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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM AUGUST 5, 2008
This dog day of summer made King Kong its Story of the Day. For the second straight day, features, not breaking news, qualified as the most heavily covered tale. None of the networks led with nature pix of a hidden habitat for the western lowland gorilla. No network correspondent was lucky enough to land a trip to the Green Abyss rainforest of the Congolese Republic where tens of thousands of the apes live unmolested by humans. The dateline for each, instead, was the Bronx Zoo. Yet their discovery by the Wildlife Conservation Society was more newsworthy than the stories that led each newscast: tornadoes in Chicagoland on ABC; prostate cancer screening advice on NBC; and the plummeting price of crude oil on CBS.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR AUGUST 5, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
| click to play | story | angle | reporter | dateline | |
| ABC | Gorilla conservation efforts in Congo | Hidden habitat discovered in Green Abyss forest | Ned Potter | New York |
| CBS | Oil, natural gas, gasoline prices | Reduced demand drives cost of crude down sharply | Anthony Mason | New York |
| ABC | 2008 John McCain campaign | Calls for nuclear power plant construction | Ron Claiborne | Michigan |
| CBS | 2008 Barack Obama campaign | Fails to secure all of Rodham Clinton's support | Jeff Greenfield | New York |
| CBS | Tornado season | Twisters in Chicagoland, one dead in Indiana | Dean Reynolds | Chicago |
| NBC | Iraq: weapons of mass destruction investigation | New book alleges pre-war espionage was ignored | David Gregory | Washington DC |
| ABC | Cyclone Nargis hits coastal Myanmar | Irrawaddy Delta recovers without government aid | Jim Sciutto | Myanmar |
| NBC | China water wars: shortage pits urban, rural use | Rice paddies drained to supply Beijing's needs | Ian Williams | China |
| NBC | Prostate cancer coverage | PSA blood tests not indicated for elderly men | Robert Bazell | New York |
| CBS | Aerobatic wedding in England for wingwalkers | Bride on plane, groom on second, vicar on third | Mark Phillips | London |
BRONX ZOO CHEERLEADING FOR CONGO’S GORILLAS This dog day of summer made King Kong its Story of the Day. For the second straight day, features, not breaking news, qualified as the most heavily covered tale. None of the networks led with nature pix of a hidden habitat for the western lowland gorilla. No network correspondent was lucky enough to land a trip to the Green Abyss rainforest of the Congolese Republic where tens of thousands of the apes live unmolested by humans. The dateline for each, instead, was the Bronx Zoo. Yet their discovery by the Wildlife Conservation Society was more newsworthy than the stories that led each newscast: tornadoes in Chicagoland on ABC; prostate cancer screening advice on NBC; and the plummeting price of crude oil on CBS.
The conservationists have not actually seen the 125,000 gorillas that they say live in Congo. Ned Potter explained on ABC's A Closer Look that their census consisted of counting their sleeping nests, beds made of leaves and branches. On NBC's In Depth, Anne Thompson explained that the Bronx Zoo's green scientists were publicizing their discovery to spread the message of "the power of preservation--protecting the land, the trees and the entire habitat these critically endangered animals need to survive." To get that message out, they supplied adorable images of frolicking apes in the tall grass, which CBS' Daniel Sieberg and Potter and Thompson each, pliantly, aired.
DEMAND DESTRUCTION The cost of a barrel of crude oil has fallen $27 in a single month from its record high. It is now just $119. CBS' Anthony Mason and ABC's Betsy Stark (embargoed link) were assigned to a reporting Economics 101 to explain the decline. Price falls as demand weakens: "For 15 straight weeks now, we have pumped less gasoline than we did a year ago," Mason declared. Stark agreed that falling demand explains why prices are falling "but not why they are falling so fast." That, she suggested, "has a lot to do with so-called oil speculators now taking profits on the belief prices have peaked."
MCCAIN GOES NUCLEAR The price of oil has not yet fallen enough for the Presidential candidates to stop talking about energy. ABC's Ron Claiborne followed Republican John McCain to Michigan, where he unveiled a plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants. Claiborne quoted McCain's assertion that Barack Obama opposes nukes: "Actually, Obama does not oppose more nuclear power plants. He favors going forward--only if it can be done safely." NBC's Andrea Mitchell surveyed both platforms and found that "as energy prices climbed this summer, both candidates have shifted with the political winds. McCain is now a true believer in offshore drilling, which he once opposed" while Obama has dropped his outright opposition to drilling and to tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Mitchell consulted unnamed experts: "Both campaigns are exaggerating the virtues of their energy proposals and not telling voters how truly difficult it would be to become really independent of foreign oil."
DOES OBAMA REALLY HAVE A HILLARY PROBLEM? On CBS, Jeff Greenfield was inspired by Kate Snow's (embargoed link) interview Monday with former President Bill Clinton on ABC to wonder whether Barack Obama would get the complete backing of Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters in November. Greenfield cited a poll that showed that 20% of her voters plan to back John McCain. He suggested that the white working class men in her base would be the toughest sell for Obama.
Greenfield failed to make a convincing case that Obama has a huge problem here. If Rodham Clinton's vote represents almost exactly half the Democratic electorate and 20% of them are leaning towards McCain, that amounts to 10% of all Democrats--a fraction that does not seem unusually large to cross party lines in a General Election.
CUBS NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE There were spectacular images from sports cameras at Wrigley Field of a lightning storm that spawned three tornadoes around Chicago. Fear of funnel clouds caused the Chicago Cubs' game to be called. Yet the storm killed only one person so it was hardly national news. NBC did the right thing, mentioning the lightning only in passing. CBS had Dean Reynolds take time off from the campaign trail to narrate the weather porn. ABC, curiously, decided that the storm should be its lead, dispatching Chris Bury (embargoed link) to tornado torn Griffith Ind.
FOLLOW-UPS ON MYANMAR AND IRAQ NBC and ABC both followed up on a pair of major international stories. ABC continued its coverage of the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It has been the lead network on the story (36 min v CBS 22, NBC 23) since the storm struck in May. Jim Sciutto gained access to the delta with a United Nations human rights mission: "The UN estimates the people have rebuilt more than 600,000 homes themselves. Despite the danger of speaking out, many called the government's relief effort nonexistent." He asked a Burmese Buddhist monk why the pacifist did not protest: "They have guns. We have no guns. The law is silent before the gun."
On NBC, the mystery of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction resurfaced. David Gregory publicized reporting by Ron Suskind in his new book The Way of the World about Tahir Jalil Habbush, Saddam Hussein's onetime chief spy. Suskind recounts that Habbush revealed that Iraq had no WMD stockpile to British spies months before the United States invaded but that the CIA decided not to believe him. After the invasion, Suskind adds, the CIA was ordered by the White House to forge a letter in Habbush's hand to fabricate an Iraqi connection with Mohammed Atta. Atta, lest we forget, was lead hijacker on September 11th, 2001. Gregory called Suskind's charge "explosive" and reported that the White House calls it "absurd."
NOT JUST CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS NBC is showing signs of doing the right thing in Beijing--taking the opportunity afforded by the Olympics to report on non-sports-related China. Last week Richard Engel covered Internet censorship and Mark Mullen looked at its flood of manufacturing exports when he publicized Sarah Bongiorni's book A Year Without Made in China. Now Ian Williams visits the arid former paddy fields of Hebei Province where farmers can no longer grow rice because water has been diverted to quench Beijing's insatiable thirst: "The water table below this booming city is falling by 20 feet a year."
Nevertheless there is no getting away from the looming onslaught of tearjerking sports feature. CBS' Kelly Cobiella offered a preview of the certain to be ubiquitous Dara Torres, the buffed fortysomething swimming coverlady. The latest twist concerns Torres' coach Michael Lohberg, who has been taken deathly ill. Lohberg had to cancel his Beijing trip as he was rushed to hospital at the National Institutes for Health where he is undergoing emergency blood transfusions.
DEFENSIVE MEDICINE DEFIES SCIENCE Given the aging demographic of the audience for the nightly newscasts, it is a no-brainer that the recommendations by the National Cancer Institute on prostate cancer screening should make news. ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson (embargoed link) got a jump on the story Monday. Now NBC picks up on the advice about the PSA blood test for Robert Bazell's lead. The NCI found that prostate tumors in men over the age of 75 are not worth finding because, at that age, the cancer grows so slowly that it is not lethal--so it might as well be ignored. On CBS, Nancy Cordes found "mixed and inconclusive new evidence that routine screening helps lower the death toll" among the elderly. Bazell added that the National Institutes of Health are running a 15-year study involving 74,000 men into the benefits of the blood test even earlier in life. Monday, ABC's Johnson was skeptical that the tests would be halted despite the science. Physicians worry about the "occasional aggressive case of cancer in an older man that might be missed if you do not do screening. They worry about ending up in front of a jury in that kind of a case and so I think many doctors will still offer the test to older men."
WING, PRAYER, RING For fun, both CBS and ABC--with Mark Phillips and Ryan Owens (embargoed link)--closed with the nuptials of Darren McWalters and Katie Hodgson in England. They were wed while wingwalking, standing on aerobatic biplanes, 1,000 feet in the air at 100 mph. A marriage that began "on a wing and a prayer," as CBS' Phillips put it.
The conservationists have not actually seen the 125,000 gorillas that they say live in Congo. Ned Potter explained on ABC's A Closer Look that their census consisted of counting their sleeping nests, beds made of leaves and branches. On NBC's In Depth, Anne Thompson explained that the Bronx Zoo's green scientists were publicizing their discovery to spread the message of "the power of preservation--protecting the land, the trees and the entire habitat these critically endangered animals need to survive." To get that message out, they supplied adorable images of frolicking apes in the tall grass, which CBS' Daniel Sieberg and Potter and Thompson each, pliantly, aired.
DEMAND DESTRUCTION The cost of a barrel of crude oil has fallen $27 in a single month from its record high. It is now just $119. CBS' Anthony Mason and ABC's Betsy Stark (embargoed link) were assigned to a reporting Economics 101 to explain the decline. Price falls as demand weakens: "For 15 straight weeks now, we have pumped less gasoline than we did a year ago," Mason declared. Stark agreed that falling demand explains why prices are falling "but not why they are falling so fast." That, she suggested, "has a lot to do with so-called oil speculators now taking profits on the belief prices have peaked."
MCCAIN GOES NUCLEAR The price of oil has not yet fallen enough for the Presidential candidates to stop talking about energy. ABC's Ron Claiborne followed Republican John McCain to Michigan, where he unveiled a plan to build 45 new nuclear power plants. Claiborne quoted McCain's assertion that Barack Obama opposes nukes: "Actually, Obama does not oppose more nuclear power plants. He favors going forward--only if it can be done safely." NBC's Andrea Mitchell surveyed both platforms and found that "as energy prices climbed this summer, both candidates have shifted with the political winds. McCain is now a true believer in offshore drilling, which he once opposed" while Obama has dropped his outright opposition to drilling and to tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Mitchell consulted unnamed experts: "Both campaigns are exaggerating the virtues of their energy proposals and not telling voters how truly difficult it would be to become really independent of foreign oil."
DOES OBAMA REALLY HAVE A HILLARY PROBLEM? On CBS, Jeff Greenfield was inspired by Kate Snow's (embargoed link) interview Monday with former President Bill Clinton on ABC to wonder whether Barack Obama would get the complete backing of Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters in November. Greenfield cited a poll that showed that 20% of her voters plan to back John McCain. He suggested that the white working class men in her base would be the toughest sell for Obama.
Greenfield failed to make a convincing case that Obama has a huge problem here. If Rodham Clinton's vote represents almost exactly half the Democratic electorate and 20% of them are leaning towards McCain, that amounts to 10% of all Democrats--a fraction that does not seem unusually large to cross party lines in a General Election.
CUBS NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE There were spectacular images from sports cameras at Wrigley Field of a lightning storm that spawned three tornadoes around Chicago. Fear of funnel clouds caused the Chicago Cubs' game to be called. Yet the storm killed only one person so it was hardly national news. NBC did the right thing, mentioning the lightning only in passing. CBS had Dean Reynolds take time off from the campaign trail to narrate the weather porn. ABC, curiously, decided that the storm should be its lead, dispatching Chris Bury (embargoed link) to tornado torn Griffith Ind.
FOLLOW-UPS ON MYANMAR AND IRAQ NBC and ABC both followed up on a pair of major international stories. ABC continued its coverage of the destruction caused by Cyclone Nargis in the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar. It has been the lead network on the story (36 min v CBS 22, NBC 23) since the storm struck in May. Jim Sciutto gained access to the delta with a United Nations human rights mission: "The UN estimates the people have rebuilt more than 600,000 homes themselves. Despite the danger of speaking out, many called the government's relief effort nonexistent." He asked a Burmese Buddhist monk why the pacifist did not protest: "They have guns. We have no guns. The law is silent before the gun."
On NBC, the mystery of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction resurfaced. David Gregory publicized reporting by Ron Suskind in his new book The Way of the World about Tahir Jalil Habbush, Saddam Hussein's onetime chief spy. Suskind recounts that Habbush revealed that Iraq had no WMD stockpile to British spies months before the United States invaded but that the CIA decided not to believe him. After the invasion, Suskind adds, the CIA was ordered by the White House to forge a letter in Habbush's hand to fabricate an Iraqi connection with Mohammed Atta. Atta, lest we forget, was lead hijacker on September 11th, 2001. Gregory called Suskind's charge "explosive" and reported that the White House calls it "absurd."
NOT JUST CITIUS, ALTIUS, FORTIUS NBC is showing signs of doing the right thing in Beijing--taking the opportunity afforded by the Olympics to report on non-sports-related China. Last week Richard Engel covered Internet censorship and Mark Mullen looked at its flood of manufacturing exports when he publicized Sarah Bongiorni's book A Year Without Made in China. Now Ian Williams visits the arid former paddy fields of Hebei Province where farmers can no longer grow rice because water has been diverted to quench Beijing's insatiable thirst: "The water table below this booming city is falling by 20 feet a year."
Nevertheless there is no getting away from the looming onslaught of tearjerking sports feature. CBS' Kelly Cobiella offered a preview of the certain to be ubiquitous Dara Torres, the buffed fortysomething swimming coverlady. The latest twist concerns Torres' coach Michael Lohberg, who has been taken deathly ill. Lohberg had to cancel his Beijing trip as he was rushed to hospital at the National Institutes for Health where he is undergoing emergency blood transfusions.
DEFENSIVE MEDICINE DEFIES SCIENCE Given the aging demographic of the audience for the nightly newscasts, it is a no-brainer that the recommendations by the National Cancer Institute on prostate cancer screening should make news. ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson (embargoed link) got a jump on the story Monday. Now NBC picks up on the advice about the PSA blood test for Robert Bazell's lead. The NCI found that prostate tumors in men over the age of 75 are not worth finding because, at that age, the cancer grows so slowly that it is not lethal--so it might as well be ignored. On CBS, Nancy Cordes found "mixed and inconclusive new evidence that routine screening helps lower the death toll" among the elderly. Bazell added that the National Institutes of Health are running a 15-year study involving 74,000 men into the benefits of the blood test even earlier in life. Monday, ABC's Johnson was skeptical that the tests would be halted despite the science. Physicians worry about the "occasional aggressive case of cancer in an older man that might be missed if you do not do screening. They worry about ending up in front of a jury in that kind of a case and so I think many doctors will still offer the test to older men."
WING, PRAYER, RING For fun, both CBS and ABC--with Mark Phillips and Ryan Owens (embargoed link)--closed with the nuptials of Darren McWalters and Katie Hodgson in England. They were wed while wingwalking, standing on aerobatic biplanes, 1,000 feet in the air at 100 mph. A marriage that began "on a wing and a prayer," as CBS' Phillips put it.
