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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 22, 2009
The news agenda is chaotic. ABC and NBC both led with the failure of "situational awareness" by the pilots of Northwest Airlines 188 as their jetliner overshot its destination by 150 miles, incommunicado for 80 minutes. CBS led with Exclusive on-the-scene footage of the Drug Enforcement Administration's raids of suspected stash houses in the Atlanta suburbs run by Mexican narcotraffickers. All three newscasts followed up on Wednesday's Story of the Day, the pay cuts facing millionaire executives whose firms required federally bailouts. Yet the H1N1 swine strain of influenza was Thursday's Story of the Day, with a series of unrelated features and interviews combining to qualify for the #1 spot.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 22, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
NEWS AGENDA LACKS SITUATIONAL AWARENESS The news agenda is chaotic. ABC and NBC both led with the failure of "situational awareness" by the pilots of Northwest Airlines 188 as their jetliner overshot its destination by 150 miles, incommunicado for 80 minutes. CBS led with Exclusive on-the-scene footage of the Drug Enforcement Administration's raids of suspected stash houses in the Atlanta suburbs run by Mexican narcotraffickers. All three newscasts followed up on Wednesday's Story of the Day, the pay cuts facing millionaire executives whose firms required federally bailouts. Yet the H1N1 swine strain of influenza was Thursday's Story of the Day, with a series of unrelated features and interviews combining to qualify for the #1 spot.
Special Master Kenneth Feinberg granted newsmaker interviews to explain his decision to cut the pay of 175 executives at seven part-nationalized businesses. ABC's Betsy Stark asked whether he had "done right by angry taxpayers" at the same time as safeguarding those companies' "ability to compete." "I have tried to balance both sides," the bureaucrat replied. NBC's Lisa Myers pointed out that even after the cuts there will still be 34 executives at AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America whose annual pay will exceed $1m. ABC's Dan Harris repeated the scuttlebutt that General Motors is having trouble finding applicants for its vacant Chief Financial Officer position because "the salary is capped by the government at $1m."
Harris has to be kidding about a shortage of corporate accountants who want to be a millionaire. Admittedly his assignment was to focus on the talking points coming out of Wall Street in favor of leaving lavish remuneration alone. He repeated one worry that a bailed-out company might suffer a "brain drain" of defections. Mostly Harris was sarcastic about Wall Street's whining. In one paraphrase, he declared "we have to hold our nose and allow these big payouts to continue because to micromanage the banks would be to cut off our nose to spite our face!" How about this self-serving rationalization? "Americans need to learn to live with an ugly truth of capitalism that sometimes infuriating unfairness may be good for all of us."
CBS' Chip Reid added that salary caps will not only apply to Feinberg's top 175 executives. The Federal Reserve's regulation of the entire commercial banking industry will include caps on compensation packages not only for top executives but also for "any employee who could expose a bank to big risk, including some traders and loan officers."
STILL ON PHOTO SAFARI, EVEN IN A DROUGHT The yearlong drought in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya finally attracted the attention of a nightly newscast. ABC's Nairobi-based Dana Hughes told us about desperate gun-toting rival tribes "launching violent raids to steal cattle and lands for grazing" in northern Kenya. As admirable as this assignment was in publicizing an undercovered story, Hughes could not avoid that cliche of African reporting--supplementing her coverage of human misery with that of wildlife. See the starving baby elephant in the Samburu National Reserve.
ALL IN THE FAMILY Operation Coronado was the nationwide dragnet by the Drug Enforcement Administration targeting Mexico's La Familia narcotics network. ABC's Pierre Thomas covered the coordinated arrests of 300 suspects in 19 states over a 48-hour period as a news story. The DEA claimed to have seized $32m in cash and eleven tons of drugs--cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, marijuana. The second part of Mark Strassmann's Exclusive feature on CBS--part one is here--told us that La Familia is accused of running tract homes in the Atlanta suburbs as "stash houses," some for storing cash, some for hiding narcotics, some for imprisoning kidnapped hostages. Strassmann's Exclusive showed us a hazmat-clad raid of a tract home fronting as an alleged production laboratory: "Agents in protective suits carefully removed buckets of explosive meth oil and acetone--so much meth in so many stages that even agents were startled."
NBC's Mark Potter chose a different narcotics angle. He crawled underneath the streets of Nogales--both in Arizona and in Mexico--where the Border Patrol has uncovered a network of 18 drug smuggling tunnels branching from the twin cities' storm drain system.
X-FACTOR IN GARDEN STATE This was the first time the off-year elections have been seen on the networks' radar. CBS sent Jeff Greenfield across the Hudson River to New Jersey to give us an update on the challenge to Jon Corzine, the incumbent Democratic governor, by Republican Chris Christie and "X-factor" independent Chris Daggett. Greenfield reminded us that four times already this decade, polls in New Jersey statewide races had indicated a close contest only to produce a comfortable victory for the Democrat on Election Day: "Should that pattern be broken this time a Corzine loss will send chills up Democratic spines across the country."
LOST SITUATIONAL AWARENESS The only negative consequence of Northwest Airlines 188 veering off over Wisconsin en route to Minneapolis from San Diego was that its 147 passengers arrived an hour late. It was hardly the most important story of the day and CBS, properly, mentioned the incident only in passing. By contrast, the other two newscasts led with the automatic pilot's overshoot. ABC's Lisa Stark and NBC's Tom Costello both cited the National Transportation Safety Board's version of the crew's explanation: "They had been in a heated conversation about airline policy and lost situational awareness." ABC spent most time on the snafu, with anchor Charles Gibson asking in-house aviation consultant John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream) for his assessment: "This bears all the earmarks of a crew that has gone to sleep. I would say actually that there is less than a 1% chance that there is any other rational explanation."
On a serious note, ABC consultant Nance criticized the Federal Aviation Administration for prohibiting planned in-flight naps by cockpit crews, despite 35 years of lobbying. The FAA refuses "to acknowledge that pilots are humans and get sleepy."
FOLLOW THE VAN By coincidence, both ABC and CBS closed with vans. CBS' Bill Whitaker brought us Los Angeles' "street food explosion" as more than two dozen gourmet vans--from Mexican-Korean fusion to organic hot dogs--sell meals on the sidewalk, alerting their diners of their whereabouts via twitter.com. The fad's online correspondent is Daniel Delaney at vendrTV. On ABC, Chris Bury caught up with Aaron Heideman's artistic creation, an '89 Dodge that houses his The Man in a Van Project. His beat-up wheels are on a nationwide tour to document the recession, inviting individuals to write their own folk histories of economic woes. Heideman was heading into Michigan: "I know I am going to get a lot of stories here."
YET MORE ‘FLU The H1N1 beat is relentless. CBS' Jim Axelrod told us about the "slow and antiquated" method for making vaccine, a 50-year-old production process using hen's eggs. The method has been modernized but will not be approved until "next year at the earliest"…CBS' Jeff Glor (no link) darkly warned us of worst case scenario estimates of a pandemic that will paralyze workplaces, costing the Gross Domestic Product $600bn, or 4% of output…NBC's Robert Bazell offered the bright side, citing statistics that the swine strain virus has spread to 95% of all college campuses yet has killed not a single student and has led to hospitalization of fewer than 0.1% of those infected…NBC's Mara Schiavocampo verified the lack of campus concern with her vox pop of students. "For the most part it is business as usual inside the classroom and out," she found. "Lots of people living, studying and partying together."
Dr Richard Besser was a public health bureaucrat at the Centers for Disease Control before he became a journalist, now the senior medical editor at ABC News. Unfortunately Besser does not seem to have received the memo. His new job is to cover the performance of the public health sector not to speak for it. Discussing popular worries about 'flu vaccine safety, this is what Besser told his anchor Charles Gibson: "It raises questions about trust in science, trust in government and what we do to explain clearly what has been done. I do not think we have done all we can to really assure the public about the safety of this vaccine."
Who is this we, Besser? The doctor is acting just like a retired general hired by a news organization to be a military consultant, unable to disentangle his loyalty to the Pentagon with his journalistic duty to his viewers. ABC News is not an arm of the public health bureaucracy and Besser, now he is a journalist, should stop confusing the two.
Special Master Kenneth Feinberg granted newsmaker interviews to explain his decision to cut the pay of 175 executives at seven part-nationalized businesses. ABC's Betsy Stark asked whether he had "done right by angry taxpayers" at the same time as safeguarding those companies' "ability to compete." "I have tried to balance both sides," the bureaucrat replied. NBC's Lisa Myers pointed out that even after the cuts there will still be 34 executives at AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America whose annual pay will exceed $1m. ABC's Dan Harris repeated the scuttlebutt that General Motors is having trouble finding applicants for its vacant Chief Financial Officer position because "the salary is capped by the government at $1m."
Harris has to be kidding about a shortage of corporate accountants who want to be a millionaire. Admittedly his assignment was to focus on the talking points coming out of Wall Street in favor of leaving lavish remuneration alone. He repeated one worry that a bailed-out company might suffer a "brain drain" of defections. Mostly Harris was sarcastic about Wall Street's whining. In one paraphrase, he declared "we have to hold our nose and allow these big payouts to continue because to micromanage the banks would be to cut off our nose to spite our face!" How about this self-serving rationalization? "Americans need to learn to live with an ugly truth of capitalism that sometimes infuriating unfairness may be good for all of us."
CBS' Chip Reid added that salary caps will not only apply to Feinberg's top 175 executives. The Federal Reserve's regulation of the entire commercial banking industry will include caps on compensation packages not only for top executives but also for "any employee who could expose a bank to big risk, including some traders and loan officers."
STILL ON PHOTO SAFARI, EVEN IN A DROUGHT The yearlong drought in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya finally attracted the attention of a nightly newscast. ABC's Nairobi-based Dana Hughes told us about desperate gun-toting rival tribes "launching violent raids to steal cattle and lands for grazing" in northern Kenya. As admirable as this assignment was in publicizing an undercovered story, Hughes could not avoid that cliche of African reporting--supplementing her coverage of human misery with that of wildlife. See the starving baby elephant in the Samburu National Reserve.
ALL IN THE FAMILY Operation Coronado was the nationwide dragnet by the Drug Enforcement Administration targeting Mexico's La Familia narcotics network. ABC's Pierre Thomas covered the coordinated arrests of 300 suspects in 19 states over a 48-hour period as a news story. The DEA claimed to have seized $32m in cash and eleven tons of drugs--cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, marijuana. The second part of Mark Strassmann's Exclusive feature on CBS--part one is here--told us that La Familia is accused of running tract homes in the Atlanta suburbs as "stash houses," some for storing cash, some for hiding narcotics, some for imprisoning kidnapped hostages. Strassmann's Exclusive showed us a hazmat-clad raid of a tract home fronting as an alleged production laboratory: "Agents in protective suits carefully removed buckets of explosive meth oil and acetone--so much meth in so many stages that even agents were startled."
NBC's Mark Potter chose a different narcotics angle. He crawled underneath the streets of Nogales--both in Arizona and in Mexico--where the Border Patrol has uncovered a network of 18 drug smuggling tunnels branching from the twin cities' storm drain system.
X-FACTOR IN GARDEN STATE This was the first time the off-year elections have been seen on the networks' radar. CBS sent Jeff Greenfield across the Hudson River to New Jersey to give us an update on the challenge to Jon Corzine, the incumbent Democratic governor, by Republican Chris Christie and "X-factor" independent Chris Daggett. Greenfield reminded us that four times already this decade, polls in New Jersey statewide races had indicated a close contest only to produce a comfortable victory for the Democrat on Election Day: "Should that pattern be broken this time a Corzine loss will send chills up Democratic spines across the country."
LOST SITUATIONAL AWARENESS The only negative consequence of Northwest Airlines 188 veering off over Wisconsin en route to Minneapolis from San Diego was that its 147 passengers arrived an hour late. It was hardly the most important story of the day and CBS, properly, mentioned the incident only in passing. By contrast, the other two newscasts led with the automatic pilot's overshoot. ABC's Lisa Stark and NBC's Tom Costello both cited the National Transportation Safety Board's version of the crew's explanation: "They had been in a heated conversation about airline policy and lost situational awareness." ABC spent most time on the snafu, with anchor Charles Gibson asking in-house aviation consultant John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream) for his assessment: "This bears all the earmarks of a crew that has gone to sleep. I would say actually that there is less than a 1% chance that there is any other rational explanation."
On a serious note, ABC consultant Nance criticized the Federal Aviation Administration for prohibiting planned in-flight naps by cockpit crews, despite 35 years of lobbying. The FAA refuses "to acknowledge that pilots are humans and get sleepy."
FOLLOW THE VAN By coincidence, both ABC and CBS closed with vans. CBS' Bill Whitaker brought us Los Angeles' "street food explosion" as more than two dozen gourmet vans--from Mexican-Korean fusion to organic hot dogs--sell meals on the sidewalk, alerting their diners of their whereabouts via twitter.com. The fad's online correspondent is Daniel Delaney at vendrTV. On ABC, Chris Bury caught up with Aaron Heideman's artistic creation, an '89 Dodge that houses his The Man in a Van Project. His beat-up wheels are on a nationwide tour to document the recession, inviting individuals to write their own folk histories of economic woes. Heideman was heading into Michigan: "I know I am going to get a lot of stories here."
YET MORE ‘FLU The H1N1 beat is relentless. CBS' Jim Axelrod told us about the "slow and antiquated" method for making vaccine, a 50-year-old production process using hen's eggs. The method has been modernized but will not be approved until "next year at the earliest"…CBS' Jeff Glor (no link) darkly warned us of worst case scenario estimates of a pandemic that will paralyze workplaces, costing the Gross Domestic Product $600bn, or 4% of output…NBC's Robert Bazell offered the bright side, citing statistics that the swine strain virus has spread to 95% of all college campuses yet has killed not a single student and has led to hospitalization of fewer than 0.1% of those infected…NBC's Mara Schiavocampo verified the lack of campus concern with her vox pop of students. "For the most part it is business as usual inside the classroom and out," she found. "Lots of people living, studying and partying together."
Dr Richard Besser was a public health bureaucrat at the Centers for Disease Control before he became a journalist, now the senior medical editor at ABC News. Unfortunately Besser does not seem to have received the memo. His new job is to cover the performance of the public health sector not to speak for it. Discussing popular worries about 'flu vaccine safety, this is what Besser told his anchor Charles Gibson: "It raises questions about trust in science, trust in government and what we do to explain clearly what has been done. I do not think we have done all we can to really assure the public about the safety of this vaccine."
Who is this we, Besser? The doctor is acting just like a retired general hired by a news organization to be a military consultant, unable to disentangle his loyalty to the Pentagon with his journalistic duty to his viewers. ABC News is not an arm of the public health bureaucracy and Besser, now he is a journalist, should stop confusing the two.
