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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM AUGUST 06, 2009
An utterly unsurprising vote in the United States Senate was Story of the Day in a slow summer news environment. Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Justice on the Supreme Court by a 68-31 majority. The native of The Bronx from a Puerto Rican family becomes the third woman to sit on the nation's highest court and its first Hispanic. NBC and CBS led with her success. ABC chose an unconfirmed assassination in the mountains of southern Waziristan. A missile attack by an unmanned CIA drone has probably killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban rebellion in Pakistan's northwest frontier region.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR AUGUST 06, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
SOTOMAYOR PROMOTED, AS PREDICTED An utterly unsurprising vote in the United States Senate was Story of the Day in a slow summer news environment. Judge Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Justice on the Supreme Court by a 68-31 majority. The native of The Bronx from a Puerto Rican family becomes the third woman to sit on the nation's highest court and its first Hispanic. NBC and CBS led with her success. ABC chose an unconfirmed assassination in the mountains of southern Waziristan. A missile attack by an unmanned CIA drone has probably killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Taliban rebellion in Pakistan's northwest frontier region.
Sotomayor had answered the Senate's questions "without a major misstep," ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg reminded us, so her confirmation had been "all but certain." She identified the two major sticking points for the 31 Republicans who opposed her as her judicial views on gun rights and on affirmative action. NBC' Pete Williams pointed out that four of the nine Republicans who did support Sotomayor plan to leave the Senate and will not seek reelection. On CBS, Wyatt Andrews compared Sotomayor's 68 approving votes with the previous two Justices to be confirmed--more than Samuel Alito's 58; fewer than John Thomas' 78.
"Bursting with pride," was the way Sandra Hughes described the Latino reaction to the Senate vote on CBS. Wise Latina Woman is now a popular T-shirt slogan and a role-model cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz, showing a young girl playing courtroom "has become a hot seller at art galleries." Hughes pointed out that Hispanics represent 15% of the entire population, but less than 4% of its lawyers and only 3% of its judges.
PROBABLY DEAD SAYS UNIDENTIFIED SOURCE Martha Raddatz' report from ABC's Washington bureau on the CIA's probable assassination of Baitullah Mehsud was not definitive. She could not tell us Mehsud was dead. "The United States believes there are strong indications" was as close as she came. And she could not tell us who told her, citing "a senior US official." Raddatz was not even certain what Mehsud's precise role in Pakistan's recent violence had been. He was "believed to be behind" the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and suicide bombers in Lahore. What she could tell us was that "the United States and Pakistan have been trying to track Mehsud for months: nine of the last ten CIA drone strikes have been aimed at his network." On NBC, Jim Miklaszewski filed a brief stand-up from the Pentagon relying on similar sources: "US officials are confident," was the way he described Mehsud's presumed demise. If it is true, Miklaszewski unidentified official source told him, "that would be great."
‘FLU WORRIES "A lot of reasons to worry this fall," warned NBC's Robert Bazell. All three newscasts filed a worried report on the prospect of an outbreak of H1N1 influenza. NBC's Bazell looked at the preparations for a surge of cases descending on hospital emergency rooms. CBS' Jon LaPook looked at public school systems busily sanitizing since "the virus is hitting children and young adults the hardest." ABC's Lisa Stark worried about the new vaccine. She reminded us of 1976, when 40m received shots to protect themselves against a swine virus outbreak and "the vaccine killed more people than the 'flu."
SUICIDAL SUBURBAN TRUE CRIMES NBC and ABC chose this light day of news to follow up on a couple of sad, tabloid true crime stories--the sort that would normally be covered on Today or Good Morning America or during daytime on the cable news channels, but rarely warrant the attention of the nightly newscasts.
ABC offered a couple of follow-ups on George Sodini, the gym member in suburban Pittsburgh who killed himself and three aerobic dancercisers. John Berman dug up YouTube videos made by Sodini in which he shares his fantasies about dating young women; in hidden code on his blog Sodini imagined canceling his murder plan if he could get "night time action" with a gym member who occasionally smiled at him. Pierre Thomas filed A Closer Look at the reason why Sodini's blog posts planning his murders failed to attract police attention. Police "do not typically look at the Internet postings of tens of millions of individual Americans" and even if they did "apparently Sodini intended his password-protected writings to be seen only after he died."
On NBC, Rehema Ellis filed an In Depth recap on the 36-year-old minivan driver who drove for two miles into oncoming traffic along the Taconic Parkway in suburban New York City before crashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others. Ellis reported that Diane Schuler had been driving "erratically" for 60 miles before the crash, having told her brother that she felt disoriented. "Police recovered a broken vodka bottle from Schuler's car and say she had also smoked marijuana." The coroner's toxicological analysis found she was drunk.
SILENT TWEETS "I asked how everyone survived the twitterpocalypse," quipped ABC's Bill Weir, when a denial of service attack on twitter.com closed down "the world's fastest-growing form of communication." He did not get a response from all of the globe's 40m tweeters but of those who did reply "most complained they got nothing done because every two minutes they had to check on twitter" to see if it was up or down.
BUELLER? BUELLER? "John Hughes spoke to a whole generation. He did not talk down to them," thus Leonard Maltin, the film critic, paid tribute to the moviemaker in the obituary George Lewis filed on NBC. The director of the 1985 meditation on teenage angst The Breakfast Club hardly appealed to the core demographic of the network nightly newscasts--although at 59 he was in that sweet spot himself--so NBC generously offered its older audience a refresher on Generation X's formative years.
Sotomayor had answered the Senate's questions "without a major misstep," ABC's Jan Crawford Greenburg reminded us, so her confirmation had been "all but certain." She identified the two major sticking points for the 31 Republicans who opposed her as her judicial views on gun rights and on affirmative action. NBC' Pete Williams pointed out that four of the nine Republicans who did support Sotomayor plan to leave the Senate and will not seek reelection. On CBS, Wyatt Andrews compared Sotomayor's 68 approving votes with the previous two Justices to be confirmed--more than Samuel Alito's 58; fewer than John Thomas' 78.
"Bursting with pride," was the way Sandra Hughes described the Latino reaction to the Senate vote on CBS. Wise Latina Woman is now a popular T-shirt slogan and a role-model cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz, showing a young girl playing courtroom "has become a hot seller at art galleries." Hughes pointed out that Hispanics represent 15% of the entire population, but less than 4% of its lawyers and only 3% of its judges.
PROBABLY DEAD SAYS UNIDENTIFIED SOURCE Martha Raddatz' report from ABC's Washington bureau on the CIA's probable assassination of Baitullah Mehsud was not definitive. She could not tell us Mehsud was dead. "The United States believes there are strong indications" was as close as she came. And she could not tell us who told her, citing "a senior US official." Raddatz was not even certain what Mehsud's precise role in Pakistan's recent violence had been. He was "believed to be behind" the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and suicide bombers in Lahore. What she could tell us was that "the United States and Pakistan have been trying to track Mehsud for months: nine of the last ten CIA drone strikes have been aimed at his network." On NBC, Jim Miklaszewski filed a brief stand-up from the Pentagon relying on similar sources: "US officials are confident," was the way he described Mehsud's presumed demise. If it is true, Miklaszewski unidentified official source told him, "that would be great."
‘FLU WORRIES "A lot of reasons to worry this fall," warned NBC's Robert Bazell. All three newscasts filed a worried report on the prospect of an outbreak of H1N1 influenza. NBC's Bazell looked at the preparations for a surge of cases descending on hospital emergency rooms. CBS' Jon LaPook looked at public school systems busily sanitizing since "the virus is hitting children and young adults the hardest." ABC's Lisa Stark worried about the new vaccine. She reminded us of 1976, when 40m received shots to protect themselves against a swine virus outbreak and "the vaccine killed more people than the 'flu."
SUICIDAL SUBURBAN TRUE CRIMES NBC and ABC chose this light day of news to follow up on a couple of sad, tabloid true crime stories--the sort that would normally be covered on Today or Good Morning America or during daytime on the cable news channels, but rarely warrant the attention of the nightly newscasts.
ABC offered a couple of follow-ups on George Sodini, the gym member in suburban Pittsburgh who killed himself and three aerobic dancercisers. John Berman dug up YouTube videos made by Sodini in which he shares his fantasies about dating young women; in hidden code on his blog Sodini imagined canceling his murder plan if he could get "night time action" with a gym member who occasionally smiled at him. Pierre Thomas filed A Closer Look at the reason why Sodini's blog posts planning his murders failed to attract police attention. Police "do not typically look at the Internet postings of tens of millions of individual Americans" and even if they did "apparently Sodini intended his password-protected writings to be seen only after he died."
On NBC, Rehema Ellis filed an In Depth recap on the 36-year-old minivan driver who drove for two miles into oncoming traffic along the Taconic Parkway in suburban New York City before crashing head-on into an SUV, killing herself and seven others. Ellis reported that Diane Schuler had been driving "erratically" for 60 miles before the crash, having told her brother that she felt disoriented. "Police recovered a broken vodka bottle from Schuler's car and say she had also smoked marijuana." The coroner's toxicological analysis found she was drunk.
SILENT TWEETS "I asked how everyone survived the twitterpocalypse," quipped ABC's Bill Weir, when a denial of service attack on twitter.com closed down "the world's fastest-growing form of communication." He did not get a response from all of the globe's 40m tweeters but of those who did reply "most complained they got nothing done because every two minutes they had to check on twitter" to see if it was up or down.
BUELLER? BUELLER? "John Hughes spoke to a whole generation. He did not talk down to them," thus Leonard Maltin, the film critic, paid tribute to the moviemaker in the obituary George Lewis filed on NBC. The director of the 1985 meditation on teenage angst The Breakfast Club hardly appealed to the core demographic of the network nightly newscasts--although at 59 he was in that sweet spot himself--so NBC generously offered its older audience a refresher on Generation X's formative years.
