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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 30, 2009
Story of the Day was a split decision. All three newscasts led with the bankruptcy of Chrysler Motors, the smallest of Detroit's so-called Big Three. Yet continuing coverage of the Mexican swine 'flu attracted more airtime (20 min v 16 for Chrysler), making it Story of the Day for the fifth straight weekday (9 min Friday, 34 min Monday, 21 min Tuesday, 18 min Wednesday). Vice President Joe Biden was responsible for putting 'flu on top with his alarmist soundbite on NBC's Today: "I would not go anywhere in confined places," including jetliners and subway cars, for fear of a stranger's sneeze. The 'flu was covered most heavily by ABC (7 min v 5 for Chrysler and CBS (7 min v 4 for Chrysler). NBC, which had an expanded 23-minute newshole, covered Chrysler most (7 min v 5 for 'flu).
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CHRYSLER AND INFLUENZA--BIDEN IS THE TIEBREAKER Story of the Day was a split decision. All three newscasts led with the bankruptcy of Chrysler Motors, the smallest of Detroit's so-called Big Three. Yet continuing coverage of the Mexican swine 'flu attracted more airtime (20 min v 16 for Chrysler), making it Story of the Day for the fifth straight weekday (9 min Friday, 34 min Monday, 21 min Tuesday, 18 min Wednesday). Vice President Joe Biden was responsible for putting 'flu on top with his alarmist soundbite on NBC's Today: "I would not go anywhere in confined places," including jetliners and subway cars, for fear of a stranger's sneeze. The 'flu was covered most heavily by ABC (7 min v 5 for Chrysler and CBS (7 min v 4 for Chrysler). NBC, which had an expanded 23-minute newshole, covered Chrysler most (7 min v 5 for 'flu).
The assignment of correspondents to the Chrysler story was evidence of the convergence of various angles.
It was an automotive story--NBC kicked off with CNBC's Phil LeBeau in Michigan. He reminded us of Chrysler's history of "surviving and reinventing itself" including Lee Iacocca's K-car in the '80s and its minivans becoming "symbols of family life in the suburbs."
It was a business story--CBS used New-York-based Anthony Mason, who outlined the "significant pay cuts" agreed to by union workers. CEO Robert Nardelli will be replaced and the new firm is organized to be owned by the United Autoworkers, the governments of the United States and Canada and Fiat, Chrysler's intended Italian-based partner. Mason warned that the reorganization may not be as rapid as planned: "Typically bankruptcies last for months and years."
It was a political story--ABC led with Jake Tapper from the White House. He played five soundbites from President Barack Obama's announcement of the bankruptcy--"an unprecedented federal plan"--and his pledge to extend an additional $8bn federal loan to the reorganized firm. Tapper noted that Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase, Chrysler's biggest creditors, agreed to be repaid only 29c on $1. They also happen to be recipients of federal bailout funds.
NBC's George Lewis followed up from California on the fate of Chrysler's dealerships while ABC's Chris Bury previewed its plan to close all its factories for 60 days while dealerships worked off unsold inventory. "Consumers may not notice much difference. The government will back Chrysler warranties and help provide new financing," Bury speculated. Italian-made Fiats will soon be sold under the Chrysler brand. "Fiat has not had a presence in the American market since the early '80s when some buyers joked that Fiat stood for Fix It Again, Tony, CBS' Mason recalled.
CBS' Mason finished in a rueful mood: "It is estimated that one out of every ten jobs in this country are somehow connected to the auto industry--including, right now, mine!" "Exactly," chuckled anchor Katie Couric, "the ripple effect."
JOE BIDEN, MEET JENNIFER ASHTON Days of careful public health message control about a rational response to a looming influenza pandemic were vandalized by Joe Biden's loose lips. "He certainly should have known better," was how NBC's Robert Bazell put it, when the Vice President advised us to boycott mass transit. "Unfortunately the Vice President sounded like he knew what he was talking about when he really did not," ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson fact-checked. CBS' Nancy Cordes quoted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: "I think the Vice President misrepresented what the Vice President wanted to say." NBC's Bazell used this Gibbs soundbite: "I understand what he said. I am telling you what he meant to say."
CBS' Cordes walked us through the science to justify labeling the H1N1 virus as a potential pandemic. "It has all three hallmarks," she pointed out, "a unique virus never seen before, easily transmitted from person to person, with a demonstrated ability to kill." Later on CBS, the newest addition to the network's in-house team of physicians showed that she is still a rookie when it comes to nailing her talking points. Dr Jennifer Ashton (at the tail of the Jon LaPook videostream) at first explained a theory to anchor Katie Couric why healthy young adults might be especially vulnerable: "They have a more robust and strong immune system so when they get exposed to the virus the immune system really overwhelms them." And then she explained who should be taking extra precautions against the virus: "People who have weakened immune systems, who have cancer, are HIV-positive, who are on steroids."
Dr Ashton's public health message control seems as disciplined as the Vice President's.
GUSTAVO MADERO AWAITS CINCO DE MAYO As the influenza death toll in Mexico moderates, the networks are scaling back their coverage. Only ABC had a Mexico City dateline as Terry McCarthy filed A Closer Look into the government's response--or lack of it: "The Health Ministry says it does not have a staff to follow up on fatal cases," he found, introducing us to Andres Valadez, a guitarist whose fellow band member died, and Oscar Barrero, an infected father with a toddler son and a pregnant wife. Neither was tested for secondary infection.
ABC's McCarthy filed from the poor northern neighborhoods of Mexico City. Handwashing is difficult there, Nancy Cordes pointed out from CBS' DC bureau. In the Gustavo Madero district, running water is available for only nine hours each day. NBC's New-York-based Robert Bazell looked forward to Cinco de Mayo as the government "ordered a five-day shutdown of businesses and non-essential government services over what would have been a holiday period anyway."
FORT WORTH & DALLAS PART WAYS The public school systems of both Dallas and Fort Worth each suffered a single infection from the Mexican swine 'flu in their student populations. In Fort Worth, ABC's Ryan Owens told us, "all 140 of the city's public schools are closed for a week" sending 80,000 students home. In Dallas, "they had one case; officials there decided to close just one school." NBC's Janet Shamlian told us that 300 schools are closed with 170,000 students in all "on an unexpected late spring break…Across the country, school is out, gates are locked, classrooms are quiet and the stands are empty."
HOW MANY CENTERS FOR CONTROLING DISEASE? The public relations team at the Centers for Disease Control continues its full court press to convince news audiences that they are on full 'flu alert. ABC's Lisa Stark was at the CDC's Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta Tuesday. Now CBS' senior in-house physician, Jon LaPook takes the flacks' tour: "Within a week the CDC hopes to send samples of the new virus to manufacturers so they can begin developing a vaccine but there is no green light yet for actual vaccine production."
A quibble: should that be "the CDC hopes" or "the CDC hope"?
TORTURE IS A PANDORA’S BOX The major news from President Barack Obama's primetime press conference Wednesday to mark his Hundred Days in office was his use of the T-word. ABC anchor Charles Gibson (see here, here and here) has been notoriously squeamish about asserting that CIA interrogators have tortured prisoners. He still used the phrase "harsh CIA interrogations" to introduce Brian Ross' Investigates. No such compunction impeded Ross' source, John Kiriakou, who led the team of spies that arrested abu-Zubaydah, a suspected leader of al-Qaeda, in the spring of 2002. abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded on 83 separate occasions: "Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture." For his part, Ross confined himself to referring to "brutal sessions the President called torture."
The vocabulary watch was the half of it. ABC still had to deal with two other torture angles. The first found Ross playing damage control in response to Brian Stelter's report in The New York Times in which Ross comes under criticism for a lack of skepticism in quoting the CIA's Kiriakou back in December 2007. This is how Tyndall Report covered Ross' story back then: Kiriakou accurately confessed that the CIA had authorized the torture technique of waterboarding; however, it turns out he misled Ross about its extreme prevalence. Kiriakou told Ross that interrogators had administered the torture just once, for 35 seconds-or-so, and "from that day on, he answered every question, just like I am sitting here speaking to you."
Stelter, in turn, is cited by Chris Ariens at TVNewser.com as being criticized by human rights activist John Sifton of One World Research for unfairly taking Ross to task. Ross now reports the availability of new information "contradicting some of our previous reporting." Back then Ross conceded that Kiriakou had no first hand knowledge of the torture: "Kiriakou himself never carried out any of the waterboarding or other controversial interrogation techniques. He says he feared that even with full legal approval from Washington, which the CIA had, someone would go too far and the day would come when someone would be under criminal investigation." On the same day, CBS' David Martin had reported that Kiriakou "refused to use the harsh interrogation techniques. That job, he said, was turned over to retired commandos under contract to the CIA." At the time, Ross never hinted at the possibility that Kiriakou's 35-seconds version might be false. Kiriakou now claims that he was lied to himself in the "top secret reports" that he was quoting from.
By the way, the link to the 2007 Ross report does not work at ABC's Website. [UPDATE: the link is now restored. You may have to clear your cache first]The videostream displays there but does not play. ABC's public relations representative Cathie Levine reassures us that there is nothing suspicious here: "We did not know that video was not available until we got your e-mail. Now that we have looked into it we learned that the video got dropped when abcnews.com migrated to a new system. They are working as quickly as possible to restore it."
Ross' second torture task was to report on Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a Spokane Wa consultancy that was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop its "ten-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding." Ross reported that Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell are psychologists and former military officers, "paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques" at secret sites. Both Mitchell and Jessen appeared on ABC's cameras to plead non-disclosure agreements with the CIA as no-comment explanations.
"It turns out that neither Mitchell not Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them," ABC's Ross revealed. "New documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboard expertise was probably misrepresented and thus there was no reason to believe it was medically safe or effective."
Ross left plenty of scope for follow-up. If the tenth of their ten-step program was categorically torture, what about steps nine, eight, seven, six and so on? What were psychologists doing facilitating torture? Surely that violates their Hippocratic oath? On which side of Barack Obama's immunity from prosecution do they find themselves? The President guaranteed immunity to the spies but not necessarily to the lawyers who wrote the memos--where do consultants stand?
The day's torture coverage was rounded out by CBS' Martin from the Pentagon, who provided free publicity for Matthew Alexander, the nom de plume of the military interrogator in the manhunt for abu-Mussab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006, and his book How to Break a Terrorist. Eschewing torture, Alexander persuaded an al-Qaeda operative to cooperate, leading military intelligence to al-Zarqawi's spiritual advisor and then to a safe house and then to assassination by an F-16 airstrike with a 500lb bomb. "Alexander's motto was: 'If you use coercion you will get a detainee to tell you the location of the house; but if you use cooperation he will tell you if the house is booby-trapped.'"
By the way, CBS tried to link the al-Zarqawi history to Obama's press conference by misleadingly shoehorning it into its series The First 100 Days--The Next 100 Days and having anchor Katie Couric refer to torture as a debate that is "far from over." To dress up his report as part of this debate, Martin prefaced it with an inflammatory and xenophobic soundbite from Michael Scheuer, a former CIA spy. "How will we know if less coercive techniques"--than waterboarding--"could not have produced the same results?" Martin hypothesized. "Why would you care? If we got the information we needed and America is better protected, who cares? These are not Americans."
NOT CURING HELPS KILL SMOKERS David Burns is the happily named tobacco researcher that CBS' Mark Phillips introduced us to in Dublin. Burns wants to know why cigarette smoking is less lethal in Australia than it is in the United States. Gas-fired drying is his hypothesis. About 50 years ago the practice of hanging tobacco in barns to be cured was discontinued for American cigarettes. Fire-drying, instead of curing, forms nitrosamines in the leaf, a carcinogen that may hike the death rate from cigarettes from 40% of smokers to 50%. In this country, smoking kills 440,000 each year.
NEWSPAPER READERSHIP IN FORT LAUDERDALE Broward County in Florida is one of the few places where newspapers still find readership. NBC's Mark Potter showed us why--"all the ads for pain clinics on page after page after page." Prescription dispensing laws are so lax that many clinics "only take cash and prescribe thousands of highly addictive and potentially lethal narcotic painkillers a day with only a cursory doctor's exam." The clinics create a secondary black market for street sales of the pills. Potter reported that out-of-state pillpoppers flock to Broward to score from its 100-or-so clinics, hence the demand for newspapers to find their addresses. He did not explain what is wrong with Craigslist.
FLOWER POWER "Rather than asking for permission we ask for forgiveness." That was the explanation Mr Stamen, guerrilla gardener, gave to ABC's Brian Rooney for his reverse vandalism. Stamen, his nom de garden, descends on highway medians in Los Angeles under cover of darkness to replace blight with plants. "Reverse vandals, who come out not to destroy but to beautify," Rooney called them. He showed us guerrillagardening.org, with examples of urban renewal from Brussels to Rome, Philadelphia to London, "spreading the seeds of a floral revolution."
The assignment of correspondents to the Chrysler story was evidence of the convergence of various angles.
It was an automotive story--NBC kicked off with CNBC's Phil LeBeau in Michigan. He reminded us of Chrysler's history of "surviving and reinventing itself" including Lee Iacocca's K-car in the '80s and its minivans becoming "symbols of family life in the suburbs."
It was a business story--CBS used New-York-based Anthony Mason, who outlined the "significant pay cuts" agreed to by union workers. CEO Robert Nardelli will be replaced and the new firm is organized to be owned by the United Autoworkers, the governments of the United States and Canada and Fiat, Chrysler's intended Italian-based partner. Mason warned that the reorganization may not be as rapid as planned: "Typically bankruptcies last for months and years."
It was a political story--ABC led with Jake Tapper from the White House. He played five soundbites from President Barack Obama's announcement of the bankruptcy--"an unprecedented federal plan"--and his pledge to extend an additional $8bn federal loan to the reorganized firm. Tapper noted that Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase, Chrysler's biggest creditors, agreed to be repaid only 29c on $1. They also happen to be recipients of federal bailout funds.
NBC's George Lewis followed up from California on the fate of Chrysler's dealerships while ABC's Chris Bury previewed its plan to close all its factories for 60 days while dealerships worked off unsold inventory. "Consumers may not notice much difference. The government will back Chrysler warranties and help provide new financing," Bury speculated. Italian-made Fiats will soon be sold under the Chrysler brand. "Fiat has not had a presence in the American market since the early '80s when some buyers joked that Fiat stood for Fix It Again, Tony, CBS' Mason recalled.
CBS' Mason finished in a rueful mood: "It is estimated that one out of every ten jobs in this country are somehow connected to the auto industry--including, right now, mine!" "Exactly," chuckled anchor Katie Couric, "the ripple effect."
JOE BIDEN, MEET JENNIFER ASHTON Days of careful public health message control about a rational response to a looming influenza pandemic were vandalized by Joe Biden's loose lips. "He certainly should have known better," was how NBC's Robert Bazell put it, when the Vice President advised us to boycott mass transit. "Unfortunately the Vice President sounded like he knew what he was talking about when he really did not," ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson fact-checked. CBS' Nancy Cordes quoted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: "I think the Vice President misrepresented what the Vice President wanted to say." NBC's Bazell used this Gibbs soundbite: "I understand what he said. I am telling you what he meant to say."
CBS' Cordes walked us through the science to justify labeling the H1N1 virus as a potential pandemic. "It has all three hallmarks," she pointed out, "a unique virus never seen before, easily transmitted from person to person, with a demonstrated ability to kill." Later on CBS, the newest addition to the network's in-house team of physicians showed that she is still a rookie when it comes to nailing her talking points. Dr Jennifer Ashton (at the tail of the Jon LaPook videostream) at first explained a theory to anchor Katie Couric why healthy young adults might be especially vulnerable: "They have a more robust and strong immune system so when they get exposed to the virus the immune system really overwhelms them." And then she explained who should be taking extra precautions against the virus: "People who have weakened immune systems, who have cancer, are HIV-positive, who are on steroids."
Dr Ashton's public health message control seems as disciplined as the Vice President's.
GUSTAVO MADERO AWAITS CINCO DE MAYO As the influenza death toll in Mexico moderates, the networks are scaling back their coverage. Only ABC had a Mexico City dateline as Terry McCarthy filed A Closer Look into the government's response--or lack of it: "The Health Ministry says it does not have a staff to follow up on fatal cases," he found, introducing us to Andres Valadez, a guitarist whose fellow band member died, and Oscar Barrero, an infected father with a toddler son and a pregnant wife. Neither was tested for secondary infection.
ABC's McCarthy filed from the poor northern neighborhoods of Mexico City. Handwashing is difficult there, Nancy Cordes pointed out from CBS' DC bureau. In the Gustavo Madero district, running water is available for only nine hours each day. NBC's New-York-based Robert Bazell looked forward to Cinco de Mayo as the government "ordered a five-day shutdown of businesses and non-essential government services over what would have been a holiday period anyway."
FORT WORTH & DALLAS PART WAYS The public school systems of both Dallas and Fort Worth each suffered a single infection from the Mexican swine 'flu in their student populations. In Fort Worth, ABC's Ryan Owens told us, "all 140 of the city's public schools are closed for a week" sending 80,000 students home. In Dallas, "they had one case; officials there decided to close just one school." NBC's Janet Shamlian told us that 300 schools are closed with 170,000 students in all "on an unexpected late spring break…Across the country, school is out, gates are locked, classrooms are quiet and the stands are empty."
HOW MANY CENTERS FOR CONTROLING DISEASE? The public relations team at the Centers for Disease Control continues its full court press to convince news audiences that they are on full 'flu alert. ABC's Lisa Stark was at the CDC's Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta Tuesday. Now CBS' senior in-house physician, Jon LaPook takes the flacks' tour: "Within a week the CDC hopes to send samples of the new virus to manufacturers so they can begin developing a vaccine but there is no green light yet for actual vaccine production."
A quibble: should that be "the CDC hopes" or "the CDC hope"?
TORTURE IS A PANDORA’S BOX The major news from President Barack Obama's primetime press conference Wednesday to mark his Hundred Days in office was his use of the T-word. ABC anchor Charles Gibson (see here, here and here) has been notoriously squeamish about asserting that CIA interrogators have tortured prisoners. He still used the phrase "harsh CIA interrogations" to introduce Brian Ross' Investigates. No such compunction impeded Ross' source, John Kiriakou, who led the team of spies that arrested abu-Zubaydah, a suspected leader of al-Qaeda, in the spring of 2002. abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded on 83 separate occasions: "Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture." For his part, Ross confined himself to referring to "brutal sessions the President called torture."
The vocabulary watch was the half of it. ABC still had to deal with two other torture angles. The first found Ross playing damage control in response to Brian Stelter's report in The New York Times in which Ross comes under criticism for a lack of skepticism in quoting the CIA's Kiriakou back in December 2007. This is how Tyndall Report covered Ross' story back then: Kiriakou accurately confessed that the CIA had authorized the torture technique of waterboarding; however, it turns out he misled Ross about its extreme prevalence. Kiriakou told Ross that interrogators had administered the torture just once, for 35 seconds-or-so, and "from that day on, he answered every question, just like I am sitting here speaking to you."
Stelter, in turn, is cited by Chris Ariens at TVNewser.com as being criticized by human rights activist John Sifton of One World Research for unfairly taking Ross to task. Ross now reports the availability of new information "contradicting some of our previous reporting." Back then Ross conceded that Kiriakou had no first hand knowledge of the torture: "Kiriakou himself never carried out any of the waterboarding or other controversial interrogation techniques. He says he feared that even with full legal approval from Washington, which the CIA had, someone would go too far and the day would come when someone would be under criminal investigation." On the same day, CBS' David Martin had reported that Kiriakou "refused to use the harsh interrogation techniques. That job, he said, was turned over to retired commandos under contract to the CIA." At the time, Ross never hinted at the possibility that Kiriakou's 35-seconds version might be false. Kiriakou now claims that he was lied to himself in the "top secret reports" that he was quoting from.
By the way, the link to the 2007 Ross report does not work at ABC's Website. [UPDATE: the link is now restored. You may have to clear your cache first]
Ross' second torture task was to report on Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a Spokane Wa consultancy that was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop its "ten-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding." Ross reported that Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell are psychologists and former military officers, "paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques" at secret sites. Both Mitchell and Jessen appeared on ABC's cameras to plead non-disclosure agreements with the CIA as no-comment explanations.
"It turns out that neither Mitchell not Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them," ABC's Ross revealed. "New documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboard expertise was probably misrepresented and thus there was no reason to believe it was medically safe or effective."
Ross left plenty of scope for follow-up. If the tenth of their ten-step program was categorically torture, what about steps nine, eight, seven, six and so on? What were psychologists doing facilitating torture? Surely that violates their Hippocratic oath? On which side of Barack Obama's immunity from prosecution do they find themselves? The President guaranteed immunity to the spies but not necessarily to the lawyers who wrote the memos--where do consultants stand?
The day's torture coverage was rounded out by CBS' Martin from the Pentagon, who provided free publicity for Matthew Alexander, the nom de plume of the military interrogator in the manhunt for abu-Mussab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006, and his book How to Break a Terrorist. Eschewing torture, Alexander persuaded an al-Qaeda operative to cooperate, leading military intelligence to al-Zarqawi's spiritual advisor and then to a safe house and then to assassination by an F-16 airstrike with a 500lb bomb. "Alexander's motto was: 'If you use coercion you will get a detainee to tell you the location of the house; but if you use cooperation he will tell you if the house is booby-trapped.'"
By the way, CBS tried to link the al-Zarqawi history to Obama's press conference by misleadingly shoehorning it into its series The First 100 Days--The Next 100 Days and having anchor Katie Couric refer to torture as a debate that is "far from over." To dress up his report as part of this debate, Martin prefaced it with an inflammatory and xenophobic soundbite from Michael Scheuer, a former CIA spy. "How will we know if less coercive techniques"--than waterboarding--"could not have produced the same results?" Martin hypothesized. "Why would you care? If we got the information we needed and America is better protected, who cares? These are not Americans."
NOT CURING HELPS KILL SMOKERS David Burns is the happily named tobacco researcher that CBS' Mark Phillips introduced us to in Dublin. Burns wants to know why cigarette smoking is less lethal in Australia than it is in the United States. Gas-fired drying is his hypothesis. About 50 years ago the practice of hanging tobacco in barns to be cured was discontinued for American cigarettes. Fire-drying, instead of curing, forms nitrosamines in the leaf, a carcinogen that may hike the death rate from cigarettes from 40% of smokers to 50%. In this country, smoking kills 440,000 each year.
NEWSPAPER READERSHIP IN FORT LAUDERDALE Broward County in Florida is one of the few places where newspapers still find readership. NBC's Mark Potter showed us why--"all the ads for pain clinics on page after page after page." Prescription dispensing laws are so lax that many clinics "only take cash and prescribe thousands of highly addictive and potentially lethal narcotic painkillers a day with only a cursory doctor's exam." The clinics create a secondary black market for street sales of the pills. Potter reported that out-of-state pillpoppers flock to Broward to score from its 100-or-so clinics, hence the demand for newspapers to find their addresses. He did not explain what is wrong with Craigslist.
FLOWER POWER "Rather than asking for permission we ask for forgiveness." That was the explanation Mr Stamen, guerrilla gardener, gave to ABC's Brian Rooney for his reverse vandalism. Stamen, his nom de garden, descends on highway medians in Los Angeles under cover of darkness to replace blight with plants. "Reverse vandals, who come out not to destroy but to beautify," Rooney called them. He showed us guerrillagardening.org, with examples of urban renewal from Brussels to Rome, Philadelphia to London, "spreading the seeds of a floral revolution."
