen celebrities. As for John McCain, NBC's political director Chuck Todd parsed his latest advertisement that ridicules 1968's Summer of Love by calling it an Obamaesque "time of hope and change."
FUMES, SMOKES, TUMORS In domestic news, CBS' Armen Keteyian extended coverage of his longstanding scoop about FEMA's toxic housing trailers after Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Stream Coach factory in Indiana was in such a hurry, cranking them out at three times the normal rate, that it cut corners, using cheap formaldehyde, Keteyian revealed in his Exclusive. The Federal Trade Commission will no longer allow its name to be used on cigarettes that are marketed as low tar or light, CBS' Nancy Cordes reported. NBC's Robert Bazell told us about a breast cancer study from Duke University that found that younger patients suffer from tumors that are more virulent than those in their seniors.
HAITI HORRORS ABC filed a "horrifying" A Closer Look feature from Haiti as Dan Harris traveled to Port-au-Prince for Nightline with an undercover camera to document the trafficking in orphans and poor children as slave labor. Harris bargained a broker down to $150 as the price to own an eleven-year-old girl. Only ABC had a reporter cover the demand by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the United States commit to a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. At the White House, Martha Raddatz (embargoed link) predicted that President George Bush would never agree. Elizabeth Palmer was in Baghdad at the Khadimiyah Hospital for CBS. The high price Iraq is obtaining for its oil exports have not filtered down as spending on healthcare, she discovered.
DEAD TREES And in media notes, NBC's Mike Taibbi discovered that newspapers are "an industry in freefall." The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, is losing money at the rate of $1m each week. Newspaper journalism is switching from ink and paper to online except at the New York Daily News where a new $150m printing press seeks to attract new readers with better color reproduction.
