 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 10, 2009
It was just a single murder, allegedly by an embittered eightysomething ex-con. Normally that is not enough mayhem to lead a local newscast let alone the national networks. Yet the setting was the nation's capital, along the DC Mall's Museum Row. The site was the Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the Mall's best-attended venues, one dedicated to repudiating anti-Semitic killers. And the accused murderer of Stephen Johns, a museum security guard, was James von Brunn, whose online writings deny the Nazi Holocaust and accuse Jews of a conspiracy to use the Federal Reserve Board to control the national economy. So all three network newscasts led with the Holocaust Museum and it was the Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 10, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MURDER ON DC’S MUSEUM ROW It was just a single murder, allegedly by an embittered eightysomething ex-con. Normally that is not enough mayhem to lead a local newscast let alone the national networks. Yet the setting was the nation's capital, along the DC Mall's Museum Row. The site was the Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the Mall's best-attended venues, one dedicated to repudiating anti-Semitic killers. And the accused murderer of Stephen Johns, a museum security guard, was James von Brunn, whose online writings deny the Nazi Holocaust and accuse Jews of a conspiracy to use the Federal Reserve Board to control the national economy. So all three network newscasts led with the Holocaust Museum and it was the Story of the Day.
"The Holocaust Museum has been prepared for something just like this since it opened 16 years ago," noted NBC's Pete Williams. "Investigators say the guard stopped the gunman from getting beyond the security checkpoint." von Brunn was wounded in crossfire and "taken to the hospital handcuffed to a gurney," ABC's Pierre Thomas recounted. CBS showed us cellphone pictures of a struggle at the museum's entrance and von Brunn's parked red car as part of Sharyl Attkisson's report.
NBC's Williams recounted von Brunn's previous brush with the law. Back in 1981, at the age of 61, he made an armed entry into the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Board and tried to place the Board of Governors under citizen's arrest for raising interest rates. "He served seven years in prison, On his Website he blamed a negro jury and a Jew judge." ABC's Thomas quoted von Brunn's ex-wife as saying that he "wanted to die in a blaze with his boots on." CBS' Bob Orr quoted police as saying that von Brunn "apparently acted alone."
CBS’ ORR RELIES ON INNUENDO It is fair enough that the network newscasts should spend so much time on this murder--not because James von Brunn's ideology presents a threat to the republic but because his act was bizarre and sensational.
So CBS' Bob Orr was out of line when he tried to make more of von Brunn's bigoted views than they warranted. His coverage of von Brunn's Website holywesternempire.org and his writings Kill the Best Gentiles was fair game. Where Orr went out of line was to claim that von Brunn's alleged violence "underscores a troubling trend" and that "the hatred he spewed is at the very base of a wider ongoing threat." He presented no evidence other than to say that von Brunn "has moved around in white supremacist circles." When he tied von Brunn to the assassination of George Tiller, the Wichita abortionist, he did so not by establishing a link between the two but by stating that they occurred eleven days apart. Tyndall Report found similar recklessness in Orr's April coverage of a Homeland Security report on white supremacists. This is not reporting; this is innuendo.
Mara Schiavocampo on NBC's In Depth was nuanced where Orr was slapdash. She showed us the nation's most active neo-Nazis, the National Socialist Movement, parading in St Louis. She pointed out that NSM has been officially designated as non-violent. She obtained a soundbite on their racist program, which is one of citizenship. "Only pure whites can be citizens." Besides people of color, they would also consign homosexuals and Jews to guest-resident status. Schiavocampo checked in with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading monitor of white supremacists. It mentioned neither the Federal Reserve Board nor the Nazi Holocaust, von Brunn's pet issues, as ideological motivation: "Principally these groups have really successfully exploited the immigration issue." Hispanics, not Jews, seem to be their betes noires.
BURY FINDS A FIAT The plight of the automobile industry has been covered so heavily in the past few weeks (54 separate reports since the end of April) that CBS and NBC refrained from going into extra detail as Chrysler's transition from bankruptcy into merger with Fiat was formally consummated. ABC did bother to assign a correspondent to the deal and Chris Bury deserves kudos for the clunker he found to illustrate it. Check out the 1979 red Fiat convertible, sale price $4,995, at a dealership in Downers Grove Ill. Or rather check out its cacophony as it starts and its emissions once it gets going. "Car buffs say modern Fiats perform much better," Bury reassured us.
SUPPLY-&-DEMAND OR SPECULATION? As the cost of a barrel of crude oil surpassed $70 on global financial markets, both CBS and ABC reflected on the impact on the price at the pump. ABC's Dan Harris used the statistic that the national average price of a gallon of gasoline has risen for six straight weeks, now standing at $2.63. CBS' Dean Reynolds called the climb of $1/gallon since December "the largest, over a six-month period, in history."
Is conventional supply-and-demand at work here? ABC's Harris thinks so: "OPEC countries have cut back on their oil production." CBS' Reynolds was not sure. "Demand right now is flat," he asserted. He suggested the weak dollar as one reason for the hike; the other is financial speculation. "Investors are driving up the price further by buying more oil as they see signs of an economic recovery and the potential for increasing demand. Of course the rising price could stall the very recovery they are anticipating."
KIVA COMES HOME Earlier this year, CBS' Daniel Sieberg publicized microcredit loans to potters in Peru and ABC anchor Charles Gibson made author Kate Smith Milway his network's Person of the Week. Smith Milway's book One Hen tells the tale of microcredit loans to poultry farmers in Ghana. Now microfinance comes home. ABC's Betsy Stark offered her second free plug to kiva.org, a Website that now facilitates person-to-person loans to small businesses in this country. Stark cited the site's track record: 98% of Kiva's entrepreneurs repay their loans in full. ABC's Stark had previously mentioned Kiva's role in helping Iraqi reconstruction back in the summer of 2007.
PRIVILEGED MOUSAVI VS POPULIST AHMADINEJAD Vibrant footage of green activists lining the boulevards of Teheran brought election fever to life on NBC. Islamist green is the color of supporters of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinjead sports the green-white-red tricolor of the flag of the Islamic Revolution.
Coverage of Iran on American newscasts so often concentrates on our western preoccupations: where Iranian leaders stand on Israel or nuclear weapons or the role of Islamic law. Refreshingly, Richard Engel portrayed the sociological and economic bases of domestic support for each candidate. Mousavi represents privilege--"students, intellectuals, business owners…many of Iran's wealthy elite." Ahmadinejad accuses Mousavi's backers of corruption as he takes a populist tack: "His base is the working class in south Teheran. In his four years in office the President has tripled government wages and awarded billions in loans to low-income families."
THIS ONE FORGETS TO NOD & WINK CBS sent Mark Phillips to the West Bank to talk to Jewish settlers living on occupied Palestinian territory. They told him that they "have always known that new outposts have been forbidden" but they never took the ban seriously: "Successive Israeli governments, they insist, have always had a nod and a wink understanding with the United States that building on existing settlements was tolerated." Phillips showed us "bulldozers and cranes still at work" even as President Barack Obama reiterates longstanding policy and calls settlement construction illegitimate. "The fear here is that this one may actually mean it."
KILLING INNOCENT VIRTUAL IRAQIS IS FORBIDDEN ABC's A Closer Look offered free publicity to Six Days in Fallujah, a videogame title to be released by Atomic Games next year. Bob Woodruff told us that its designers call their realistic scenario of urban combat "part game, part documentary." They have hired dozens of USMC veterans of Operation Phantom Fury to make sure of Six Days…' verisimilitude in rendering "the most intense urban warfare of US troops in half a century. In the real Battle of Fallujah more than four dozen Americans and over 1,000 insurgents were killed." The rules of the game insist that if an innocent Iraqi is found among those 1,000 killed then the player loses.
NO MORE FREE TV IN THE BEDROOM, FRIDAY NBC assigned Ron Mott to assess the prospects that its broadcast signal would turn to mere snow on viewers' sets on Friday. That is the day when rabbit ears will no longer work. Analog will be canceled and replaced by a digital signal. Mott consulted the AC Nielsen company and concluded that fewer than 3m households nationwide will lose their free TV entirely. According to Nielsen, nearly 4m homes have made the conversion since February. However Mott warned that Nielsen's numbers count households not television sets: "Millions more are expected to lose reception on that spare set in the bedroom or kitchen."
"The Holocaust Museum has been prepared for something just like this since it opened 16 years ago," noted NBC's Pete Williams. "Investigators say the guard stopped the gunman from getting beyond the security checkpoint." von Brunn was wounded in crossfire and "taken to the hospital handcuffed to a gurney," ABC's Pierre Thomas recounted. CBS showed us cellphone pictures of a struggle at the museum's entrance and von Brunn's parked red car as part of Sharyl Attkisson's report.
NBC's Williams recounted von Brunn's previous brush with the law. Back in 1981, at the age of 61, he made an armed entry into the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Board and tried to place the Board of Governors under citizen's arrest for raising interest rates. "He served seven years in prison, On his Website he blamed a negro jury and a Jew judge." ABC's Thomas quoted von Brunn's ex-wife as saying that he "wanted to die in a blaze with his boots on." CBS' Bob Orr quoted police as saying that von Brunn "apparently acted alone."
CBS’ ORR RELIES ON INNUENDO It is fair enough that the network newscasts should spend so much time on this murder--not because James von Brunn's ideology presents a threat to the republic but because his act was bizarre and sensational.
So CBS' Bob Orr was out of line when he tried to make more of von Brunn's bigoted views than they warranted. His coverage of von Brunn's Website holywesternempire.org and his writings Kill the Best Gentiles was fair game. Where Orr went out of line was to claim that von Brunn's alleged violence "underscores a troubling trend" and that "the hatred he spewed is at the very base of a wider ongoing threat." He presented no evidence other than to say that von Brunn "has moved around in white supremacist circles." When he tied von Brunn to the assassination of George Tiller, the Wichita abortionist, he did so not by establishing a link between the two but by stating that they occurred eleven days apart. Tyndall Report found similar recklessness in Orr's April coverage of a Homeland Security report on white supremacists. This is not reporting; this is innuendo.
Mara Schiavocampo on NBC's In Depth was nuanced where Orr was slapdash. She showed us the nation's most active neo-Nazis, the National Socialist Movement, parading in St Louis. She pointed out that NSM has been officially designated as non-violent. She obtained a soundbite on their racist program, which is one of citizenship. "Only pure whites can be citizens." Besides people of color, they would also consign homosexuals and Jews to guest-resident status. Schiavocampo checked in with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading monitor of white supremacists. It mentioned neither the Federal Reserve Board nor the Nazi Holocaust, von Brunn's pet issues, as ideological motivation: "Principally these groups have really successfully exploited the immigration issue." Hispanics, not Jews, seem to be their betes noires.
BURY FINDS A FIAT The plight of the automobile industry has been covered so heavily in the past few weeks (54 separate reports since the end of April) that CBS and NBC refrained from going into extra detail as Chrysler's transition from bankruptcy into merger with Fiat was formally consummated. ABC did bother to assign a correspondent to the deal and Chris Bury deserves kudos for the clunker he found to illustrate it. Check out the 1979 red Fiat convertible, sale price $4,995, at a dealership in Downers Grove Ill. Or rather check out its cacophony as it starts and its emissions once it gets going. "Car buffs say modern Fiats perform much better," Bury reassured us.
SUPPLY-&-DEMAND OR SPECULATION? As the cost of a barrel of crude oil surpassed $70 on global financial markets, both CBS and ABC reflected on the impact on the price at the pump. ABC's Dan Harris used the statistic that the national average price of a gallon of gasoline has risen for six straight weeks, now standing at $2.63. CBS' Dean Reynolds called the climb of $1/gallon since December "the largest, over a six-month period, in history."
Is conventional supply-and-demand at work here? ABC's Harris thinks so: "OPEC countries have cut back on their oil production." CBS' Reynolds was not sure. "Demand right now is flat," he asserted. He suggested the weak dollar as one reason for the hike; the other is financial speculation. "Investors are driving up the price further by buying more oil as they see signs of an economic recovery and the potential for increasing demand. Of course the rising price could stall the very recovery they are anticipating."
KIVA COMES HOME Earlier this year, CBS' Daniel Sieberg publicized microcredit loans to potters in Peru and ABC anchor Charles Gibson made author Kate Smith Milway his network's Person of the Week. Smith Milway's book One Hen tells the tale of microcredit loans to poultry farmers in Ghana. Now microfinance comes home. ABC's Betsy Stark offered her second free plug to kiva.org, a Website that now facilitates person-to-person loans to small businesses in this country. Stark cited the site's track record: 98% of Kiva's entrepreneurs repay their loans in full. ABC's Stark had previously mentioned Kiva's role in helping Iraqi reconstruction back in the summer of 2007.
PRIVILEGED MOUSAVI VS POPULIST AHMADINEJAD Vibrant footage of green activists lining the boulevards of Teheran brought election fever to life on NBC. Islamist green is the color of supporters of former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinjead sports the green-white-red tricolor of the flag of the Islamic Revolution.
Coverage of Iran on American newscasts so often concentrates on our western preoccupations: where Iranian leaders stand on Israel or nuclear weapons or the role of Islamic law. Refreshingly, Richard Engel portrayed the sociological and economic bases of domestic support for each candidate. Mousavi represents privilege--"students, intellectuals, business owners…many of Iran's wealthy elite." Ahmadinejad accuses Mousavi's backers of corruption as he takes a populist tack: "His base is the working class in south Teheran. In his four years in office the President has tripled government wages and awarded billions in loans to low-income families."
THIS ONE FORGETS TO NOD & WINK CBS sent Mark Phillips to the West Bank to talk to Jewish settlers living on occupied Palestinian territory. They told him that they "have always known that new outposts have been forbidden" but they never took the ban seriously: "Successive Israeli governments, they insist, have always had a nod and a wink understanding with the United States that building on existing settlements was tolerated." Phillips showed us "bulldozers and cranes still at work" even as President Barack Obama reiterates longstanding policy and calls settlement construction illegitimate. "The fear here is that this one may actually mean it."
KILLING INNOCENT VIRTUAL IRAQIS IS FORBIDDEN ABC's A Closer Look offered free publicity to Six Days in Fallujah, a videogame title to be released by Atomic Games next year. Bob Woodruff told us that its designers call their realistic scenario of urban combat "part game, part documentary." They have hired dozens of USMC veterans of Operation Phantom Fury to make sure of Six Days…' verisimilitude in rendering "the most intense urban warfare of US troops in half a century. In the real Battle of Fallujah more than four dozen Americans and over 1,000 insurgents were killed." The rules of the game insist that if an innocent Iraqi is found among those 1,000 killed then the player loses.
NO MORE FREE TV IN THE BEDROOM, FRIDAY NBC assigned Ron Mott to assess the prospects that its broadcast signal would turn to mere snow on viewers' sets on Friday. That is the day when rabbit ears will no longer work. Analog will be canceled and replaced by a digital signal. Mott consulted the AC Nielsen company and concluded that fewer than 3m households nationwide will lose their free TV entirely. According to Nielsen, nearly 4m homes have made the conversion since February. However Mott warned that Nielsen's numbers count households not television sets: "Millions more are expected to lose reception on that spare set in the bedroom or kitchen."
