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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 11, 2009
Calamity befell Michael McLendon's extended family in rural Alabama. All three national newscasts led with the local story--the carnage that left eleven people dead. The source of the horror was McLendon himself. The 28-year-old shot and killed his own mother and her dogs in Kinston before driving to Samson where his grandmother, his uncle, two cousins and two neighbors were next to be blown away. Then he headed for Geneva, killing a pedestrian, a gas station customer and a passing motorist en route. When he arrived at the metals factory where he used to work, McLendon killed himself. McLendon's rampage was the first local violent crime to be the national newscasts' Story of the Day since the shooting spree at Northern Illinois University last February. McLendon doubled that campus death toll.
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THEY BLEED. IT LEADS Calamity befell Michael McLendon's extended family in rural Alabama. All three national newscasts led with the local story--the carnage that left eleven people dead. The source of the horror was McLendon himself. The 28-year-old shot and killed his own mother and her dogs in Kinston before driving to Samson where his grandmother, his uncle, two cousins and two neighbors were next to be blown away. Then he headed for Geneva, killing a pedestrian, a gas station customer and a passing motorist en route. When he arrived at the metals factory where he used to work, McLendon killed himself. McLendon's rampage was the first local violent crime to be the national newscasts' Story of the Day since the shooting spree at Northern Illinois University last February. McLendon doubled that campus death toll.
NBC's Ron Mott interpreted the killings thus: "It started as a methodical, deliberate attack but ended with mass murder." CBS' Mark Strassmann had the same take, narrating a crime that started as a family affair but turned into "firing randomly at anyone and anything." Confusingly, ABC's Steve Osunsami reported that "at his home authorities found what appears to be a clue, a list of former employers," none of whom were harmed in the rampage. "Officials do not agree on what it means but one of them said it appears to be a list of those who had done him wrong." By the way, Osunsami's tick-tock of each of the gruesome deaths accounted for only ten of the eleven corpses.
ABC followed on Osunsami's report with a mournful First Person replaying of Deputy Josh Myers' soundbites in reaction to the murders. He was assigned to the case by the Geneva County Sheriff's Department so was away from his home in Samson when McLendon arrived in town. It happened that his own wife and baby daughter were the neighbors of McLendon's uncle to be killed. The deputy recalled talking to his surviving four-year-old son. "He asked where momma was. I had to tell him that she was with Jesus. It is supposed to be me getting shot not my family."
THEY DIED WITH THEIR PENCILS It so happens that Stuttgart suffered firearms violence too. CBS followed its Alabama coverage with Richard Roth narrating German videotape from London. Tim Kretschmer, a 17-year-old, returned to his former high school armed with his father's sporting pistol and killed nine students and three teachers. The teenager himself died in an automobile showroom after hijacking a car and being chased by police, Roth reported. "School officials and former classmates called Kretschmer absolutely average, a mediocre student who was training to be a salesman." NBC had Robert Moore of ITN, its British newsgathering partner, file a brief stand-up from the crime scene. Moore repeated a "poignant detail" recounted by local police: many of the dead students were "still clutching their pencils" where they fell.
HOW BARBARA HURT WAS HURT The celebrity coverage of the violence alleged against singer Chris Brown inspired CBS' Byron Pitts. He quoted estimates that 1.3m women suffer violence at the hands of their spouses, partners, boyfriends and lovers each year. Of those, one in a thousand--1,300 women annually--end up dead. Pitts cited TMZ tabloid reports that Brown and his girlfriend Rihanna, the soul singer, had reconciled--even after he was charged with felony punching and choking and biting. Then Pitts introduced us to Barbara Hurt, a 37-year-old from Lakeland Fla: "He has cracked my ribs or broken some ribs. He has busted my eye I cannot count how many times. My nose has been broken and busted and bitten," Hurt recounted of Anthony Civitarese, soon to be released from jail having served his domestic battery sentence. Pitts attributed Hurt's injuries to "a cycle of abuse" of beatings and pleas for forgiveness and reconciliation. "Do not blame yourself and ask for help," he advised the battered. "Domestic violence is a crime."
SCIUTTO ON ZIMBABWE ABC's London-based Jim Sciutto is trying to keep coverage of Zimbabwe alive. Of the last ten stories about that benighted country on the three-network newscasts, five have been filed by Sciutto. His latest effort looks at the progress of Prime Minister Morgan Tszangirai's national unity government. The schools have reopened in Victoria Falls, even though they have no books, no electricity and no desks. Inflation is still rampant in Harare, where only dollars and rands are accepted as currency. And rural Mount Darwin has seen 5,000 cases of cholera in the past month: "Half the doctors have left. Those who remain are unpaid and exhausted."
TOTALLY MODERN MICHELLE A pair of First Ladies--the occupant Michelle Obama and her Democratic predecessor, the current Secretary of State--met to honor a global collection of women's rights activists at the State Department. NBC assigned diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell to the ceremonies. Mitchell decided to tell us nothing about women's rights, concentrating on a contrast between Hillary and Michelle instead. Back in the day, Rodham Clinton took on healthcare, Mitchell reminded us. Last week when Barack Obama tackled the same topic, his wife "was serving up food at a soup kitchen around town." Nevertheless the current First Lady gets high marks for style from Mitchell: "Totally modern when it comes to fashion and being fit!"
CHIP REID CHOOSES WRONG VERBS Contrast how the three White House correspondents covered the President's decision to sign into law a bill to pay for the government to keep operating through the end of this fiscal year, even though it contains earmarked spending, the kind he voted against this time last year when he was still Candidate Obama.
NBC handled the story briefly, assigning Savannah Guthrie to a stand-up in which she noted the signing ceremony took place "behind closed doors." ABC's Jake Tapper caught the White House in a pair of hypocritical soundbites--Barack Obama as candidate: "I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line;" Robert Gibbs, press secretary: "I think it is reasonable to assume that the President has not gone through each and every item in the legislation." In fairness, Tapper did point out that those disputed earmarks "constitute roughly 2% of the bill."
Now consider how CBS' Chip Reid, unfairly, characterizes that same 2%. "He signed a bill stuffed with porkbarrel spending…a $410bn domestic spending bill, 1,100 pages loaded with about 8,500 pet projects known as earmarks." Come on, Chip! Stuffed and loaded? Perhaps "peppered" and "sprinkled" were the verbs you were looking for.
BANK OF AMERICA, BY AMERICA, FOR AMERICA An attribute of financial center banks that are too big to fail, as the Federal Reserve Board likes to call them, is that they do business on a global scale. Citigroup, for example, arranges financing for public works in Dubai; JPMorgan Chase has clients in India; Bank of America has joint ventures with construction banks in China. All three banks continued to do such overseas business even after they received federal bailout funds from the TARP fund. A House committee held hearings to ask the Treasury Department why such banking is still permitted. NBC's Lisa Myers gave us the answer from Neel Kashkari, TARP's manager: "These financial institutions are global institutions and they take deposits from savers all around the world."
NBC's Myers was not convinced. She pointed out that Dubai and India and China were getting funds "while some American companies were struggling to get loans." Maybe Myers was suggesting that these banks should be nationalized in the other meaning of that word--not government owned but trade protectionist.
MADOFF KIN NOT OFF THE HOOK On the eve of the court hearing in which financier Bernard Madoff is expected to file a formal guilty plea to fraud charges, prosecution sources gave a heads up to ABC's Jim Avila (no link) and CBS' Armen Keteyian that the investigation would not end there. ABC's Avila repeated an unattributed tip that "as many as twelve of his former employees are still possible targets and that includes his family members." CBS' Keteyian named son Andrew and son Mark and brother Peter and wife Ruth: "Investigators are said to be interested in the $10m she withdrew from a brokerage account just one day before her husband was arrested."
SCHADENFREUDE FOR STEVE FORBES It is that time again for Forbes magazine to reap free publicity by focusing on the filthy rich. This year Dan Harris drew the Billionaires List assignment at ABC as he did in 2008; in 2007 ABC gave the job to Bill Weir. Just check the previous two entries and you can see times change. In both 2007 and 2008, the grinning publisher Steve Forbes ventured a cheesy dating joke about an unmarried plutocrat and how we might be able to sleep our way to wealth. No humor this time: "In the last year the world's richest 1,000-or-so people lost $2tr," Harris informed us. "We had over 300 dropouts. We have never had so many dropouts in one year," pouted the publisher.
Now listen to Anthony Mason's lame justification about why it is in our interest to have the Forbes list grow longer on CBS. "Remember, two-thirds of these billionaires are self-made. They are the pioneering businessmen like Bill Gates who created companies that have created the jobs and the wealth in this country so we want them to get richer because when they do, we do." At least he did not suggest prostituting ourselves. Yet still, Mason preposterously implies, mere multi-millionaires do no hiring when they run a business.
FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES "How cool is this?" asked marine biologist Diana Reiss from Sea World as she showed ABC's Robert Krulwich her underwater videotape of Porpoises at Play. "Very cool," Krulwich averred. Check it out for yourself.
NBC's Ron Mott interpreted the killings thus: "It started as a methodical, deliberate attack but ended with mass murder." CBS' Mark Strassmann had the same take, narrating a crime that started as a family affair but turned into "firing randomly at anyone and anything." Confusingly, ABC's Steve Osunsami reported that "at his home authorities found what appears to be a clue, a list of former employers," none of whom were harmed in the rampage. "Officials do not agree on what it means but one of them said it appears to be a list of those who had done him wrong." By the way, Osunsami's tick-tock of each of the gruesome deaths accounted for only ten of the eleven corpses.
ABC followed on Osunsami's report with a mournful First Person replaying of Deputy Josh Myers' soundbites in reaction to the murders. He was assigned to the case by the Geneva County Sheriff's Department so was away from his home in Samson when McLendon arrived in town. It happened that his own wife and baby daughter were the neighbors of McLendon's uncle to be killed. The deputy recalled talking to his surviving four-year-old son. "He asked where momma was. I had to tell him that she was with Jesus. It is supposed to be me getting shot not my family."
THEY DIED WITH THEIR PENCILS It so happens that Stuttgart suffered firearms violence too. CBS followed its Alabama coverage with Richard Roth narrating German videotape from London. Tim Kretschmer, a 17-year-old, returned to his former high school armed with his father's sporting pistol and killed nine students and three teachers. The teenager himself died in an automobile showroom after hijacking a car and being chased by police, Roth reported. "School officials and former classmates called Kretschmer absolutely average, a mediocre student who was training to be a salesman." NBC had Robert Moore of ITN, its British newsgathering partner, file a brief stand-up from the crime scene. Moore repeated a "poignant detail" recounted by local police: many of the dead students were "still clutching their pencils" where they fell.
HOW BARBARA HURT WAS HURT The celebrity coverage of the violence alleged against singer Chris Brown inspired CBS' Byron Pitts. He quoted estimates that 1.3m women suffer violence at the hands of their spouses, partners, boyfriends and lovers each year. Of those, one in a thousand--1,300 women annually--end up dead. Pitts cited TMZ tabloid reports that Brown and his girlfriend Rihanna, the soul singer, had reconciled--even after he was charged with felony punching and choking and biting. Then Pitts introduced us to Barbara Hurt, a 37-year-old from Lakeland Fla: "He has cracked my ribs or broken some ribs. He has busted my eye I cannot count how many times. My nose has been broken and busted and bitten," Hurt recounted of Anthony Civitarese, soon to be released from jail having served his domestic battery sentence. Pitts attributed Hurt's injuries to "a cycle of abuse" of beatings and pleas for forgiveness and reconciliation. "Do not blame yourself and ask for help," he advised the battered. "Domestic violence is a crime."
SCIUTTO ON ZIMBABWE ABC's London-based Jim Sciutto is trying to keep coverage of Zimbabwe alive. Of the last ten stories about that benighted country on the three-network newscasts, five have been filed by Sciutto. His latest effort looks at the progress of Prime Minister Morgan Tszangirai's national unity government. The schools have reopened in Victoria Falls, even though they have no books, no electricity and no desks. Inflation is still rampant in Harare, where only dollars and rands are accepted as currency. And rural Mount Darwin has seen 5,000 cases of cholera in the past month: "Half the doctors have left. Those who remain are unpaid and exhausted."
TOTALLY MODERN MICHELLE A pair of First Ladies--the occupant Michelle Obama and her Democratic predecessor, the current Secretary of State--met to honor a global collection of women's rights activists at the State Department. NBC assigned diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell to the ceremonies. Mitchell decided to tell us nothing about women's rights, concentrating on a contrast between Hillary and Michelle instead. Back in the day, Rodham Clinton took on healthcare, Mitchell reminded us. Last week when Barack Obama tackled the same topic, his wife "was serving up food at a soup kitchen around town." Nevertheless the current First Lady gets high marks for style from Mitchell: "Totally modern when it comes to fashion and being fit!"
CHIP REID CHOOSES WRONG VERBS Contrast how the three White House correspondents covered the President's decision to sign into law a bill to pay for the government to keep operating through the end of this fiscal year, even though it contains earmarked spending, the kind he voted against this time last year when he was still Candidate Obama.
NBC handled the story briefly, assigning Savannah Guthrie to a stand-up in which she noted the signing ceremony took place "behind closed doors." ABC's Jake Tapper caught the White House in a pair of hypocritical soundbites--Barack Obama as candidate: "I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line;" Robert Gibbs, press secretary: "I think it is reasonable to assume that the President has not gone through each and every item in the legislation." In fairness, Tapper did point out that those disputed earmarks "constitute roughly 2% of the bill."
Now consider how CBS' Chip Reid, unfairly, characterizes that same 2%. "He signed a bill stuffed with porkbarrel spending…a $410bn domestic spending bill, 1,100 pages loaded with about 8,500 pet projects known as earmarks." Come on, Chip! Stuffed and loaded? Perhaps "peppered" and "sprinkled" were the verbs you were looking for.
BANK OF AMERICA, BY AMERICA, FOR AMERICA An attribute of financial center banks that are too big to fail, as the Federal Reserve Board likes to call them, is that they do business on a global scale. Citigroup, for example, arranges financing for public works in Dubai; JPMorgan Chase has clients in India; Bank of America has joint ventures with construction banks in China. All three banks continued to do such overseas business even after they received federal bailout funds from the TARP fund. A House committee held hearings to ask the Treasury Department why such banking is still permitted. NBC's Lisa Myers gave us the answer from Neel Kashkari, TARP's manager: "These financial institutions are global institutions and they take deposits from savers all around the world."
NBC's Myers was not convinced. She pointed out that Dubai and India and China were getting funds "while some American companies were struggling to get loans." Maybe Myers was suggesting that these banks should be nationalized in the other meaning of that word--not government owned but trade protectionist.
MADOFF KIN NOT OFF THE HOOK On the eve of the court hearing in which financier Bernard Madoff is expected to file a formal guilty plea to fraud charges, prosecution sources gave a heads up to ABC's Jim Avila (no link) and CBS' Armen Keteyian that the investigation would not end there. ABC's Avila repeated an unattributed tip that "as many as twelve of his former employees are still possible targets and that includes his family members." CBS' Keteyian named son Andrew and son Mark and brother Peter and wife Ruth: "Investigators are said to be interested in the $10m she withdrew from a brokerage account just one day before her husband was arrested."
SCHADENFREUDE FOR STEVE FORBES It is that time again for Forbes magazine to reap free publicity by focusing on the filthy rich. This year Dan Harris drew the Billionaires List assignment at ABC as he did in 2008; in 2007 ABC gave the job to Bill Weir. Just check the previous two entries and you can see times change. In both 2007 and 2008, the grinning publisher Steve Forbes ventured a cheesy dating joke about an unmarried plutocrat and how we might be able to sleep our way to wealth. No humor this time: "In the last year the world's richest 1,000-or-so people lost $2tr," Harris informed us. "We had over 300 dropouts. We have never had so many dropouts in one year," pouted the publisher.
Now listen to Anthony Mason's lame justification about why it is in our interest to have the Forbes list grow longer on CBS. "Remember, two-thirds of these billionaires are self-made. They are the pioneering businessmen like Bill Gates who created companies that have created the jobs and the wealth in this country so we want them to get richer because when they do, we do." At least he did not suggest prostituting ourselves. Yet still, Mason preposterously implies, mere multi-millionaires do no hiring when they run a business.
FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES "How cool is this?" asked marine biologist Diana Reiss from Sea World as she showed ABC's Robert Krulwich her underwater videotape of Porpoises at Play. "Very cool," Krulwich averred. Check it out for yourself.
