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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 23, 2009
A vacuous week of news concluded with a non-story. All three network newscasts ended last week with a rehash of misplaced fears that a six-year-old boy was a castaway in an untethered helium balloon over Colorado. He was never in danger. Now the same newscasts all lead with misplaced fears about an off-course jetliner over Wisconsin. The passengers were never in danger; the pilots merely lost situational awareness for 80 minutes. This Story of the Day is hardly the stuff of headlines--more like the summer silly season. If the networks could not find any newsworthy domestic developments, why not search overseas? Yet the day's news vacuum was not filled by a single report from a foreign dateline on any newscast. Lucky Charles Gibson took the boring day off from ABC's anchor desk as George Stephanopoulos substituted.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 23, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
OVERSHOOTING JETLINER FOLLOWS BOYLESS HELIUM BALLOON A vacuous week of news concluded with a non-story. All three network newscasts ended last week with a rehash of misplaced fears that a six-year-old boy was a castaway in an untethered helium balloon over Colorado. He was never in danger. Now the same newscasts all lead with misplaced fears about an off-course jetliner over Wisconsin. The passengers were never in danger; the pilots merely lost situational awareness for 80 minutes. This Story of the Day is hardly the stuff of headlines--more like the summer silly season. If the networks could not find any newsworthy domestic developments, why not search overseas? Yet the day's news vacuum was not filled by a single report from a foreign dateline on any newscast. Lucky Charles Gibson took the boring day off from ABC's anchor desk as George Stephanopoulos substituted.
The National Transportation Safety board may never know what was going on in the cockpit of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 as it flew past its destination in Minneapolis towards Eau Claire. "The cockpit voice recorder caught just the last 30 minutes of the flight. By that time it was likely just routine communication about landing," ABC's Lisa Stark explained. While the plane was incommunicado, CBS' Wyatt Andrews told us, air traffic controllers in Minneapolis "watched with building tension, their post-9/11 training telling them to presume the worst, disabled pilots or even terrorism…four National Guard F-16s were put on standby." Even when radio contact was restored "the pilots were put through a series of maneuvers in the air to prove to controlers they had command of the aircraft," noted NBC's Kevin Tibbles.
ABC's Stark aired a soundbite from pilot Richard Cole. "I tell you this: neither of us was asleep." Such reassurance did not deter John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream), her network's in-house aviation consultant, from demanding "immediately, under emergency authority," that the Federal Aviation Administration authorize pilots to take "naps in the cockpit under a controled environment." Nance was clearly distraught. He called the pilots "outrageously irresponsible" and their loss of situational awareness "outrageous behavior." He even took the plane's equipment personally: "I am really upset that this is only the 30-minute older version of the flight cockpit voice recorder. We were hoping it was a two-hour one."
ATTENDANT LOVES MEN IN UNIFORM ABC, graciously, balanced all this negative publicity for Northwest Airlines with a positive closing feature on Delta, its corporate sibling. Delta Airlines flight attendant Robin Schmidt was granted ABC's Person of the Week accolade for boosting the morale of members of the military deployed overseas. Over the past seven years she has adopted 73 different soldiers to receive personalized care packages and messages of support. She urges her Delta passengers to write "words of encouragement, prayers, draw pictures, tell jokes" to her designated GI. "The gifts are great," reported ABC's Bob Woodruff, "but soldiers say it is the journals that really hit home."
SUBSIDY SPURS SALES There was very little other breaking news that the networks bothered to report. CBS' Anthony Mason and ABC's Ryan Owens covered the monthly release of statistics from the real estate sector. Existing homes sales are increasing. Both reporters gave credit for the increase to the federal income tax break that offers an $8,000 subsidy to those buying their first home. Owens quoted an estimate that 45% of September's sales qualified for such a subsidy. Thursday, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell told us about estimates by the Internal Revenue Service that $500m out of the $13bn in subsidies may have been falsely claimed.
H1N1 DOMESTIC DEATH TOLL TOPS GRAND Of course we were given our daily dose of 'flu news. CNN's in-house physician Sanjay Gupta updated us at CBS. "You may have heard that up to one in five children were thought to have had H1N1 already," the doctor advised. Do not believe it. That statistic was not based on diagnoses but on a telephone survey: "These are kids that may have had coughs, sniffles--really hard to say they all had H1N1." So what are the real numbers? On ABC, in-house physician Richard Besser told us that this virus has just killed its 1,000th patient nationwide. On NBC, Robert Bazell added that 90 of those deaths occurred just in the last week.
What about the vaccine? NBC's Bazell recalled that federal public health authorities predicted three months ago that by now 100m doses would be distributed: "As of today 11.6m have become available." Bazell's colleague Lee Cowan (at the tail of the Bazell videostream) showed scenes from "the nation's vaccine scavenger hunt" with young people and pregnant women standing in line in Los Angeles and Maryland, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, Las Vegas and Oregon.
CBS cross-promoted 60 Minutes by having Kelly Cobiella file an update us the "strapping 15-year-old football player" Luke Duvall, hospitalized in intensive care in Arkansas. Duvall's plight was profiled by Scott Pelley on the news magazine last Sunday. The teenager has had his breathing tube taken out and is trying to talk again. ABC cross-promoted 20/20 which in turn is publicizing Superfreakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. In keeping with the day's infectious disease theme, John Berman zeroed in on a Freakonomics chapter about research conducted in Australia into hospital hygiene. Nurses checked on physicians as they did their rounds: the doctors self-reported a 73% compliance rate with hand-washing protocols; the nurses observed the rate at 9%.
ABC's Berman demonstrated how the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles enforces its hand-washing rules. Each doctor puts his unwashed hand in a Petri dish; the culture is grown; and is then displayed on the hospital's computers as a screen saver. "Nothing like the gross-out factor," beamed Berman, before growing a culture from his own palm print.
WHAT ELSE? In political news, NBC's Chuck Todd handicapped the off-year elections. "The political climate has been volatile," he reckoned with third-party candidates intruding into two-party races for Governor in New Jersey and for Congress in upstate New York…President Barack Obama's call for the nation's public schools to work longer days and longer years is being contradicted in his native state, ABC's David Wright reported. Budget cuts have given Hawaii's schoolchildren three-day weekends. Its year now has just 163 school days, compared with 220 in its Pacific neighbor South Korea and 243 in Japan…FOX News Channel has been dismissed by the White House "not a real news organization at all," observed CBS' Jeff Greenfield. He quoted Chip Reid, his own network's correspondent at the White House, on the mainstream media's response when FNC was excluded from a press pool interview at the Treasury Department: "All the networks said That is it! You have crossed the line." Unfortunately Greenfield's coverage of such journalistic solidarity has not been posted online.
NIX THE N-WORD In its closing Friday feature, CBS paid tribute to Jonathan McCoy as an embodiment of The American Spirit. McCoy is an eleven-year-old from Atlanta who composed an indictment of the use of the word nigger in a speech competition. "The speech has gone viral," Byron Pitts told us. He preached it at the Empowerment Temple in Baltimore; it has received a million hits on YouTube; he addressed the freshman class at Morehouse College; he has launched an online pledge drive obtaining petitioners' promises never to use the word. McCoy himself never says it, referring to it merely as the N-word. Not only does he object to its use as a slur but also colloquially. What about the casual brotherly greeting What's up N-word? "I think it is wrong."
FIND HER WITH JUDGE CRATER, DB COOPER & JIMMY HOFFA A day's news that kicked off with a detailed inquiry into a trivial midair error by a pair of Northwest Airlines pilots, closed with history's most famous failed aviation adventure. NBC's Miguel Almaguer offered free publicity to the opening of Amelia, the biopic of the aviatrix Earhart. The movie recreates "her record-setting flights across the Atlantic, her solo journey over the Pacific, and her final flight, an attempt to circumnavigate the globe…When she never returned the fascination with her only grew."
The National Transportation Safety board may never know what was going on in the cockpit of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 as it flew past its destination in Minneapolis towards Eau Claire. "The cockpit voice recorder caught just the last 30 minutes of the flight. By that time it was likely just routine communication about landing," ABC's Lisa Stark explained. While the plane was incommunicado, CBS' Wyatt Andrews told us, air traffic controllers in Minneapolis "watched with building tension, their post-9/11 training telling them to presume the worst, disabled pilots or even terrorism…four National Guard F-16s were put on standby." Even when radio contact was restored "the pilots were put through a series of maneuvers in the air to prove to controlers they had command of the aircraft," noted NBC's Kevin Tibbles.
ABC's Stark aired a soundbite from pilot Richard Cole. "I tell you this: neither of us was asleep." Such reassurance did not deter John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream), her network's in-house aviation consultant, from demanding "immediately, under emergency authority," that the Federal Aviation Administration authorize pilots to take "naps in the cockpit under a controled environment." Nance was clearly distraught. He called the pilots "outrageously irresponsible" and their loss of situational awareness "outrageous behavior." He even took the plane's equipment personally: "I am really upset that this is only the 30-minute older version of the flight cockpit voice recorder. We were hoping it was a two-hour one."
ATTENDANT LOVES MEN IN UNIFORM ABC, graciously, balanced all this negative publicity for Northwest Airlines with a positive closing feature on Delta, its corporate sibling. Delta Airlines flight attendant Robin Schmidt was granted ABC's Person of the Week accolade for boosting the morale of members of the military deployed overseas. Over the past seven years she has adopted 73 different soldiers to receive personalized care packages and messages of support. She urges her Delta passengers to write "words of encouragement, prayers, draw pictures, tell jokes" to her designated GI. "The gifts are great," reported ABC's Bob Woodruff, "but soldiers say it is the journals that really hit home."
SUBSIDY SPURS SALES There was very little other breaking news that the networks bothered to report. CBS' Anthony Mason and ABC's Ryan Owens covered the monthly release of statistics from the real estate sector. Existing homes sales are increasing. Both reporters gave credit for the increase to the federal income tax break that offers an $8,000 subsidy to those buying their first home. Owens quoted an estimate that 45% of September's sales qualified for such a subsidy. Thursday, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell told us about estimates by the Internal Revenue Service that $500m out of the $13bn in subsidies may have been falsely claimed.
H1N1 DOMESTIC DEATH TOLL TOPS GRAND Of course we were given our daily dose of 'flu news. CNN's in-house physician Sanjay Gupta updated us at CBS. "You may have heard that up to one in five children were thought to have had H1N1 already," the doctor advised. Do not believe it. That statistic was not based on diagnoses but on a telephone survey: "These are kids that may have had coughs, sniffles--really hard to say they all had H1N1." So what are the real numbers? On ABC, in-house physician Richard Besser told us that this virus has just killed its 1,000th patient nationwide. On NBC, Robert Bazell added that 90 of those deaths occurred just in the last week.
What about the vaccine? NBC's Bazell recalled that federal public health authorities predicted three months ago that by now 100m doses would be distributed: "As of today 11.6m have become available." Bazell's colleague Lee Cowan (at the tail of the Bazell videostream) showed scenes from "the nation's vaccine scavenger hunt" with young people and pregnant women standing in line in Los Angeles and Maryland, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, Las Vegas and Oregon.
CBS cross-promoted 60 Minutes by having Kelly Cobiella file an update us the "strapping 15-year-old football player" Luke Duvall, hospitalized in intensive care in Arkansas. Duvall's plight was profiled by Scott Pelley on the news magazine last Sunday. The teenager has had his breathing tube taken out and is trying to talk again. ABC cross-promoted 20/20 which in turn is publicizing Superfreakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. In keeping with the day's infectious disease theme, John Berman zeroed in on a Freakonomics chapter about research conducted in Australia into hospital hygiene. Nurses checked on physicians as they did their rounds: the doctors self-reported a 73% compliance rate with hand-washing protocols; the nurses observed the rate at 9%.
ABC's Berman demonstrated how the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles enforces its hand-washing rules. Each doctor puts his unwashed hand in a Petri dish; the culture is grown; and is then displayed on the hospital's computers as a screen saver. "Nothing like the gross-out factor," beamed Berman, before growing a culture from his own palm print.
WHAT ELSE? In political news, NBC's Chuck Todd handicapped the off-year elections. "The political climate has been volatile," he reckoned with third-party candidates intruding into two-party races for Governor in New Jersey and for Congress in upstate New York…President Barack Obama's call for the nation's public schools to work longer days and longer years is being contradicted in his native state, ABC's David Wright reported. Budget cuts have given Hawaii's schoolchildren three-day weekends. Its year now has just 163 school days, compared with 220 in its Pacific neighbor South Korea and 243 in Japan…FOX News Channel has been dismissed by the White House "not a real news organization at all," observed CBS' Jeff Greenfield. He quoted Chip Reid, his own network's correspondent at the White House, on the mainstream media's response when FNC was excluded from a press pool interview at the Treasury Department: "All the networks said That is it! You have crossed the line." Unfortunately Greenfield's coverage of such journalistic solidarity has not been posted online.
NIX THE N-WORD In its closing Friday feature, CBS paid tribute to Jonathan McCoy as an embodiment of The American Spirit. McCoy is an eleven-year-old from Atlanta who composed an indictment of the use of the word nigger in a speech competition. "The speech has gone viral," Byron Pitts told us. He preached it at the Empowerment Temple in Baltimore; it has received a million hits on YouTube; he addressed the freshman class at Morehouse College; he has launched an online pledge drive obtaining petitioners' promises never to use the word. McCoy himself never says it, referring to it merely as the N-word. Not only does he object to its use as a slur but also colloquially. What about the casual brotherly greeting What's up N-word? "I think it is wrong."
FIND HER WITH JUDGE CRATER, DB COOPER & JIMMY HOFFA A day's news that kicked off with a detailed inquiry into a trivial midair error by a pair of Northwest Airlines pilots, closed with history's most famous failed aviation adventure. NBC's Miguel Almaguer offered free publicity to the opening of Amelia, the biopic of the aviatrix Earhart. The movie recreates "her record-setting flights across the Atlantic, her solo journey over the Pacific, and her final flight, an attempt to circumnavigate the globe…When she never returned the fascination with her only grew."
