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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 20, 2009
The shaky state of the bailed out major banks was CBS' lead. NBC and ABC both led with a follow-up to Friday's torture story as President Barack Obama arrived at the CIA's Langley headquarters to deliver a pep talk to his spies. Yet neither lead was Story of the Day. This was the tenth anniversary of the high school shooting in Littleton Colo. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve classmates, one teacher and then themselves. Memorial features filed on all three newscasts made that sad occasion the most heavily covered story. Remember Columbine.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 20, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
REMEMBER COLUMBINE The shaky state of the bailed out major banks was CBS' lead. NBC and ABC both led with a follow-up to Friday's torture story as President Barack Obama arrived at the CIA's Langley headquarters to deliver a pep talk to his spies. Yet neither lead was Story of the Day. This was the tenth anniversary of the high school shooting in Littleton Colo. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve classmates, one teacher and then themselves. Memorial features filed on all three newscasts made that sad occasion the most heavily covered story. Remember Columbine.
"It is clear the emotional wounds are still raw here," commented NBC's Lester Holt from the Columbine memorial, before debunking some lore about the attacks. "Harris and Klebold did not have specific targets. Rather their plan was to indiscriminately kill hundreds with two propane bombs"--which failed to work--"nor were they loners or victims of bullying." Holt did not address whether the rumored uncanny fantasy culmination of their plot was true: that the schoolboys planned to hijack a jetliner, have it fly to New York City and destroy the World Trade Center.
ABC anchor Charles Gibson (at the tail of the Snow videostream) interviewed Kenneth Trump of the National School Safety & Security Service. Trump believes that schools are safer now than they were ten years ago: "Students will come forward and report plots, weapons and other safety concerns," he claimed, "recognizing that today they are not snitching; they are possibly saving a life." Whether Harris and Klebold would have responded by making their plot even more clandestine and so harder to foil, nobody knows.
The memorial features on all three newscasts involved profiles of twentysomethings, now living adult life, who were high schoolers at Columbine on that fateful day. NBC's Roger O'Neil introduced us to Crystal Woodman Miller, a motivational speaker, and Andrew Robinson, a feature filmmaker. Kate Snow's A Closer Look on ABC brought us Valeen Schnurr, social worker, Patrick Ireland, financial planner, and Anne Marie Hochhalter, retail store manager. On CBS, Mark Strassmann assembled the five alumni of Columbine HS who have returned to teach there: Katie Tennessen, Mandy Cooke, Alise Williamson Steiner, Cris Welsh and Brett O'Neill.
BOFA, CITI & AMEX When Bank of America announced that it was setting aside more than $13bn against future losses from bad loans, the three newscasts responded, each with a different angle. ABC had Dan Harris focus on the New York Stock Exchange, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to 7841, down 289 points. Guess which trio of stocks led the averages south? BofA, Citigroup and American Express. CBS had Anthony Mason focus on the consumer, now obliged to pay higher interest rates and fees on credit cards to cover the looming losses. Guess which firms are most exposed to credit card losses? BofA, Citigroup and American Express. NBC anchor Brian Williams asked CNBC's David Faber about the outlook for the banks. "Loans that they have made in the past are going bad," Faber warned, "not just sub-prime mortgages anymore but mortgages of all types, credit card portfolios, commercial real estate and home equity loans." Faber failed to reel of a trio of most exposed names.
COURIC’S INCOHERENT EDITORIAL WORLDVIEW Katie Couric is not just the anchor of the CBS Evening News, she is also its managing editor. As such she fell down on the job Monday, allowing a pair of reports on air that, combined, gave this viewer whiplash. Chip Reid and Sharyl Attkisson produced side-by-side stories that portrayed an incoherent editorial worldview. Couric could have handled the confusion with a bemused "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" introduction. Or she could have taken the two Washington-based correspondents aside and asked for a rewrite. Doing nothing was just negligence.
Reid, for his part, gave extended airtime to critics of Barack Obama's request that his Cabinet reduce federal spending by $100m. Obama himself "admitted $100m is a drop in the budget bucket," Reid conceded, before going on to quote the--accurate--Republican characterization of $100m as 0.0002% of federal spending. "A comparable cut for a family with a budget of $75,000 would be about $1.50." Then along comes Attkisson with her Follow the Money story on Rep John Murtha, the Democratic defense budget appropriator. Suddenly what is chump-change for Reid becomes significant public policy for Attkisson.
Murtha "is not shy about directing money to those who give generously to his election campaign," she thundered. Murtha is supported by a firm called the Commonwealth Research Institute, which encourages recipients of Murtha's earmarks to locate facilities in his hometown of Johnstown Pa. In all, Murtha proposes that earmarks be awarded to ten companies that supported him at election time, awarding projects with a total outlay of $31m. To use Reid's math, that would be comparable for a family with a budget of $75,000 to earmarks of 46c. That is 0.00006% of federal spending.
So come on Couric, where does CBS Evening News stand? Is $100m saved so small that it demands a story? Or is $31m appropriated so large that it demands another?
CBS TAKES KATRINA MANTLE FROM NBC Time was when NBC used to boast that it owned the Hurricane Katrina story. Of the 50 stories in Tyndall Report's database since November 2006--14 months after the storm--more than half have been filed by NBC (29 v ABC 7, CBS 14). So far this year, though, that mantle has passed to CBS. Now Armen Keteyian previews a federal trial in Louisiana. A half dozen New Orleans plaintiffs are suing the Army Corps of Engineers for negligently causing the city to flood. The suit points to Mr GO, the nickname for the Corps' 76-mile waterway built in the 1960s, despite warnings of disaster, as a shortcut for shipping. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet destroyed wetlands and forests that were New Orleans' natural flood protection, creating "in effect a hurricane highway" to channel storm waters, like a funnel, towards the city. Keteyian predicted that if these six plaintiffs prevail, the Corps will face 200,000 similar lawsuits.
NO MORE MEALY-MOUTHS CBS offered a brief follow-up to Friday's CIA torture story, deciding that Chip Reid's main assignment from the White House should be the paltriness of the budget cuts instead. ABC and NBC treated Barack Obama's trip to Langley to deliver a pep talk to his spies as more significant. Both White House correspondents, Jake Tapper and Savannah Guthrie, were given their newscast's lead.
Yet, as important as the story was, for some reason both reporters had an attack of almost identical mealy-mouthedness: "harshest interrogation tactics, which some call torture"--NBC's Guthrie; "severe interrogation methods that some consider torture"--ABC's Tapper.
Some? What is this some? Why not many? Or why not turn the phrase around? Surely "interrogation methods that some deny are torture" is a more accurate way of avoiding a direct declaration of the T-word? Is this a journalistic decision not to call a spade a spade? Or do we perceive the hand of lawyers afraid of a Dick Cheney's libel lawsuit? The Attorney General calls waterboarding torture. Surely Eric Holder carries more weight than a timid some?
The networks' anchors should give us an explanation. If their house style prohibits them from calling torture by its name, a brief outline of their reasoning would clear the air.
CELLPHONE SHOWS STERN & SERIOUS SIDE At the State Department, ABC's Martha Raddatz managed to obtain contrasting still photographs of Barack Obama's conversations with Hugo Chavez, his Venezuelan counterpart, at the weekend's Summit of the Americas. The official photograph was of a "cordial handshake;" grainier cellphone videotape showed Obama being "stern and serious." The latter images, which should reassure some of our President's anti-socialist critics, appeared to have come from Latin American television.
The Chavez pix allowed Raddatz to review the new President's diplomatic outreach--Iran, Turkey, Russia, Cuba. She quoted President Raul Castro's offer to negotiate "everything, everything, everything" with Obama. Next she moved to North Korea, where Kim Jong Il offered "nothing, nothing, nothing." Raddatz concluded: "That is the problem with foreign policy. Sometimes no matter how far you reach out, there is no one on the other end to take your hand."
FROM TIPPLER TO STRINGER TO SPY TO THE BIG HOUSE Elizabeth Palmer of CBS was the only network correspondent assigned to extend coverage in solidarity with Roxana Saberi. The freelance television journalist from North Dakota is now consigned to an eight year prison sentence in Teheran. Charges against Saberi escalated in three months from "buying alcohol, a crime in Iran, to working without a press card and now, finally espionage." The United States insists that Saberi is innocent.
MUSSELS MAKE MAINE GREENER NBC's Sea Change series on the maritime environment, part of its corporate Universal Green Week, kicked off with Anne Thompson in the "rugged beauty known as Bar Harbor." Overfishing off the coast of Maine has depleted the wild stocks of salmon and all but wiped out cod. She introduced us to aquaculture, which is seeking to restore the salmon fishery and reintroduce halibut too. The problem is that aquaculture uses feed and antibiotics, allowing disease to spread. Thompson told us that new green fish farms use mussels and seaweed to absorb pollution and clean waste water.
PALM BEACH STORY An entire string of poloponies keeled over and died at the US Open Championships in Palm Beach County. CBS' Kelly Cobiella told us of the horror: "One after another seven horses fell to the ground in front of fans." The stable, worth as much as $2m, belonged to the Venezuelan team Lechuza Caracas. ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi quoted unnamed sources quoted by the local Sun-Sentinel that performance enhancing steroids had been tainted. Others pointed the finger of suspicion at vitamins or feed additives. "Fans are still buzzing," CBS' Cobiella assured us. "Rumors are flying."
"It is clear the emotional wounds are still raw here," commented NBC's Lester Holt from the Columbine memorial, before debunking some lore about the attacks. "Harris and Klebold did not have specific targets. Rather their plan was to indiscriminately kill hundreds with two propane bombs"--which failed to work--"nor were they loners or victims of bullying." Holt did not address whether the rumored uncanny fantasy culmination of their plot was true: that the schoolboys planned to hijack a jetliner, have it fly to New York City and destroy the World Trade Center.
ABC anchor Charles Gibson (at the tail of the Snow videostream) interviewed Kenneth Trump of the National School Safety & Security Service. Trump believes that schools are safer now than they were ten years ago: "Students will come forward and report plots, weapons and other safety concerns," he claimed, "recognizing that today they are not snitching; they are possibly saving a life." Whether Harris and Klebold would have responded by making their plot even more clandestine and so harder to foil, nobody knows.
The memorial features on all three newscasts involved profiles of twentysomethings, now living adult life, who were high schoolers at Columbine on that fateful day. NBC's Roger O'Neil introduced us to Crystal Woodman Miller, a motivational speaker, and Andrew Robinson, a feature filmmaker. Kate Snow's A Closer Look on ABC brought us Valeen Schnurr, social worker, Patrick Ireland, financial planner, and Anne Marie Hochhalter, retail store manager. On CBS, Mark Strassmann assembled the five alumni of Columbine HS who have returned to teach there: Katie Tennessen, Mandy Cooke, Alise Williamson Steiner, Cris Welsh and Brett O'Neill.
BOFA, CITI & AMEX When Bank of America announced that it was setting aside more than $13bn against future losses from bad loans, the three newscasts responded, each with a different angle. ABC had Dan Harris focus on the New York Stock Exchange, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to 7841, down 289 points. Guess which trio of stocks led the averages south? BofA, Citigroup and American Express. CBS had Anthony Mason focus on the consumer, now obliged to pay higher interest rates and fees on credit cards to cover the looming losses. Guess which firms are most exposed to credit card losses? BofA, Citigroup and American Express. NBC anchor Brian Williams asked CNBC's David Faber about the outlook for the banks. "Loans that they have made in the past are going bad," Faber warned, "not just sub-prime mortgages anymore but mortgages of all types, credit card portfolios, commercial real estate and home equity loans." Faber failed to reel of a trio of most exposed names.
COURIC’S INCOHERENT EDITORIAL WORLDVIEW Katie Couric is not just the anchor of the CBS Evening News, she is also its managing editor. As such she fell down on the job Monday, allowing a pair of reports on air that, combined, gave this viewer whiplash. Chip Reid and Sharyl Attkisson produced side-by-side stories that portrayed an incoherent editorial worldview. Couric could have handled the confusion with a bemused "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" introduction. Or she could have taken the two Washington-based correspondents aside and asked for a rewrite. Doing nothing was just negligence.
Reid, for his part, gave extended airtime to critics of Barack Obama's request that his Cabinet reduce federal spending by $100m. Obama himself "admitted $100m is a drop in the budget bucket," Reid conceded, before going on to quote the--accurate--Republican characterization of $100m as 0.0002% of federal spending. "A comparable cut for a family with a budget of $75,000 would be about $1.50." Then along comes Attkisson with her Follow the Money story on Rep John Murtha, the Democratic defense budget appropriator. Suddenly what is chump-change for Reid becomes significant public policy for Attkisson.
Murtha "is not shy about directing money to those who give generously to his election campaign," she thundered. Murtha is supported by a firm called the Commonwealth Research Institute, which encourages recipients of Murtha's earmarks to locate facilities in his hometown of Johnstown Pa. In all, Murtha proposes that earmarks be awarded to ten companies that supported him at election time, awarding projects with a total outlay of $31m. To use Reid's math, that would be comparable for a family with a budget of $75,000 to earmarks of 46c. That is 0.00006% of federal spending.
So come on Couric, where does CBS Evening News stand? Is $100m saved so small that it demands a story? Or is $31m appropriated so large that it demands another?
CBS TAKES KATRINA MANTLE FROM NBC Time was when NBC used to boast that it owned the Hurricane Katrina story. Of the 50 stories in Tyndall Report's database since November 2006--14 months after the storm--more than half have been filed by NBC (29 v ABC 7, CBS 14). So far this year, though, that mantle has passed to CBS. Now Armen Keteyian previews a federal trial in Louisiana. A half dozen New Orleans plaintiffs are suing the Army Corps of Engineers for negligently causing the city to flood. The suit points to Mr GO, the nickname for the Corps' 76-mile waterway built in the 1960s, despite warnings of disaster, as a shortcut for shipping. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet destroyed wetlands and forests that were New Orleans' natural flood protection, creating "in effect a hurricane highway" to channel storm waters, like a funnel, towards the city. Keteyian predicted that if these six plaintiffs prevail, the Corps will face 200,000 similar lawsuits.
NO MORE MEALY-MOUTHS CBS offered a brief follow-up to Friday's CIA torture story, deciding that Chip Reid's main assignment from the White House should be the paltriness of the budget cuts instead. ABC and NBC treated Barack Obama's trip to Langley to deliver a pep talk to his spies as more significant. Both White House correspondents, Jake Tapper and Savannah Guthrie, were given their newscast's lead.
Yet, as important as the story was, for some reason both reporters had an attack of almost identical mealy-mouthedness: "harshest interrogation tactics, which some call torture"--NBC's Guthrie; "severe interrogation methods that some consider torture"--ABC's Tapper.
Some? What is this some? Why not many? Or why not turn the phrase around? Surely "interrogation methods that some deny are torture" is a more accurate way of avoiding a direct declaration of the T-word? Is this a journalistic decision not to call a spade a spade? Or do we perceive the hand of lawyers afraid of a Dick Cheney's libel lawsuit? The Attorney General calls waterboarding torture. Surely Eric Holder carries more weight than a timid some?
The networks' anchors should give us an explanation. If their house style prohibits them from calling torture by its name, a brief outline of their reasoning would clear the air.
CELLPHONE SHOWS STERN & SERIOUS SIDE At the State Department, ABC's Martha Raddatz managed to obtain contrasting still photographs of Barack Obama's conversations with Hugo Chavez, his Venezuelan counterpart, at the weekend's Summit of the Americas. The official photograph was of a "cordial handshake;" grainier cellphone videotape showed Obama being "stern and serious." The latter images, which should reassure some of our President's anti-socialist critics, appeared to have come from Latin American television.
The Chavez pix allowed Raddatz to review the new President's diplomatic outreach--Iran, Turkey, Russia, Cuba. She quoted President Raul Castro's offer to negotiate "everything, everything, everything" with Obama. Next she moved to North Korea, where Kim Jong Il offered "nothing, nothing, nothing." Raddatz concluded: "That is the problem with foreign policy. Sometimes no matter how far you reach out, there is no one on the other end to take your hand."
FROM TIPPLER TO STRINGER TO SPY TO THE BIG HOUSE Elizabeth Palmer of CBS was the only network correspondent assigned to extend coverage in solidarity with Roxana Saberi. The freelance television journalist from North Dakota is now consigned to an eight year prison sentence in Teheran. Charges against Saberi escalated in three months from "buying alcohol, a crime in Iran, to working without a press card and now, finally espionage." The United States insists that Saberi is innocent.
MUSSELS MAKE MAINE GREENER NBC's Sea Change series on the maritime environment, part of its corporate Universal Green Week, kicked off with Anne Thompson in the "rugged beauty known as Bar Harbor." Overfishing off the coast of Maine has depleted the wild stocks of salmon and all but wiped out cod. She introduced us to aquaculture, which is seeking to restore the salmon fishery and reintroduce halibut too. The problem is that aquaculture uses feed and antibiotics, allowing disease to spread. Thompson told us that new green fish farms use mussels and seaweed to absorb pollution and clean waste water.
PALM BEACH STORY An entire string of poloponies keeled over and died at the US Open Championships in Palm Beach County. CBS' Kelly Cobiella told us of the horror: "One after another seven horses fell to the ground in front of fans." The stable, worth as much as $2m, belonged to the Venezuelan team Lechuza Caracas. ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi quoted unnamed sources quoted by the local Sun-Sentinel that performance enhancing steroids had been tainted. Others pointed the finger of suspicion at vitamins or feed additives. "Fans are still buzzing," CBS' Cobiella assured us. "Rumors are flying."
