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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 1, 2009
Day Two of the London road trip by all three network anchors brought a very heavy news day. All three newscasts led with Barack Obama's busy day of diplomacy, meeting with world leaders in preparation for the G20 Financial Summit. All three assigned a correspondent to the anti-capitalist protests in the City of London, its financial hub. All three closed with a soft G20 feature. In total, G20 accounted for 43% of the three-network newshole (25 min out of 58). Curiously the three anchors also conducted taped interviews with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner--each remarkably unnewsworthy, yet each afforded a prominent placement--for another nine minutes of total airtime.
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LONDON CALLING, PLUS EXTRA AIRTIME FOR NEWSFREE GEITHNER Day Two of the London road trip by all three network anchors brought a very heavy news day. All three newscasts led with Barack Obama's busy day of diplomacy, meeting with world leaders in preparation for the G20 Financial Summit. All three assigned a correspondent to the anti-capitalist protests in the City of London, its financial hub. All three closed with a soft G20 feature. In total, G20 accounted for 43% of the three-network newshole (25 min out of 58). Curiously the three anchors also conducted taped interviews with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner--each remarkably unnewsworthy, yet each afforded a prominent placement--for another nine minutes of total airtime.
"A diplomatic decathlon," was how NBC's Chuck Todd described the President's day, "packing in a week's worth of international diplomacy into twelve hours." Obama held talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and scheduled summit visits to Beijing with President Wu Jintao and to Moscow with President Dmitri Medvedev. "Though this is an economic summit," ABC's Jake Tapper reckoned that the Medvedev meeting was the headlinegrabber. He heard some heralding "a major breakthrough in US-Russia relations" in their greenlighting of a renewal of the START nuclear treaty that was first signed in 1991. CBS' Chip Reid picked up on the joint statement: "We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear-free world."
CBS' Reid heard "veiled criticism" of the way the two leaders' predecessors, Vladimir Putin and George Bush, conducted their diplomacy. ABC's Jim Sciutto went further: "Those relations reached a crisis point over the last year over Russia's war in Georgia and United States plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe." The decision to renew START talks, Sciutto reckoned, "goes beyond the normal diplomatic speak, setting out a very specific work plan for negotiators leading up to the summit in July."
STREET THEATER GIVEN PLENTY OF PUBLICITY G20 action videotape was generated by anti-capitalist protestors and the bankers' protectors from the Metropolitan Police. CBS' Mark Phillips noted sardonically that "no major international summit is complete these days without its requisite street theater of protest." ABC's Miguel Marquez first showed us an angry mob, then peace protestors, and then environmental street-campers, before offering the coup de theatre, activist actors "who tried to sneak in disguised as police in an armored vehicle." NBC's Stephanie Gosk presented a "good-natured and carnival-like" scene as four columns of protestors, complete with costumes and effigies, converged on the City as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Things did not finish so festive. NBC's Gosk saw police "pushing the crowd…charging…beating people on the head" while vandals ransacked the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Watching a yellow line of police protecting the bank's property, a protestor asked Gosk: "Considering the damage the RBS has done to working class people in this country, where were the police then? Where are the police when families are getting evicted?"
WHERE’S THE NEWS, TIM? Why was Secretary Timothy Geithner afforded such free publicity for his talking points? Where is the news in this answer to ABC anchor Charles Gibson? "I think this is the strongest moment of cooperation globally you have seen since World War II." What about this defense of his department's TARP bailout of the financial sector to CBS anchor Katie Couric? "We are moving very quickly to make sure that we have in place strong transparency, strong conditions on this assistance, stronger tracking mechanisms and we are committed to the strongest possible oversight." What about his claims of equal treatment for the financial and automotive sectors for NBC anchor Brian Williams? "There has been dramatic restructuring. The entire landscape of our financial system has changed dramatically…The government has come in and changed management."
I cannot understand why the consensus that Geithner was such an important interview get.
BORIS SEEKS MOVING CRANES, MAKES KATIE CRACK "Made redundant," CBS anchor Katie Couric translated for us, is the British term for "laid-off." Couric personalized the global economic slowdown that the G20 is supposed to fix with a profile of Tina Owen and Mark Puffett, a tearful twosome of the 27,000 British workers who have been redundant since Christmas, when Woolworths, the dime store chain, went out of business. Couric then moved on to London, where 130,000 workers in high finance have become redundant in the past 18 months, to receive a boosterish spin job from Mayor Boris Johnson. "We see a lot of cranes on the horizon," the anchor observed. "Are they motionless cranes?" the mayor asked. "Are you now going to say that they are standing idle?" "I am." "I can see one moving there." "Look at all these though." "Are they? Well, you know, what is the time now? Well, they are probably knocked off." Katie could not help it. Boris made her laugh.
ALL TIED UP AT THE OFFICE Across the Channel, CBS' Richard Roth saw humor in bossnapping. "If the phone call home the other night was to say he was tied up at the office…he really meant it." French workers at factories run by 3M and SONY and Caterpillar have barricaded their bosses at work overnight in protest against layoffs. "It is an action that is more theatrical than threatening," Roth assured us. "The workers did not get in trouble with the law. So far no charges have been filed." As for the 3M exec, he "did sound sympathetic after 36 hours' captivity." Roth offered his soundbite--"workers have more to complain about than I do"--before watching him being driven off by his chauffeur.
CONSUMERS STILL STUCK BACK IN THE USA The G20 focus was supposed to be on the global economic slowdown but that did not stop NBC and ABC from covering domestic money worries. The news hook for Dan Harris on ABC was his own network's opinion poll on consumer behavior during the recession: 63% are spending less, including fewer restaurant meals, canceled vacations, less money on children's activities and 24% of us are "putting off a doctor's visit or medical test." On NBC, John Yang followed up on his network's lead on Monday and Tuesday, the impending bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler.
What Yang lacked was a copy editor. His statistical reporting is as clear as mud. "Nationwide new car sales fell in March for the 17th straight month--GM down 45% from the year before, Ford dropped 41%, Chrysler 39%--on track to be the worst year in nearly three decades but there is a glimmer of hope, a double digit increase from February to March."
EXONERATED BUT NOT REINSTATED It is bad luck for Ted Stevens, the Republican former Senator from Alaska, that his exoneration by the Justice Department should have come on such a heavy news day. The coverage of the reversal of his conviction for $250,000 in graft because of the prosecutor's misconduct would surely have been accorded more prominence on a G20-free agenda. Nevertheless, the network newscasts did the right thing: all three had covered his indictment last July and again his conviction last October; so it was proper that Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to drop the charges against him should get similarly unanimous treatment. A trio of Justice Department correspondents filed--Pete Williams at NBC, Bob Orr at CBS and Pierre Thomas at ABC. Thomas reported that FBI agent Chad Joy had accused prosecutors of suppressing potentially exculpatory evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit. NBC's Williams noted that Holder's reversal does not restore Stevens' political career in the Senate: just a week after his now-overturned conviction "he lost his bid for re-election--by a whisker."
ANCHORS BECOME COURTIERS Our anchors seem to be falling into a London Fog. Tuesday CBS' Katie Couric turned into quite the courtier as she worried about the protocol of President in the presence of Majesty. Now ABC's Charles Gibson takes a stroll down The Mall to Buckingham Palace to muse that "when you visit the Queen, she does not come down to the door to say Hi! even if you are the President of the United States." Gibson rehearsed the p's-&-q's of a royal audience and shared gossip about the exchange of gifts. Barack Obama gave Elizabeth Windsor "a rare songbook signed by composer Richard Rodgers." As a follow-up to Couric's report, Gibson did not share whether the tunes included the supposed royal favorite The Lady is a Tramp.
This obsequiousness is quite unbecoming a republican nation. Can you imagine how refreshing it would have been if Gibson, instead, had--accurately--described Obama's trip to the Palace as a meeting with the "monarch under whose imperial lash his black-skinned kin had been subject a mere generation ago"?
UPDATE: next day, NBC anchor Brian Williams dodged the courtiers' curse by filing a suitably wry--and brief--observation about the "purists in British society" who "positively huffed" when they saw Her Majesty and First Lady arm in arm: "The reacharound hug was a mutual thing, a sign of affection not at all a breach of protocol, so we can all breathe a bit easier."
BAKEWELL TARTS & LADY BRACKNELL All three newscasts chose a soft G20 feature for a closer. ABC's Nick Watt filed a delectable profile of Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who catered the banquet for world leaders at 10 Downing Street. That would be seaweed and salmon followed by slow-roasted lamb followed by Bakewell tart. The Naked Chef is a fiscal advisor too: "You have just got to put a huge tax on sugar because there is four times too much sugar going into everything." Even the Bakewell tarts?
CBS and NBC both closed with the impression Michelle Obama was making on the English. Dawna Friesen's report on NBC was altogether too saccharine with phrases like "star struck" and "Michelle's magic" and "relaxed, easy charm" and "elegant and understated." Sheila MacVicar decided to have fun instead as she channeled her inner Lady Bracknell on CBS. She reminded us that Queen Elizabeth would never be caught without one and the Margaret Thatcher used to hit her political opponents with hers and that even the "always elegant" Princess Diana had a pretty little black one. A "burning question" for the First Lady is in the minds of the women of Britain. Where is her handbag?
"A diplomatic decathlon," was how NBC's Chuck Todd described the President's day, "packing in a week's worth of international diplomacy into twelve hours." Obama held talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and scheduled summit visits to Beijing with President Wu Jintao and to Moscow with President Dmitri Medvedev. "Though this is an economic summit," ABC's Jake Tapper reckoned that the Medvedev meeting was the headlinegrabber. He heard some heralding "a major breakthrough in US-Russia relations" in their greenlighting of a renewal of the START nuclear treaty that was first signed in 1991. CBS' Chip Reid picked up on the joint statement: "We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear-free world."
CBS' Reid heard "veiled criticism" of the way the two leaders' predecessors, Vladimir Putin and George Bush, conducted their diplomacy. ABC's Jim Sciutto went further: "Those relations reached a crisis point over the last year over Russia's war in Georgia and United States plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe." The decision to renew START talks, Sciutto reckoned, "goes beyond the normal diplomatic speak, setting out a very specific work plan for negotiators leading up to the summit in July."
STREET THEATER GIVEN PLENTY OF PUBLICITY G20 action videotape was generated by anti-capitalist protestors and the bankers' protectors from the Metropolitan Police. CBS' Mark Phillips noted sardonically that "no major international summit is complete these days without its requisite street theater of protest." ABC's Miguel Marquez first showed us an angry mob, then peace protestors, and then environmental street-campers, before offering the coup de theatre, activist actors "who tried to sneak in disguised as police in an armored vehicle." NBC's Stephanie Gosk presented a "good-natured and carnival-like" scene as four columns of protestors, complete with costumes and effigies, converged on the City as the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Things did not finish so festive. NBC's Gosk saw police "pushing the crowd…charging…beating people on the head" while vandals ransacked the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland. Watching a yellow line of police protecting the bank's property, a protestor asked Gosk: "Considering the damage the RBS has done to working class people in this country, where were the police then? Where are the police when families are getting evicted?"
WHERE’S THE NEWS, TIM? Why was Secretary Timothy Geithner afforded such free publicity for his talking points? Where is the news in this answer to ABC anchor Charles Gibson? "I think this is the strongest moment of cooperation globally you have seen since World War II." What about this defense of his department's TARP bailout of the financial sector to CBS anchor Katie Couric? "We are moving very quickly to make sure that we have in place strong transparency, strong conditions on this assistance, stronger tracking mechanisms and we are committed to the strongest possible oversight." What about his claims of equal treatment for the financial and automotive sectors for NBC anchor Brian Williams? "There has been dramatic restructuring. The entire landscape of our financial system has changed dramatically…The government has come in and changed management."
I cannot understand why the consensus that Geithner was such an important interview get.
BORIS SEEKS MOVING CRANES, MAKES KATIE CRACK "Made redundant," CBS anchor Katie Couric translated for us, is the British term for "laid-off." Couric personalized the global economic slowdown that the G20 is supposed to fix with a profile of Tina Owen and Mark Puffett, a tearful twosome of the 27,000 British workers who have been redundant since Christmas, when Woolworths, the dime store chain, went out of business. Couric then moved on to London, where 130,000 workers in high finance have become redundant in the past 18 months, to receive a boosterish spin job from Mayor Boris Johnson. "We see a lot of cranes on the horizon," the anchor observed. "Are they motionless cranes?" the mayor asked. "Are you now going to say that they are standing idle?" "I am." "I can see one moving there." "Look at all these though." "Are they? Well, you know, what is the time now? Well, they are probably knocked off." Katie could not help it. Boris made her laugh.
ALL TIED UP AT THE OFFICE Across the Channel, CBS' Richard Roth saw humor in bossnapping. "If the phone call home the other night was to say he was tied up at the office…he really meant it." French workers at factories run by 3M and SONY and Caterpillar have barricaded their bosses at work overnight in protest against layoffs. "It is an action that is more theatrical than threatening," Roth assured us. "The workers did not get in trouble with the law. So far no charges have been filed." As for the 3M exec, he "did sound sympathetic after 36 hours' captivity." Roth offered his soundbite--"workers have more to complain about than I do"--before watching him being driven off by his chauffeur.
CONSUMERS STILL STUCK BACK IN THE USA The G20 focus was supposed to be on the global economic slowdown but that did not stop NBC and ABC from covering domestic money worries. The news hook for Dan Harris on ABC was his own network's opinion poll on consumer behavior during the recession: 63% are spending less, including fewer restaurant meals, canceled vacations, less money on children's activities and 24% of us are "putting off a doctor's visit or medical test." On NBC, John Yang followed up on his network's lead on Monday and Tuesday, the impending bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler.
What Yang lacked was a copy editor. His statistical reporting is as clear as mud. "Nationwide new car sales fell in March for the 17th straight month--GM down 45% from the year before, Ford dropped 41%, Chrysler 39%--on track to be the worst year in nearly three decades but there is a glimmer of hope, a double digit increase from February to March."
EXONERATED BUT NOT REINSTATED It is bad luck for Ted Stevens, the Republican former Senator from Alaska, that his exoneration by the Justice Department should have come on such a heavy news day. The coverage of the reversal of his conviction for $250,000 in graft because of the prosecutor's misconduct would surely have been accorded more prominence on a G20-free agenda. Nevertheless, the network newscasts did the right thing: all three had covered his indictment last July and again his conviction last October; so it was proper that Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to drop the charges against him should get similarly unanimous treatment. A trio of Justice Department correspondents filed--Pete Williams at NBC, Bob Orr at CBS and Pierre Thomas at ABC. Thomas reported that FBI agent Chad Joy had accused prosecutors of suppressing potentially exculpatory evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit. NBC's Williams noted that Holder's reversal does not restore Stevens' political career in the Senate: just a week after his now-overturned conviction "he lost his bid for re-election--by a whisker."
ANCHORS BECOME COURTIERS Our anchors seem to be falling into a London Fog. Tuesday CBS' Katie Couric turned into quite the courtier as she worried about the protocol of President in the presence of Majesty. Now ABC's Charles Gibson takes a stroll down The Mall to Buckingham Palace to muse that "when you visit the Queen, she does not come down to the door to say Hi! even if you are the President of the United States." Gibson rehearsed the p's-&-q's of a royal audience and shared gossip about the exchange of gifts. Barack Obama gave Elizabeth Windsor "a rare songbook signed by composer Richard Rodgers." As a follow-up to Couric's report, Gibson did not share whether the tunes included the supposed royal favorite The Lady is a Tramp.
This obsequiousness is quite unbecoming a republican nation. Can you imagine how refreshing it would have been if Gibson, instead, had--accurately--described Obama's trip to the Palace as a meeting with the "monarch under whose imperial lash his black-skinned kin had been subject a mere generation ago"?
UPDATE: next day, NBC anchor Brian Williams dodged the courtiers' curse by filing a suitably wry--and brief--observation about the "purists in British society" who "positively huffed" when they saw Her Majesty and First Lady arm in arm: "The reacharound hug was a mutual thing, a sign of affection not at all a breach of protocol, so we can all breathe a bit easier."
BAKEWELL TARTS & LADY BRACKNELL All three newscasts chose a soft G20 feature for a closer. ABC's Nick Watt filed a delectable profile of Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who catered the banquet for world leaders at 10 Downing Street. That would be seaweed and salmon followed by slow-roasted lamb followed by Bakewell tart. The Naked Chef is a fiscal advisor too: "You have just got to put a huge tax on sugar because there is four times too much sugar going into everything." Even the Bakewell tarts?
CBS and NBC both closed with the impression Michelle Obama was making on the English. Dawna Friesen's report on NBC was altogether too saccharine with phrases like "star struck" and "Michelle's magic" and "relaxed, easy charm" and "elegant and understated." Sheila MacVicar decided to have fun instead as she channeled her inner Lady Bracknell on CBS. She reminded us that Queen Elizabeth would never be caught without one and the Margaret Thatcher used to hit her political opponents with hers and that even the "always elegant" Princess Diana had a pretty little black one. A "burning question" for the First Lady is in the minds of the women of Britain. Where is her handbag?
