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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JULY 17, 2009
A suspected splinter group of Jemaah Islamiyah was all that prevented this summer Friday from providing an extremely light ending to the week's news. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, insightfully, took the day off with Elizabeth Vargas substituting. A pair of suicidal bombers, believed to be operatives from the Indonesian radical Islamist cell, attacked luxury hotels in Jakarta, the city's Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. ABC and CBS led with the bombs that left ten-or-so dead. They were the Story of the Day, the only development deemed worthy of coverage by a reporter on all three newscasts. President Barack Obama was NBC's lead as he addressed the 100th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the NAACP.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JULY 17, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
JEMAAH RUINS BREAKFAST IN JAKARTA HOTELS A suspected splinter group of Jemaah Islamiyah was all that prevented this summer Friday from providing an extremely light ending to the week's news. ABC anchor Charles Gibson, insightfully, took the day off with Elizabeth Vargas substituting. A pair of suicidal bombers, believed to be operatives from the Indonesian radical Islamist cell, attacked luxury hotels in Jakarta, the city's Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. ABC and CBS led with the bombs that left ten-or-so dead. They were the Story of the Day, the only development deemed worthy of coverage by a reporter on all three newscasts. President Barack Obama was NBC's lead as he addressed the 100th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the NAACP.
ABC was on the scene in Indonesia. Clarissa Ward filed from Jakarta and her colleague Bob Woodruff had been a guest at that very Marriott just two weeks ago. Ward quoted Woodruff recalling the hotel's lax security: no one stopped guests even if they did set off alarms at metal detectors. Ward reported that the two bombers had apparently checked in as guests--Room #1808--before killing themselves over breakfast in the hotels' dining rooms. She showed surveillance camera videotape of the blast sending shockwaves through the lobby.
CBS had Terry McCarthy narrate videotape of the attacks from its bureau in Beijing. He generalized that "luxury hotels patronized by westerners have become soft targets for terrorists from Islamabad and Amman to Mumbai and Jakarta." NBC used Bangkok-based Ian Williams, who reminded us that Jemaah Islamiyah had attacked the Marriott before, with a truckbomb in 2003, but since then "the group has splintered under a crackdown." ABC's Brian Ross, reporting from New York City, speculated that a cell led by Nordin Top was responsible for both this Marriott attack and the one six years ago.
RAFSANJANI’S AMEN CORNER The day's other major overseas news was made in Iran by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. None of the networks had a correspondent in Teheran so CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and ABC's Jim Sciutto both filed from London. Rafsanjani was speaking on "Iran's most important public stage, Friday prayers at Teheran University," noted ABC's Sciutto. In the wake of the disputed presidential elections and the violent suppression of opposition protests, Rafsanjani warned the Islamic Republic that it had lost the trust of the people and he demanded the release of those arrested during the protests. CBS' Palmer pointed out that the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi attended Rafsanjani's sermon. She saw this as a sign that Mousavi was siding with the "more moderate opposition" rather than his younger supporters "who want still bigger, faster changes."
ABC's Sciutto noted that the regime had closed down cellphone networks as huge crowds formed outside the mosque where Rafsanjani was speaking, "some witnesses said more than a million." State television did not broadcast the sermon live "but it did show the rallies, portraying protestors as vandals." Eyewitnesses were scared to talk to Sciutto directly for fear of government wiretaps. He interviewed them via Facebook instead.
MANDELA AT 91, NAACP AT 100 Rounding out the day's foreign coverage was a high-minded human-interest feature on a dozen teenage students who won an essay competition. Their prize was a trip to Johannesburg and a visit with a frail Nelson Mandela, who celebrates his 91st birthday this weekend. "Along with students from South Africa they wrote a charter committing themselves to public service," ABC's John Berman told us.
Back home the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gave Barack Obama several standing ovations when he encouraged them to overcome persistent racial discrimination. NBC's Ron Allen reported that the President's message focused on parenting and education, "what has been called the civil rights issue of the 21st century." The key soundbite: "If you live in a poor neighborhood you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. That is not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school."
A UNIVERSITY WITH NO CAMPUS "The best relatively cheap university you have never heard of." That was the rave from Time magazine about Western Governors University that Tom Costello quoted approvingly for NBC's What Works series. WGU was founded twelve years ago yet its growth was so slow that by 2003 it had only 500 students. Now the fully-accredited not-for-profit school is "among the biggest providers of math and science teachers in inner cities," with a student body of 14,000, charging $6,000 annual tuition. Where is the WGU campus? Nowhere. All its courses are taught online.
CBO CATCH-UP BY CBS, NBC ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper filed the sole report on Thursday's newscasts about the warning by the Congressional Budget Office that proposed healthcare reform legislation would not cut costs. Now Chip Reid, CBS' man at the White House, follows up with a yet more extreme take on the CBO study. He reported that the CBO found that the proposals "would send spending on healthcare soaring." Contrary to Barack Obama's insistence that "reform will bend the longterm cost curve downward," CBS' Reid claimed that the CBO predicted "that the cost curve will go up." From Capitol Hill, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell had the same take-home from the CBO analysis: "The plans would increase spending not reduce it."
ABC's Tapper was specific that the CBO was not referring to the nation's healthcare costs but just to its federal portion. Neither CBS' Reid nor NBC's O'Donnell was so clear. When they warned of healthcare cost inflation it was not clear whether they envisaged an overall spending increase or a growing government plan--or both.
FLY ME TO THE MOON Thursday, ABC's David Wright and NBC's Tom Costello looked back 40 years to the televised landing of Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon. Now CBS' Mark Strassmann looks forward to 2020, when four astronauts will land the spacecraft Constellation on the moon in a $100bn weeklong exploration for polar ice, "a possible source of water, oxygen and hydrogen." Strassmann's images detailing the moon mission were clearer and more colorful than Apollo's--because they were imaginary, courtesy of NASA's computer animated wishful thinking.
BANK ERROR NOT IN YOUR FAVOR Bank of America and Citigroup are "bleeding red ink," warned CBS' Anthony Mason, "taking a beating on bad consumer loans--BofA put aside $13bn to cover lending losses, Citi $4bn. Yet both announced corporate profits for the second quarter of 2009. Mason listed the fees "even on good customers" that are being raised to keep the banks in the black: $100 to close a checking account; $3 more each month to keep one open; $2 per withdrawal at an average ATM; $26 for each overdraft. On NBC, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC filed on the banks' profits--along with IBM's and General Electric's--to conclude that "we have seen the worst in terms of this economic downturn." Then she warned that retailers and the fashion industry may be "in real trouble in terms of meeting payroll" if small-business lender CIT goes bankrupt. CBS' Nancy Cordes warned us about CIT on Thursday.
MUSSELS, ALGAE, SHARKS & SQUID Anne Thompson's environmental reporting for NBC's Our Planet was conscientious enough. She worried about the Great Lakes ecosystem, its fishery depleted, its water polluted, its habitat invaded by exotic species. Saltwater mussels, for example, are responsible for algae because they clean the freshwater of plankton, allowing blooms to grow. A quibble for Thompson. She called the Great Lakes "the world's largest freshwater resource." Leaving aside the fact that most of the world's fresh water is in solid form on ice shelves, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant liquid fresh water. It is still a false claim: there is more fresh water in Siberia's Lake Baikal than in all of America's Great Lakes combined.
CBS' Nancy Cordes warned us about the depletion of the shark population in the globe's oceans on Wednesday. CBS' John Blackstone warned us about the proliferation of jumbo squid off California's coast in March. Now Mike von Fremd ties up the two threads from San Diego for ABC: the city's scuba divers are confronting seven-foot-long calamari with razor-sharp beaks in the Pacific. Global warming could be one reason for the surplus squid…or "sharks eat giant squid but sharks have been overfished."
ABC was on the scene in Indonesia. Clarissa Ward filed from Jakarta and her colleague Bob Woodruff had been a guest at that very Marriott just two weeks ago. Ward quoted Woodruff recalling the hotel's lax security: no one stopped guests even if they did set off alarms at metal detectors. Ward reported that the two bombers had apparently checked in as guests--Room #1808--before killing themselves over breakfast in the hotels' dining rooms. She showed surveillance camera videotape of the blast sending shockwaves through the lobby.
CBS had Terry McCarthy narrate videotape of the attacks from its bureau in Beijing. He generalized that "luxury hotels patronized by westerners have become soft targets for terrorists from Islamabad and Amman to Mumbai and Jakarta." NBC used Bangkok-based Ian Williams, who reminded us that Jemaah Islamiyah had attacked the Marriott before, with a truckbomb in 2003, but since then "the group has splintered under a crackdown." ABC's Brian Ross, reporting from New York City, speculated that a cell led by Nordin Top was responsible for both this Marriott attack and the one six years ago.
RAFSANJANI’S AMEN CORNER The day's other major overseas news was made in Iran by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. None of the networks had a correspondent in Teheran so CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and ABC's Jim Sciutto both filed from London. Rafsanjani was speaking on "Iran's most important public stage, Friday prayers at Teheran University," noted ABC's Sciutto. In the wake of the disputed presidential elections and the violent suppression of opposition protests, Rafsanjani warned the Islamic Republic that it had lost the trust of the people and he demanded the release of those arrested during the protests. CBS' Palmer pointed out that the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi attended Rafsanjani's sermon. She saw this as a sign that Mousavi was siding with the "more moderate opposition" rather than his younger supporters "who want still bigger, faster changes."
ABC's Sciutto noted that the regime had closed down cellphone networks as huge crowds formed outside the mosque where Rafsanjani was speaking, "some witnesses said more than a million." State television did not broadcast the sermon live "but it did show the rallies, portraying protestors as vandals." Eyewitnesses were scared to talk to Sciutto directly for fear of government wiretaps. He interviewed them via Facebook instead.
MANDELA AT 91, NAACP AT 100 Rounding out the day's foreign coverage was a high-minded human-interest feature on a dozen teenage students who won an essay competition. Their prize was a trip to Johannesburg and a visit with a frail Nelson Mandela, who celebrates his 91st birthday this weekend. "Along with students from South Africa they wrote a charter committing themselves to public service," ABC's John Berman told us.
Back home the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gave Barack Obama several standing ovations when he encouraged them to overcome persistent racial discrimination. NBC's Ron Allen reported that the President's message focused on parenting and education, "what has been called the civil rights issue of the 21st century." The key soundbite: "If you live in a poor neighborhood you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. That is not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school."
A UNIVERSITY WITH NO CAMPUS "The best relatively cheap university you have never heard of." That was the rave from Time magazine about Western Governors University that Tom Costello quoted approvingly for NBC's What Works series. WGU was founded twelve years ago yet its growth was so slow that by 2003 it had only 500 students. Now the fully-accredited not-for-profit school is "among the biggest providers of math and science teachers in inner cities," with a student body of 14,000, charging $6,000 annual tuition. Where is the WGU campus? Nowhere. All its courses are taught online.
CBO CATCH-UP BY CBS, NBC ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper filed the sole report on Thursday's newscasts about the warning by the Congressional Budget Office that proposed healthcare reform legislation would not cut costs. Now Chip Reid, CBS' man at the White House, follows up with a yet more extreme take on the CBO study. He reported that the CBO found that the proposals "would send spending on healthcare soaring." Contrary to Barack Obama's insistence that "reform will bend the longterm cost curve downward," CBS' Reid claimed that the CBO predicted "that the cost curve will go up." From Capitol Hill, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell had the same take-home from the CBO analysis: "The plans would increase spending not reduce it."
ABC's Tapper was specific that the CBO was not referring to the nation's healthcare costs but just to its federal portion. Neither CBS' Reid nor NBC's O'Donnell was so clear. When they warned of healthcare cost inflation it was not clear whether they envisaged an overall spending increase or a growing government plan--or both.
FLY ME TO THE MOON Thursday, ABC's David Wright and NBC's Tom Costello looked back 40 years to the televised landing of Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon. Now CBS' Mark Strassmann looks forward to 2020, when four astronauts will land the spacecraft Constellation on the moon in a $100bn weeklong exploration for polar ice, "a possible source of water, oxygen and hydrogen." Strassmann's images detailing the moon mission were clearer and more colorful than Apollo's--because they were imaginary, courtesy of NASA's computer animated wishful thinking.
BANK ERROR NOT IN YOUR FAVOR Bank of America and Citigroup are "bleeding red ink," warned CBS' Anthony Mason, "taking a beating on bad consumer loans--BofA put aside $13bn to cover lending losses, Citi $4bn. Yet both announced corporate profits for the second quarter of 2009. Mason listed the fees "even on good customers" that are being raised to keep the banks in the black: $100 to close a checking account; $3 more each month to keep one open; $2 per withdrawal at an average ATM; $26 for each overdraft. On NBC, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC filed on the banks' profits--along with IBM's and General Electric's--to conclude that "we have seen the worst in terms of this economic downturn." Then she warned that retailers and the fashion industry may be "in real trouble in terms of meeting payroll" if small-business lender CIT goes bankrupt. CBS' Nancy Cordes warned us about CIT on Thursday.
MUSSELS, ALGAE, SHARKS & SQUID Anne Thompson's environmental reporting for NBC's Our Planet was conscientious enough. She worried about the Great Lakes ecosystem, its fishery depleted, its water polluted, its habitat invaded by exotic species. Saltwater mussels, for example, are responsible for algae because they clean the freshwater of plankton, allowing blooms to grow. A quibble for Thompson. She called the Great Lakes "the world's largest freshwater resource." Leaving aside the fact that most of the world's fresh water is in solid form on ice shelves, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she meant liquid fresh water. It is still a false claim: there is more fresh water in Siberia's Lake Baikal than in all of America's Great Lakes combined.
CBS' Nancy Cordes warned us about the depletion of the shark population in the globe's oceans on Wednesday. CBS' John Blackstone warned us about the proliferation of jumbo squid off California's coast in March. Now Mike von Fremd ties up the two threads from San Diego for ABC: the city's scuba divers are confronting seven-foot-long calamari with razor-sharp beaks in the Pacific. Global warming could be one reason for the surplus squid…or "sharks eat giant squid but sharks have been overfished."
