 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 03, 2009
Any of three big stories could have legitimately topped the news agenda. The monthly unemployment statistics for March revealed worsening joblessness: 8.5% of the workforce unemployed. President Barack Obama continued his European diplomacy, traveling to the Rhine River border of France and Germany for NATO's 60th anniversary summit. A community center in downtown Binghamton NY was targeted by a rampaging suicidal gunman. All three newscasts selected the shooting spree as the most newsworthy of the three, leading each newscast and qualifying as Story of the Day. Friday saw an all-female anchor line-up. Katie Couric traveled back to New York from London to take her chair at CBS. NBC and ABC used substitutes from their morning programs: Ann Curry from Today and Diane Sawyer from Good Morning America.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 03, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
BINGHAMTON SHOOTER UPSTAGES JOBLESS, NATO Any of three big stories could have legitimately topped the news agenda. The monthly unemployment statistics for March revealed worsening joblessness: 8.5% of the workforce unemployed. President Barack Obama continued his European diplomacy, traveling to the Rhine River border of France and Germany for NATO's 60th anniversary summit. A community center in downtown Binghamton NY was targeted by a rampaging suicidal gunman. All three newscasts selected the shooting spree as the most newsworthy of the three, leading each newscast and qualifying as Story of the Day. Friday saw an all-female anchor line-up. Katie Couric traveled back to New York from London to take her chair at CBS. NBC and ABC used substitutes from their morning programs: Ann Curry from Today and Diane Sawyer from Good Morning America.
Jiverly Voong, a 41-year-old Vietnamese-American, barricaded the doors of Binghamton's American Civic Association with a car before he killed 13 others, wounded four more critically and then ended his own life. Police had arrived on the scene within two minutes of the 10:30 am attack, ABC's Dan Harris reported, as a woman who was shot in the reception area "survived by pretending to be dead and called 911." Police did not identify Voong's body and declare the incident over until 3:00 pm. "The gunman held some 37 hostages," NBC's Ron Allen reported, "some hiding in a closet, others downstairs in the boiler room." On CBS, Bob Orr had a contradictory report: "He went to a classroom; calmly shot everyone he saw before turning the gun on himself and shooting himself; there was never any hostage standoff."
The American Civic Association, founded in 1939, offers support for immigrants. "English language services, citizenship classes, psychological and social counseling for people who are trying to understand a new country and a new culture," was how NBC's Rehema Ellis put it. ABC's Stephanie Sy reported that Binghamton is proud of its cultural diversity. "Immigrants from all over the world have made a home here--Vietnamese, Bosnians, Iraqis--many seeking refuge from wartorn countries." Voong himself became a naturalized citizen nearly 30 years ago, NBC's Pete Williams told us. CBS' Jeff Glor reported that those Voong killed were in the process of taking the immigration citizenship exam. As ABC's Harris put it: "They came to this country to start a new life and they ended up dying in what has become a signature American disaster, a shooting rampage."
ABC's substitute anchor Diane Sawyer cited the statistic that 50 "multiple shootings" have killed 200 people nationwide in the two years since the massacre on the campus at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead. Since then, the Binghamton shooting (14 min on 14 dead) was the fifth of those 50 to qualify as Story of the Day on the network newscasts. The others were last month's McLendon family carnage in Alabama (10 min on 11 dead) and shootings at Northern Illinois University (18 min on 6 dead), a city council meeting in Kirkwood Mo (6 min on 6 dead) and during Christmas shopping at an Omaha department store (15 min on 9 dead). "There is not a lot of sense of urgency on gun control," ABC's Pierre Thomas reported from the Justice Department, contrasting those 50 shootings with 250m guns in circulation nationwide. The killer Voong, CBS' Orr noted, "did own two legally registered guns but we still do not know yet if those are the same guns used in the spree."
OBAMA ARROGANCE SOUNDBITE SETS NATO AGENDA The coverage of the NATO Summit on the 60th anniversary of its foundation was underwhelming. The three newscasts assigned their male White House correspondents to Barack Obama's next stop in Strasbourg. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to contain the westward march of the Soviet Union's Communist sphere of influence in post-WWII Europe. Not one of the three explained how such an alliance now finds itself engaged in an aggressive war against radical Islamists in Afghanistan. It just does.
ABC's Jake Tapper described the President as "making the case that for the NATO alliance to mean anything, the 28-member nations need to step up and help vanquish al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan." NBC's Chuck Todd saw Obama "trying to convince old allies that an old alliance like NATO has a new mission…the challenge for the President is to convince NATO allies that this is not just America's war." CBS' Chip Reid used outdated Bush Administration rhetoric to characterize Obama's pitch: "In the greater War on Terror, Europe cannot stand on the sidelines."
Why was explaining NATO's current unlikely role not on the correspondents' agenda? Because the President had different priorities. He wanted to talk in broad terms about transAtlantic attitudes. All three newscasts used his soundbite to a hall of students in a town-hall-style meeting: "There have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive. But in Europe there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious."
CARLA & MICHELLE The blatant sex role stereotyping of White House assignments continues unabated. Add Savannah Guthrie to the list of correspondents on the distaff side--ABC's Yunji de Nies, CBS' Sheila MacVicar, NBC's Dawna Friesen, twice--whose chore has been to follow Michelle Obama around this week. NBC's Guthrie was in Strasbourg for the NATO Summit yet while her male colleagues covered Afghanistan, her task was the "much anticipated first encounter between the world's most famous First Ladies." Mrs Sarkozy meet Mrs Obama. "For all their differences these First Ladies have one thing in common--a public here in France and in America that is endlessly fascinated with them, not to mention the international press." At least the female members of that corps.
ECONOMISTS ARE DISMAL Pick your dismal economic statistic. All three newscasts covered the rise in the unemployment rate--Betsy Stark on ABC, Anthony Mason on CBS, CNBC's Trish Regan on NBC--and all three cited the number of jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007: 5.1m. Stark used the number of states whose unemployment rate is worse than 10%: seven. Mason used the underemployment rate, including those who have given up looking for work and those involuntarily working part-time: 15.6%. Regan told us that even corporations that are still making profits are reducing payroll: IBM.
Both Mason and Stark consulted the crystal balls of unidentified "economists." Economists say that "the worst months may now be behind us. While the economy will continue to lose jobs the pace of those losses should begin to slow"--CBS' Mason. Economists say that "improvements in the job market lag the stock market by several months and the best we can hope for right now is for the job losses to get smaller"--ABC's Stark.
HOMELESS AND HUNGRY Amid all that joblessness, NBC filed a report on the homeless and CBS on the hungry. The 32m Americans on food stamps now receive 13% more money on their supermarket debit cards, CBS' Nancy Cordes told us. The extra will help hungry families, of course, but Cordes explained why it is paid for from the federal government's stimulus legislation: "The main goal is to help the grocer," whose increased sales volume will require more workers. Janet Shamlian filed some nitty-gritty video of the back streets of Philadelphia for her Making a Difference feature for NBC. Shamlian profiled the Back On My Feet roadrunning club for street people, including onetime drug addicts "hoping for that runner's high." Shamlian misidentified the high as "that sense of accomplishment" when in fact it is a shot of endorphins. The junkie joggers are organized by marathoner Anne Mahlum, who was ABC's Person of the Week at the end of 2007. Mahlum's next stop must surely be CBS' Assignment America.
IOWA ROLLS OUT GAY WELCOME MAT Iowa is not literally "a bastion of middle American values," ABC's Chris Bury suggested, it is merely "often portrayed" as such. So are gay weddings middle American or not? The state's Supreme Court thinks so. It rejected Iowa's ban on being married to someone of one's own gender. Now Iowa joins Massachusetts and Connecticut in recognizing the tying of gay knots. There is a pitch on YouTube that markets the state as an immigration Mecca for marriage-minded homosexuals: "If you are looking for a great place to live, a place where people treat their neighbors with respect, please consider coming to Iowa." Bury showed us the seven other potential welcoming states, which have not explicitly permitted such unions but have not passed an outright ban either: New Mexico, Wyoming, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
LIFE DOCUMENTED AFTERMATH OF DEATH NBC provided free publicity to the posting of 41-year-old magazine photojournalism at life.com. The freshly unearthed photographs were taken by Life Magazine's Henry Groskinsky at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, documenting the grief of King's entourage. Groskinsky offered a show-&-tell to Mark Potter: "It is not clear why these pictures were not published until now."
GIVING CINDERELLA CONFIDENCE Diane Sawyer brought her Good Morning America sensibility with her when she selected ABC's Person of the Week. Kim Peters runs the Prom Shop Project in Texas, collecting 5,000 gowns for high school seniors who cannot afford to be the belle of the ball. Sawyer showed us the teenagers trying on the dresses. She called Peters "a kind of fairy godmother" who "makes princesses out of young women." Sawyer's unconvincing conclusion to a report that focused on fashion and accessories was that Peters "understands that sometimes it is not just a ruffle or a strand of pearls, sometimes it is the gift of confidence, the confidence to shine."
Jiverly Voong, a 41-year-old Vietnamese-American, barricaded the doors of Binghamton's American Civic Association with a car before he killed 13 others, wounded four more critically and then ended his own life. Police had arrived on the scene within two minutes of the 10:30 am attack, ABC's Dan Harris reported, as a woman who was shot in the reception area "survived by pretending to be dead and called 911." Police did not identify Voong's body and declare the incident over until 3:00 pm. "The gunman held some 37 hostages," NBC's Ron Allen reported, "some hiding in a closet, others downstairs in the boiler room." On CBS, Bob Orr had a contradictory report: "He went to a classroom; calmly shot everyone he saw before turning the gun on himself and shooting himself; there was never any hostage standoff."
The American Civic Association, founded in 1939, offers support for immigrants. "English language services, citizenship classes, psychological and social counseling for people who are trying to understand a new country and a new culture," was how NBC's Rehema Ellis put it. ABC's Stephanie Sy reported that Binghamton is proud of its cultural diversity. "Immigrants from all over the world have made a home here--Vietnamese, Bosnians, Iraqis--many seeking refuge from wartorn countries." Voong himself became a naturalized citizen nearly 30 years ago, NBC's Pete Williams told us. CBS' Jeff Glor reported that those Voong killed were in the process of taking the immigration citizenship exam. As ABC's Harris put it: "They came to this country to start a new life and they ended up dying in what has become a signature American disaster, a shooting rampage."
ABC's substitute anchor Diane Sawyer cited the statistic that 50 "multiple shootings" have killed 200 people nationwide in the two years since the massacre on the campus at Virginia Tech that left 33 dead. Since then, the Binghamton shooting (14 min on 14 dead) was the fifth of those 50 to qualify as Story of the Day on the network newscasts. The others were last month's McLendon family carnage in Alabama (10 min on 11 dead) and shootings at Northern Illinois University (18 min on 6 dead), a city council meeting in Kirkwood Mo (6 min on 6 dead) and during Christmas shopping at an Omaha department store (15 min on 9 dead). "There is not a lot of sense of urgency on gun control," ABC's Pierre Thomas reported from the Justice Department, contrasting those 50 shootings with 250m guns in circulation nationwide. The killer Voong, CBS' Orr noted, "did own two legally registered guns but we still do not know yet if those are the same guns used in the spree."
OBAMA ARROGANCE SOUNDBITE SETS NATO AGENDA The coverage of the NATO Summit on the 60th anniversary of its foundation was underwhelming. The three newscasts assigned their male White House correspondents to Barack Obama's next stop in Strasbourg. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created to contain the westward march of the Soviet Union's Communist sphere of influence in post-WWII Europe. Not one of the three explained how such an alliance now finds itself engaged in an aggressive war against radical Islamists in Afghanistan. It just does.
ABC's Jake Tapper described the President as "making the case that for the NATO alliance to mean anything, the 28-member nations need to step up and help vanquish al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan." NBC's Chuck Todd saw Obama "trying to convince old allies that an old alliance like NATO has a new mission…the challenge for the President is to convince NATO allies that this is not just America's war." CBS' Chip Reid used outdated Bush Administration rhetoric to characterize Obama's pitch: "In the greater War on Terror, Europe cannot stand on the sidelines."
Why was explaining NATO's current unlikely role not on the correspondents' agenda? Because the President had different priorities. He wanted to talk in broad terms about transAtlantic attitudes. All three newscasts used his soundbite to a hall of students in a town-hall-style meeting: "There have been times when America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive. But in Europe there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious."
CARLA & MICHELLE The blatant sex role stereotyping of White House assignments continues unabated. Add Savannah Guthrie to the list of correspondents on the distaff side--ABC's Yunji de Nies, CBS' Sheila MacVicar, NBC's Dawna Friesen, twice--whose chore has been to follow Michelle Obama around this week. NBC's Guthrie was in Strasbourg for the NATO Summit yet while her male colleagues covered Afghanistan, her task was the "much anticipated first encounter between the world's most famous First Ladies." Mrs Sarkozy meet Mrs Obama. "For all their differences these First Ladies have one thing in common--a public here in France and in America that is endlessly fascinated with them, not to mention the international press." At least the female members of that corps.
ECONOMISTS ARE DISMAL Pick your dismal economic statistic. All three newscasts covered the rise in the unemployment rate--Betsy Stark on ABC, Anthony Mason on CBS, CNBC's Trish Regan on NBC--and all three cited the number of jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007: 5.1m. Stark used the number of states whose unemployment rate is worse than 10%: seven. Mason used the underemployment rate, including those who have given up looking for work and those involuntarily working part-time: 15.6%. Regan told us that even corporations that are still making profits are reducing payroll: IBM.
Both Mason and Stark consulted the crystal balls of unidentified "economists." Economists say that "the worst months may now be behind us. While the economy will continue to lose jobs the pace of those losses should begin to slow"--CBS' Mason. Economists say that "improvements in the job market lag the stock market by several months and the best we can hope for right now is for the job losses to get smaller"--ABC's Stark.
HOMELESS AND HUNGRY Amid all that joblessness, NBC filed a report on the homeless and CBS on the hungry. The 32m Americans on food stamps now receive 13% more money on their supermarket debit cards, CBS' Nancy Cordes told us. The extra will help hungry families, of course, but Cordes explained why it is paid for from the federal government's stimulus legislation: "The main goal is to help the grocer," whose increased sales volume will require more workers. Janet Shamlian filed some nitty-gritty video of the back streets of Philadelphia for her Making a Difference feature for NBC. Shamlian profiled the Back On My Feet roadrunning club for street people, including onetime drug addicts "hoping for that runner's high." Shamlian misidentified the high as "that sense of accomplishment" when in fact it is a shot of endorphins. The junkie joggers are organized by marathoner Anne Mahlum, who was ABC's Person of the Week at the end of 2007. Mahlum's next stop must surely be CBS' Assignment America.
IOWA ROLLS OUT GAY WELCOME MAT Iowa is not literally "a bastion of middle American values," ABC's Chris Bury suggested, it is merely "often portrayed" as such. So are gay weddings middle American or not? The state's Supreme Court thinks so. It rejected Iowa's ban on being married to someone of one's own gender. Now Iowa joins Massachusetts and Connecticut in recognizing the tying of gay knots. There is a pitch on YouTube that markets the state as an immigration Mecca for marriage-minded homosexuals: "If you are looking for a great place to live, a place where people treat their neighbors with respect, please consider coming to Iowa." Bury showed us the seven other potential welcoming states, which have not explicitly permitted such unions but have not passed an outright ban either: New Mexico, Wyoming, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.
LIFE DOCUMENTED AFTERMATH OF DEATH NBC provided free publicity to the posting of 41-year-old magazine photojournalism at life.com. The freshly unearthed photographs were taken by Life Magazine's Henry Groskinsky at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, documenting the grief of King's entourage. Groskinsky offered a show-&-tell to Mark Potter: "It is not clear why these pictures were not published until now."
GIVING CINDERELLA CONFIDENCE Diane Sawyer brought her Good Morning America sensibility with her when she selected ABC's Person of the Week. Kim Peters runs the Prom Shop Project in Texas, collecting 5,000 gowns for high school seniors who cannot afford to be the belle of the ball. Sawyer showed us the teenagers trying on the dresses. She called Peters "a kind of fairy godmother" who "makes princesses out of young women." Sawyer's unconvincing conclusion to a report that focused on fashion and accessories was that Peters "understands that sometimes it is not just a ruffle or a strand of pearls, sometimes it is the gift of confidence, the confidence to shine."
