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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 15, 2009
Taxed Enough Already! The slogan for hundreds of rallies nationwide to mark April 15th, the Internal Revenue Service's deadline for filing 2008's income tax returns, qualified as Story of the Day. The three networks covered the protests from around the nation--NBC from Los Angeles, CBS from Chicago, ABC from New York--with NBC and CBS deciding to make the 750-or-so teaparties their lead. ABC aired an Exclusive on Good Morning America with the First and Second Mate of the Maersk Line's Alabama, recounting their pirate adventure in Mombasa. ABC chose to re-air highlights for its lead. CBS used a substitute anchor for the second straight day, this time Maggie Rodriguez.
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FOX NEWS CHANNEL SETS NETWORKS’ TEATIME AGENDA Taxed Enough Already! The slogan for hundreds of rallies nationwide to mark April 15th, the Internal Revenue Service's deadline for filing 2008's income tax returns, qualified as Story of the Day. The three networks covered the protests from around the nation--NBC from Los Angeles, CBS from Chicago, ABC from New York--with NBC and CBS deciding to make the 750-or-so teaparties their lead. ABC aired an Exclusive on Good Morning America with the First and Second Mate of the Maersk Line's Alabama, recounting their pirate adventure in Mombasa. ABC chose to re-air highlights for its lead. CBS used a substitute anchor for the second straight day, this time Maggie Rodriguez.
Reporters faced a couple of delicate decisions about precise phrasing when covering the teabag parties. First, were they authentic, grassroots, populist protests or were they the product of mobilization by the networks' own rivals in the news media? NBC's Lee Cowan split the difference. He quoted organizers as insisting that they were "organic uprisings of likeminded taxpayers of both parties" and then handed off to his own network's White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd, who interpreted them as political rather than fiscal events--"anti-Obama rallies getting conservatives excited about the conservative movement again." CBS' Dean Reynolds showed us a split screen of Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto and Glenn Beck to illustrate that "a fistful of rightward leaning websites and commentators embraced the cause." On ABC, Dan Harris said the rallies were "cheered on" by Fox News Channel and talkradio.
Second, which policies did the rallies oppose and what platforms did they advocate as remedies? CBS' Reynolds portrayed them as anti-Keynesian, "a counterweight to the argument that there is no choice but to kickstart the economy with an infusion of spending." ABC' Harris, too, looked past the "taxes" in the title to identify spending as their target, "the bailouts, the stimulus plan and Barack Obama's budget." NBC's Cowan repeated the protests' literal title, Taxed Enough Already while CBS' Reynolds had the more nuanced interpretation that the protests were not against current taxes but against "tax hikes they suspect are right around the corner."
Cowan's literal take on NBC was incorrect, if David Wright's data were correct on ABC. Wright told us that because of the recession and the bear markets in real estate and in stocks, this is "a lean year for Uncle Sam." Income taxes and capital gains taxes have declined already, some $160bn lower than last year, a 14% reduction. To counter the teaparties, only NBC assigned a correspondent to cover the President's April 15th initiative. Savannah Guthrie told us of his pledge to simplify the tax code, ridding it of the "carveouts and loopholes" that make taxes so complicated to file, whatever their level.
ARE RACIST RADICALS A REAL THREAT? CBS' Bob Orr picked up on a Department of Homeland Security report that warned of a rise in white supremacist violence fueled by "rising unemployment, illegal immigration, a fear of gun control and the election of America's first black President." Orr did mention a lone gunman suspected of killing three police officers in Pittsburgh as being a "gun enthusiast, an anti-government racist" but could come up with no organized conspiracy to back up the warning. In fact, Orr's alarming report concluded as merely alarmist. His government sources told him of "no evidence that any fringe group is planning any kind of attack." Orr contented himself with archival footage of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and this generalization: "An interest in radical causes seems to peak during bad economic times"--which does not amount to much at all.
LIBERTY SUN STILL AT LIBERTY ABC's lead Exclusive may have looked back to last week's Indian Ocean drama on the Maersk Line's Alabama but the pirate bands of Somalia have already moved on. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and ABC's David Muir both narrated the attempted seizure 300-miles offshore of the New York based Liberty Sun, a second freighter flying the United States flag. Muir reported that the 20-man crew barricaded itself in the engine room so that when pirates boarded the ship after a rocket grenade attack there was no one to operate it. All three newscasts reenacted the Liberty Sun's escape with animated computer graphics.
CBS had Jeff Glor of its Early Show file a stake-out at Andrews AFB in Maryland awaiting the arrival of the Alabama's crew. In the meantime he ran down anti-piracy precautions. Diverting shipping around the Cape of Good Hope would be prohibitively expensive but confining merchant shipping to narrow sea lanes with naval patrols might be possible. The pirates' land bases are likely too small and scattered to be taken out by military strikes. The military solution proposed in Muir's report on ABC was to target the mother ships that tow the pirates' small speedboats out to the shipping lanes.
FOOD, JUICE, FUEL--AND A HOSTAGE First Mate Shane Murphy and Second Mate Colin Wright recounted last Wednesday's confrontation on board the Alabama in Jim Sciutto's Exclusive for ABC. The Maersk Line crew had been trained not to resist a pirate boarding party but some of them did anyway. They thought they had successfully repelled the gun toting quartet and persuaded them to leave before the USS Bainbridge should arrive on the scene. As an incentive Captain Richard Phillips gave them food, juice, fuel and a lifeboat to replace the pirate speedboat, which was disabled. Then a "disastrous turn," Sciutto recounted. The captain was in the lifeboat to explain how to sail it when he was taken hostage. "There never was a plan to exchange Phillips for the pirates."
MEXICO IS NOT A FAILURE Terry Moran, anchor of ABC's Nightline and Andrea Mitchell, NBC's diplomatic correspondent, arrived in Mexico City ahead of Barack Obama's state visit. Both correspondents were granted an interview with Felipe Calderon, the President of Mexico, in his office. ABC's Moran brought up the recent Pentagon assessment that his republic runs the risk of becoming a "failed state" because of the narcoviolence in its northern states that has claimed as many as 10,000 lives in the past two years. "Absolutely not," Calderon asserted. As for that fence built by the United States along his northern border: "I cannot say that this is a friendly attitude." For its part, the United States is "tightening the financial noose" around three trafficking organizations, NBC's Mitchell pointed out. Banking will now be more difficult for the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM The burka in Kabul is often treated by western reporters as a symbol of the repression of women by Afghan society. Richard Engel for NBC's In Depth offered a creepier explanation for the burka's role in Afghanistan's sexual politics. It allows women who have escaped a husband's brutality to walk in the street in anonymous safety. Engel visited a battered women's shelter in Kabul which presented hair-raising tales of sexist depravity--a nine-year-old girl sold by her mother as a child bride for $300; a teenage bride whose 65-year-old gambler husband offered her as a prostitute in payment for his debts; a 22-year-old wife of a guerrilla who broke her legs and pulled out her fingernails. The women will have to live in the confinement of the shelter for years--unless they use that burka to venture outside.
PENNIES FOR PERUVIAN POTTERY CBS' Daniel Sieberg set off from a small saver's Harlem apartment on a trip to the remote Peruvian village of Villa El Salvador in order to lavish free publicity on microplace.com, an online investment site that attracts microloans for small businesses in the Third World. The Website's funds are bundled through Calvert Investments for banks such as Edyficar in Peru. Edyficar, in turn, has lent a total of $10,000 to Paulina Atahja, who runs a craft pottery making decorated bull statuettes. Sieberg returned to Harlem, painted bull in hand, with the news that a sliver of Peruvian poverty has been relieved and an annual 3% rate of return is secure.
THEN ALONG CAME SUSAN YouTube must have thought it was generating the week's major online music story when it assembled a symphony orchestra under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas to perform in Carnegie Hall. The auditions were held across the World Wide Web as musicians made videostreamed submissions. Sure enough ABC took the bait Monday as John Berman previewed the concert and NBC sent Chris Jansing to Spokane to profile trumpeter Eric Moe.
Then along came Susan Boyle. The 47-year-old Scottish spinster made the disdainful celebrity panel of Britain's Got Talent eat crow by belting out a crowdpleasing I Dreamed a Dream. The video went viral and has now been seen by a 6m global audience online. ABC's David Muir covered the sensation Tuesday but his network did not post a videostream of Muir's story. CBS has made its package available. "You could just about hear the sound of jaws dropping around the land," reflected Mark Phillips as he found his way to the local pub where Boyle sings karaoke--and Tilson Thomas' Carnegie concert is consigned to relative obscurity.
Reporters faced a couple of delicate decisions about precise phrasing when covering the teabag parties. First, were they authentic, grassroots, populist protests or were they the product of mobilization by the networks' own rivals in the news media? NBC's Lee Cowan split the difference. He quoted organizers as insisting that they were "organic uprisings of likeminded taxpayers of both parties" and then handed off to his own network's White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd, who interpreted them as political rather than fiscal events--"anti-Obama rallies getting conservatives excited about the conservative movement again." CBS' Dean Reynolds showed us a split screen of Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto and Glenn Beck to illustrate that "a fistful of rightward leaning websites and commentators embraced the cause." On ABC, Dan Harris said the rallies were "cheered on" by Fox News Channel and talkradio.
Second, which policies did the rallies oppose and what platforms did they advocate as remedies? CBS' Reynolds portrayed them as anti-Keynesian, "a counterweight to the argument that there is no choice but to kickstart the economy with an infusion of spending." ABC' Harris, too, looked past the "taxes" in the title to identify spending as their target, "the bailouts, the stimulus plan and Barack Obama's budget." NBC's Cowan repeated the protests' literal title, Taxed Enough Already while CBS' Reynolds had the more nuanced interpretation that the protests were not against current taxes but against "tax hikes they suspect are right around the corner."
Cowan's literal take on NBC was incorrect, if David Wright's data were correct on ABC. Wright told us that because of the recession and the bear markets in real estate and in stocks, this is "a lean year for Uncle Sam." Income taxes and capital gains taxes have declined already, some $160bn lower than last year, a 14% reduction. To counter the teaparties, only NBC assigned a correspondent to cover the President's April 15th initiative. Savannah Guthrie told us of his pledge to simplify the tax code, ridding it of the "carveouts and loopholes" that make taxes so complicated to file, whatever their level.
ARE RACIST RADICALS A REAL THREAT? CBS' Bob Orr picked up on a Department of Homeland Security report that warned of a rise in white supremacist violence fueled by "rising unemployment, illegal immigration, a fear of gun control and the election of America's first black President." Orr did mention a lone gunman suspected of killing three police officers in Pittsburgh as being a "gun enthusiast, an anti-government racist" but could come up with no organized conspiracy to back up the warning. In fact, Orr's alarming report concluded as merely alarmist. His government sources told him of "no evidence that any fringe group is planning any kind of attack." Orr contented himself with archival footage of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and this generalization: "An interest in radical causes seems to peak during bad economic times"--which does not amount to much at all.
LIBERTY SUN STILL AT LIBERTY ABC's lead Exclusive may have looked back to last week's Indian Ocean drama on the Maersk Line's Alabama but the pirate bands of Somalia have already moved on. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and ABC's David Muir both narrated the attempted seizure 300-miles offshore of the New York based Liberty Sun, a second freighter flying the United States flag. Muir reported that the 20-man crew barricaded itself in the engine room so that when pirates boarded the ship after a rocket grenade attack there was no one to operate it. All three newscasts reenacted the Liberty Sun's escape with animated computer graphics.
CBS had Jeff Glor of its Early Show file a stake-out at Andrews AFB in Maryland awaiting the arrival of the Alabama's crew. In the meantime he ran down anti-piracy precautions. Diverting shipping around the Cape of Good Hope would be prohibitively expensive but confining merchant shipping to narrow sea lanes with naval patrols might be possible. The pirates' land bases are likely too small and scattered to be taken out by military strikes. The military solution proposed in Muir's report on ABC was to target the mother ships that tow the pirates' small speedboats out to the shipping lanes.
FOOD, JUICE, FUEL--AND A HOSTAGE First Mate Shane Murphy and Second Mate Colin Wright recounted last Wednesday's confrontation on board the Alabama in Jim Sciutto's Exclusive for ABC. The Maersk Line crew had been trained not to resist a pirate boarding party but some of them did anyway. They thought they had successfully repelled the gun toting quartet and persuaded them to leave before the USS Bainbridge should arrive on the scene. As an incentive Captain Richard Phillips gave them food, juice, fuel and a lifeboat to replace the pirate speedboat, which was disabled. Then a "disastrous turn," Sciutto recounted. The captain was in the lifeboat to explain how to sail it when he was taken hostage. "There never was a plan to exchange Phillips for the pirates."
MEXICO IS NOT A FAILURE Terry Moran, anchor of ABC's Nightline and Andrea Mitchell, NBC's diplomatic correspondent, arrived in Mexico City ahead of Barack Obama's state visit. Both correspondents were granted an interview with Felipe Calderon, the President of Mexico, in his office. ABC's Moran brought up the recent Pentagon assessment that his republic runs the risk of becoming a "failed state" because of the narcoviolence in its northern states that has claimed as many as 10,000 lives in the past two years. "Absolutely not," Calderon asserted. As for that fence built by the United States along his northern border: "I cannot say that this is a friendly attitude." For its part, the United States is "tightening the financial noose" around three trafficking organizations, NBC's Mitchell pointed out. Banking will now be more difficult for the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM The burka in Kabul is often treated by western reporters as a symbol of the repression of women by Afghan society. Richard Engel for NBC's In Depth offered a creepier explanation for the burka's role in Afghanistan's sexual politics. It allows women who have escaped a husband's brutality to walk in the street in anonymous safety. Engel visited a battered women's shelter in Kabul which presented hair-raising tales of sexist depravity--a nine-year-old girl sold by her mother as a child bride for $300; a teenage bride whose 65-year-old gambler husband offered her as a prostitute in payment for his debts; a 22-year-old wife of a guerrilla who broke her legs and pulled out her fingernails. The women will have to live in the confinement of the shelter for years--unless they use that burka to venture outside.
PENNIES FOR PERUVIAN POTTERY CBS' Daniel Sieberg set off from a small saver's Harlem apartment on a trip to the remote Peruvian village of Villa El Salvador in order to lavish free publicity on microplace.com, an online investment site that attracts microloans for small businesses in the Third World. The Website's funds are bundled through Calvert Investments for banks such as Edyficar in Peru. Edyficar, in turn, has lent a total of $10,000 to Paulina Atahja, who runs a craft pottery making decorated bull statuettes. Sieberg returned to Harlem, painted bull in hand, with the news that a sliver of Peruvian poverty has been relieved and an annual 3% rate of return is secure.
THEN ALONG CAME SUSAN YouTube must have thought it was generating the week's major online music story when it assembled a symphony orchestra under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas to perform in Carnegie Hall. The auditions were held across the World Wide Web as musicians made videostreamed submissions. Sure enough ABC took the bait Monday as John Berman previewed the concert and NBC sent Chris Jansing to Spokane to profile trumpeter Eric Moe.
Then along came Susan Boyle. The 47-year-old Scottish spinster made the disdainful celebrity panel of Britain's Got Talent eat crow by belting out a crowdpleasing I Dreamed a Dream. The video went viral and has now been seen by a 6m global audience online. ABC's David Muir covered the sensation Tuesday but his network did not post a videostream of Muir's story. CBS has made its package available. "You could just about hear the sound of jaws dropping around the land," reflected Mark Phillips as he found his way to the local pub where Boyle sings karaoke--and Tilson Thomas' Carnegie concert is consigned to relative obscurity.
