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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JULY 08, 2009
The Government Accountability Office was a newsmaking machine. The office filed a trio of reports at hearings on Capitol Hill. CBS led with the GAO's analysis of the first five months of the $787bn program to stimulate the economy. ABC selected an expose of laxity by the Federal Protective Service, the government building security force run by the Department of Homeland Security. A third GAO report scrutinized bottled water; it was covered by all three newscasts. NBC did not fall under the GAO's spell when it picked its lead; it chose coordinated Denial of Service attacks on American and South Korean Websites. The fiscal stimulus study was Story of the Day as Michael Jackson, at last, appears to be yesterday's news.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JULY 08, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
GAO ALL OVER NEWS LIKE WHITE ON RICE The Government Accountability Office was a newsmaking machine. The office filed a trio of reports at hearings on Capitol Hill. CBS led with the GAO's analysis of the first five months of the $787bn program to stimulate the economy. ABC selected an expose of laxity by the Federal Protective Service, the government building security force run by the Department of Homeland Security. A third GAO report scrutinized bottled water; it was covered by all three newscasts. NBC did not fall under the GAO's spell when it picked its lead; it chose coordinated Denial of Service attacks on American and South Korean Websites. The fiscal stimulus study was Story of the Day as Michael Jackson, at last, appears to be yesterday's news.
Considering that CBS decided to make the fiscal stimulus story its lead, its coverage created more confusion than clarity. Anchor Katie Couric introduced Nancy Cordes' report by citing Republicans criticism of the $787bn package as a "costly failure." Yet Cordes' story on the GAO report emphasized the lack of spending not the excess of it: so far only 11% of the funds for infrastructure projects have been disbursed. She quoted the Democratic argument that funds had been expedited for the social safety instead: "The money spent to backfill state budgets has saved teaching jobs, covered Medicaid payments, boosted unemployment benefits and increased funding for food stamps."
Next CBS turned to Jill Schlesinger (at the tail of the Cordes videostream), the editor-at-large of its moneywatch.com. Yet Schlesinger could not decide whether Keynesian deficit spending represented economic wisdom during a deep recession: "When we talk about the stimulus, we are talking about taxpayer money and right now we are borrowing to try to stimulate the economy. That means we have to pay back in the future so we must think very clearly about what that means," she told anchor Couric, without sharing the results of that thinking. Later Schlesinger hinted that the Paradox of Thrift was no big concern, so we guess that moneywatch.com has a Chicago School editorial slant: "If people live responsibly and take control of their financial lives we will have a stronger economy."
At ABC, This Week's George Stephanopoulos does not reject the Keynesian option out of hand: "A lot of economists are saying now that a second stimulus is going to be necessary because of this high unemployment right now," he told anchor Charles Gibson. On NBC, Lisa Myers suggested that the public works component of the $787bn spending had "created or saved 150,000 jobs since February. The problem is that that number is dwarfed by the almost 2m jobs lost over that period."
IS THAT BABY A BOMB? All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the GAO's investigation into the Federal Protective Service. ABC anchor Charles Gibson quoted the mission statement of the $1bn/yr "highly trained and multi-disciplined police force" that is tasked with enforcing security at 9,000 buildings on 2,300 different federal facilities nationwide. "We are talking about 13,000 guards," noted NBC's Kelly O'Donnell. "They are not federal employees but contractors hired by the government."
Anyway all three correspondents--NBC's O'Donnell, CBS' Bob Orr and ABC's Pierre Thomas--picked up on the anecdotes of incompetence: one medicated guard was found sleeping at his post; another shot his own image in a bathroom mirror while practicing with his gun; a third X-rayed a sleeping infant when he passed the baby carrier through the bomb detector.
The headline grabbing ruse pulled off by the GAO was to smuggle a bombmaking kit--"a bag full of bomb components, liquid explosives and a detonator," as ABC's Thomas put it--through the screening systems in ten separate buildings and then to assemble it undetected in building bathrooms. CBS' Orr reported that the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security itself were successfully infiltrated.
Then CBS' Orr went overboard. He mentioned both the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the attacks of 9/11 as types of threat that this lax security might fail to prevent. Neither involved a bomb assembled and detonated inside a building; both came from the outside. Neither Timothy McVeigh nor Mohamed Atta had to worry whether building security guards were up to snuff.
TAP VS BOTTLE--A PRIMER Next on the GAO's subjects for scrutiny comes drinking water. NBC's Tom Costello explained that municipal water supplies are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency whereas bottled water comes under the less stringent oversight of the Food & Drug Administration. For example, CBS' Kelly Wallace pointed out, "tap water must be tested in certified labs; not the case with bottled water. Tap is checked for maximum levels of phthalates, potentially dangerous chemicals; not bottled." Elisabeth Leamy filed for ABC's A Closer Look and told us that fully 45% of all bottled water is taken from municipal supplies. Some is subsequently further filtered; some is not. Yet FDA labeling rules do not require disclosure of "where the water comes from, how it is treated, or whether it is treated at all."
Bottled water is big business. CBS estimated its sales at $22bn annually. ABC put the number at $16bn. Yet with water in bottles costing 1,900 times more than water from a tap, CBS' Wallace noted that sales stopped growing in 2007. "The industry blames the recession."
HOW MUCH DOES THAT BARREL COST? CBS' Armen Keteyian continued on an alphabet-soup kind of a day with the CFTC. Usually the Commodities Futures Trading Commission would stand no chance of qualifying for a mention outside the niche programing of CNBC. Keteyian made the financial regulator relevant by tracing the rollercoaster cost of a barrel of crude oil: from $147 this time last year to $34 in December to $60 right now. "Oil speculators are at it again," he feared, "pumping an estimated $200bn into the oil futures market in just the last year." To smooth out fluctuations, the CFTC may now put limits on the size of bets in the commodities markets and insist on more transparent reporting of those positions.
WEB WARS NBC's Pete Williams told us about an "unusually intense and longlasting" attempt at cyber-sabotage targeting major Websites in this country and in South Korea. The sites for the Federal Trade Commission and the US government's Transportation Department were disabled for at least two days. South Korea's spies "believe the attacks may have originated in North Korea; American officials say the source is unknown." In all 60,000 separate computers were coordinated to bombard 35 different URLs. Williams reassured us that no infrastructure systems were harmed: financial markets fought off the attacks; air traffic control was untouched; the electricity grid and the water supply were not targeted.
G8 HOT AIR The G8 Summit in Italy received lackluster coverage. CBS' White House correspondent Chip Reid did not even file a report. NBC's Chuck Todd offered a stand-up about a "tougher statement than the United States expected to get" from the world's leaders on Iran, giving Teheran a September deadline to enter talks on its nuclear program. ABC's Jake Tapper reminded us of the unmet promises of previous G8 gabfests. In 2005 the developed economies promised $25bn in development aid to Africa and delivered "one third of that money." This time global warming was the topic of the boilerplate: "Environmentalists had been hoping for bold action on climate change but little consensus was achieved…Instead they agreed on a non-binding goal" as the G8 nations "failed to get major polluters such as China and India to go along."
MARRIAGE, ITALIAN STYLE At least the G8 inspired a couple of sidebars, again from NBC and ABC but not from CBS. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had relocated the summit into the Appennine Mountains to publicize the rebuilding needs of L'Aquila, the medieval city leveled by April's earthquake. NBC's Martin Fletcher filed a trio of reports (here, here and here) from the zone at the time. Now for his follow-up: aftershocks continue; the old town remains a deserted ruin; 25,000 live in tents. Yet life goes on. Fletcher was a wedding guest: "Married life begins at Tent #9, Piazza d'Armi Refugee Camp."
ABC's Nick Watt turned his attention to the summit's host, the 72-year-old Berlusconi, "a self-confessed ladies' man with a great tan and hair plugs." His Minister of Equal Opportunities is a "former topless model." His soon-to-be-ex-wife was "an actress who was topless on stage when she first caught his eye." In April he gave a lingerie model an 18th birthday present of a diamond necklace when he attended her party. As for reports that he sometimes dated "let us say professional ladies," Berlusconi denied all: "I have never understood what satisfaction there is without conquest."
URUMQI’S MEAN STREETS CBS not only skipped Italian coverage; it also decided not to have a reporter file from Xinjiang Province in China where 156 were killed in Sunday's ethnic rioting between local Uighurs and Han Chinese. Both ABC's Clarissa Ward and NBC's Ian Williams did make the trip to Urumqi as government security forces enforced calm. ABC's Ward observed "a mob of Han Chinese armed with sticks and bats viciously beating a Uighur man before turning their anger towards us, outraged by what they call biased foreign coverage of recent events." The Beijing government blocked "all Internet, text messages and international phone calls," Ward added. As for NBC's Williams, he joined in the government-organized tour for journalists to a major hospital where most of those injured with head and stab wounds turned out to be Han. He later checked out the Uighur section: "Even before the violence Urumqi was segregated. Now these poorer neighborhoods are sealed off by riot police."
CBS’ GUILTY CONSCIENCE CBS had some nerve apologizing for its lack of attention to the major stories of the week. "The news cycle was seized and then saturated by the sudden death of Michael Jackson," was Jeff Glor's explanation. He admitted that his network's newscast had skipped Barack Obama's trip to Moscow , the ethnic rioting in China and the debate over global warming. It was the late pop star, he insisted, "turning events that might normally make headlines into footnotes."
No, it was not. It was the warped editorial priorities of CBS and its anchor Katie Couric. Couric was the anchor who jetted out to the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Monday ahead of Jackson's memorial there. Her two rivals offered regular hard news instead. On the five weekdays (Wednesday 1st through Tuesday 7th) leading up to the Staples Center event, CBS (45 min v ABC 25, NBC 26) spent almost as much time on Jackson as its two rivals combined. It is bad enough that CBS blames its own misjudgment on the dead singer. It also inspired PBS' Jeffrey Brown to conduct a media analysis interview on Newshour, erroneously based on the premise that Glor's special pleading had been justified.
Considering that CBS decided to make the fiscal stimulus story its lead, its coverage created more confusion than clarity. Anchor Katie Couric introduced Nancy Cordes' report by citing Republicans criticism of the $787bn package as a "costly failure." Yet Cordes' story on the GAO report emphasized the lack of spending not the excess of it: so far only 11% of the funds for infrastructure projects have been disbursed. She quoted the Democratic argument that funds had been expedited for the social safety instead: "The money spent to backfill state budgets has saved teaching jobs, covered Medicaid payments, boosted unemployment benefits and increased funding for food stamps."
Next CBS turned to Jill Schlesinger (at the tail of the Cordes videostream), the editor-at-large of its moneywatch.com. Yet Schlesinger could not decide whether Keynesian deficit spending represented economic wisdom during a deep recession: "When we talk about the stimulus, we are talking about taxpayer money and right now we are borrowing to try to stimulate the economy. That means we have to pay back in the future so we must think very clearly about what that means," she told anchor Couric, without sharing the results of that thinking. Later Schlesinger hinted that the Paradox of Thrift was no big concern, so we guess that moneywatch.com has a Chicago School editorial slant: "If people live responsibly and take control of their financial lives we will have a stronger economy."
At ABC, This Week's George Stephanopoulos does not reject the Keynesian option out of hand: "A lot of economists are saying now that a second stimulus is going to be necessary because of this high unemployment right now," he told anchor Charles Gibson. On NBC, Lisa Myers suggested that the public works component of the $787bn spending had "created or saved 150,000 jobs since February. The problem is that that number is dwarfed by the almost 2m jobs lost over that period."
IS THAT BABY A BOMB? All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the GAO's investigation into the Federal Protective Service. ABC anchor Charles Gibson quoted the mission statement of the $1bn/yr "highly trained and multi-disciplined police force" that is tasked with enforcing security at 9,000 buildings on 2,300 different federal facilities nationwide. "We are talking about 13,000 guards," noted NBC's Kelly O'Donnell. "They are not federal employees but contractors hired by the government."
Anyway all three correspondents--NBC's O'Donnell, CBS' Bob Orr and ABC's Pierre Thomas--picked up on the anecdotes of incompetence: one medicated guard was found sleeping at his post; another shot his own image in a bathroom mirror while practicing with his gun; a third X-rayed a sleeping infant when he passed the baby carrier through the bomb detector.
The headline grabbing ruse pulled off by the GAO was to smuggle a bombmaking kit--"a bag full of bomb components, liquid explosives and a detonator," as ABC's Thomas put it--through the screening systems in ten separate buildings and then to assemble it undetected in building bathrooms. CBS' Orr reported that the Departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security itself were successfully infiltrated.
Then CBS' Orr went overboard. He mentioned both the Oklahoma City federal building bombing and the attacks of 9/11 as types of threat that this lax security might fail to prevent. Neither involved a bomb assembled and detonated inside a building; both came from the outside. Neither Timothy McVeigh nor Mohamed Atta had to worry whether building security guards were up to snuff.
TAP VS BOTTLE--A PRIMER Next on the GAO's subjects for scrutiny comes drinking water. NBC's Tom Costello explained that municipal water supplies are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency whereas bottled water comes under the less stringent oversight of the Food & Drug Administration. For example, CBS' Kelly Wallace pointed out, "tap water must be tested in certified labs; not the case with bottled water. Tap is checked for maximum levels of phthalates, potentially dangerous chemicals; not bottled." Elisabeth Leamy filed for ABC's A Closer Look and told us that fully 45% of all bottled water is taken from municipal supplies. Some is subsequently further filtered; some is not. Yet FDA labeling rules do not require disclosure of "where the water comes from, how it is treated, or whether it is treated at all."
Bottled water is big business. CBS estimated its sales at $22bn annually. ABC put the number at $16bn. Yet with water in bottles costing 1,900 times more than water from a tap, CBS' Wallace noted that sales stopped growing in 2007. "The industry blames the recession."
HOW MUCH DOES THAT BARREL COST? CBS' Armen Keteyian continued on an alphabet-soup kind of a day with the CFTC. Usually the Commodities Futures Trading Commission would stand no chance of qualifying for a mention outside the niche programing of CNBC. Keteyian made the financial regulator relevant by tracing the rollercoaster cost of a barrel of crude oil: from $147 this time last year to $34 in December to $60 right now. "Oil speculators are at it again," he feared, "pumping an estimated $200bn into the oil futures market in just the last year." To smooth out fluctuations, the CFTC may now put limits on the size of bets in the commodities markets and insist on more transparent reporting of those positions.
WEB WARS NBC's Pete Williams told us about an "unusually intense and longlasting" attempt at cyber-sabotage targeting major Websites in this country and in South Korea. The sites for the Federal Trade Commission and the US government's Transportation Department were disabled for at least two days. South Korea's spies "believe the attacks may have originated in North Korea; American officials say the source is unknown." In all 60,000 separate computers were coordinated to bombard 35 different URLs. Williams reassured us that no infrastructure systems were harmed: financial markets fought off the attacks; air traffic control was untouched; the electricity grid and the water supply were not targeted.
G8 HOT AIR The G8 Summit in Italy received lackluster coverage. CBS' White House correspondent Chip Reid did not even file a report. NBC's Chuck Todd offered a stand-up about a "tougher statement than the United States expected to get" from the world's leaders on Iran, giving Teheran a September deadline to enter talks on its nuclear program. ABC's Jake Tapper reminded us of the unmet promises of previous G8 gabfests. In 2005 the developed economies promised $25bn in development aid to Africa and delivered "one third of that money." This time global warming was the topic of the boilerplate: "Environmentalists had been hoping for bold action on climate change but little consensus was achieved…Instead they agreed on a non-binding goal" as the G8 nations "failed to get major polluters such as China and India to go along."
MARRIAGE, ITALIAN STYLE At least the G8 inspired a couple of sidebars, again from NBC and ABC but not from CBS. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had relocated the summit into the Appennine Mountains to publicize the rebuilding needs of L'Aquila, the medieval city leveled by April's earthquake. NBC's Martin Fletcher filed a trio of reports (here, here and here) from the zone at the time. Now for his follow-up: aftershocks continue; the old town remains a deserted ruin; 25,000 live in tents. Yet life goes on. Fletcher was a wedding guest: "Married life begins at Tent #9, Piazza d'Armi Refugee Camp."
ABC's Nick Watt turned his attention to the summit's host, the 72-year-old Berlusconi, "a self-confessed ladies' man with a great tan and hair plugs." His Minister of Equal Opportunities is a "former topless model." His soon-to-be-ex-wife was "an actress who was topless on stage when she first caught his eye." In April he gave a lingerie model an 18th birthday present of a diamond necklace when he attended her party. As for reports that he sometimes dated "let us say professional ladies," Berlusconi denied all: "I have never understood what satisfaction there is without conquest."
URUMQI’S MEAN STREETS CBS not only skipped Italian coverage; it also decided not to have a reporter file from Xinjiang Province in China where 156 were killed in Sunday's ethnic rioting between local Uighurs and Han Chinese. Both ABC's Clarissa Ward and NBC's Ian Williams did make the trip to Urumqi as government security forces enforced calm. ABC's Ward observed "a mob of Han Chinese armed with sticks and bats viciously beating a Uighur man before turning their anger towards us, outraged by what they call biased foreign coverage of recent events." The Beijing government blocked "all Internet, text messages and international phone calls," Ward added. As for NBC's Williams, he joined in the government-organized tour for journalists to a major hospital where most of those injured with head and stab wounds turned out to be Han. He later checked out the Uighur section: "Even before the violence Urumqi was segregated. Now these poorer neighborhoods are sealed off by riot police."
CBS’ GUILTY CONSCIENCE CBS had some nerve apologizing for its lack of attention to the major stories of the week. "The news cycle was seized and then saturated by the sudden death of Michael Jackson," was Jeff Glor's explanation. He admitted that his network's newscast had skipped Barack Obama's trip to Moscow , the ethnic rioting in China and the debate over global warming. It was the late pop star, he insisted, "turning events that might normally make headlines into footnotes."
No, it was not. It was the warped editorial priorities of CBS and its anchor Katie Couric. Couric was the anchor who jetted out to the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Monday ahead of Jackson's memorial there. Her two rivals offered regular hard news instead. On the five weekdays (Wednesday 1st through Tuesday 7th) leading up to the Staples Center event, CBS (45 min v ABC 25, NBC 26) spent almost as much time on Jackson as its two rivals combined. It is bad enough that CBS blames its own misjudgment on the dead singer. It also inspired PBS' Jeffrey Brown to conduct a media analysis interview on Newshour, erroneously based on the premise that Glor's special pleading had been justified.
