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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 11, 2009
A busy day of news saw no consensus about the top story. NBC led with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis en route to repair NASA's Hubble telescope. ABC led with a murder spree at the USArmy's Camp Liberty base outside Baghdad: a sergeant killed five of his comrades at a clinic for soldiers suffering from combat stress. It turned out that ABC's Martha Raddatz had toured that very clinic just days ago when reporting from Iraq. CBS kicked off with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to replace Gen David McKiernan as the commanding officer of NATO and US troops in Afghanistan. It turned out that CBS anchor Katie Couric had accompanied Gates to Kabul and had interviewed McKiernan, unaware that he had just been fired. Afghanistan qualified as the Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 11, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
COURIC AND RADDATZ PRE-POSITIONED FOR BREAKING NEWS A busy day of news saw no consensus about the top story. NBC led with the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis en route to repair NASA's Hubble telescope. ABC led with a murder spree at the USArmy's Camp Liberty base outside Baghdad: a sergeant killed five of his comrades at a clinic for soldiers suffering from combat stress. It turned out that ABC's Martha Raddatz had toured that very clinic just days ago when reporting from Iraq. CBS kicked off with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to replace Gen David McKiernan as the commanding officer of NATO and US troops in Afghanistan. It turned out that CBS anchor Katie Couric had accompanied Gates to Kabul and had interviewed McKiernan, unaware that he had just been fired. Afghanistan qualified as the Story of the Day.
CBS' Couric confessed that she had been unable to get the scoop from either Gates or McKiernan during last week's trip to the Afghan war zone. Her unidentified sources "close to the Defense Secretary" told her that McKiernan had demonstrated "extraordinary class" when he was replaced. She had interviewed him "shortly thereafter. He gave no indication his time in this troubled country might be coming to a close."
McKiernan had been commander in Afghanistan for eleven months but had been under pressure because unidentified "military experts," according to CBS' Couric, "felt his expertise in waging a counterinsurgency was inadequate." From the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski quoted McKiernan's "critics" as calling him "old army--focused more on conventional warfare than the counterinsurgency strategy desperately needed." Gates nominated Gen Stanley McChrystal as the new commander, a former Green Beret. "McKiernan's resignation will essentially end his 40-year military career," Miklaszewski predicted.
ABC covered the Afghan story in least detail even though Martha Raddatz thought it was "truly an earthquake." She mentioned it in passing at the end of her Camp Liberty report: "This does not happen very often that a top general is fired." CBS' Couric told us that it has not been since 1951 and Douglas MacArthur that a commanding general has been replaced mid-war.
Next, CBS' Couric continued with what had seemed to be the major story from Afghanistan during her trip. She profiled McKiernan's new tactic for troop deployment, "fanning out into the country setting up smaller operations in local communities." She filed some spectacular landscape videotape from Logar Province, perched on a ridge with snipers from the 10th Mountain Division overlooking the valley. The community-based tactic is based on an experiment in next-door Wardak Province that NBC's Jim Maceda covered last week. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge place, even for 100,000 troops. Soldiers in Logar told Couric that they were the first Americans ever to set foot in some villages "and that is eight years into this war."
CAMP LIBERTY SUFFERS STRESS The Combat Stress Control Center at Camp Liberty where the five soldiers were killed is commanded by Col Beth Salisbury. She had already taken ABC's Martha Raddatz on a guided tour. The dead were two of her clinic workers and three of its patients. Salisbury told Raddatz that patients' "weapons are taken for safety and we secure them" while undergoing treatment. CBS had its Pentagon correspondent David Martin cover the killings. He reported that the killer, an unidentified sergeant, "had gone there looking for help; got into an argument; left in such an agitated state that his weapon was taken away from him; but managed to get another one; came back; and gunned down the workers."
ABC anchor Charles Gibson misspoke concerning the murders, calling them "a tragic accident." NBC did not assign a reporter to cover them. Instead anchor Brian Williams talked generalities with in-house military analyst Jack Jacobs. Jacobs was not surprised that the violence should happen on a base rather than on the battlefield: "It is at times when you have lots of free time on your hands…those are the times when the stress of repeated deployments and other kinds of things get to you."
ROTH LETS RATZINGER’S SHOULDERS DO THE TALKING The day's other major overseas story saw Pope Benedict XVI continue his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Only CBS assigned a reporter to the Pontiff's visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial for the Nazi Holocaust. "Being German-born and once a conscript in Hitler's army added meaning as Benedict crossed the stone floor etched with names of Nazi death camps and laid a wreath," narrated Richard Roth. He noted that the Holy Father did not apologize for the Roman Catholic Church's sins of omission or commission "during one of history's darkest episodes." Yet Roth concluded: "There is a burden in this place that, Israelis say, visitors inevitably feel. For Benedict, some said, you could see it weighing on his shoulders as eloquent as any words."
That some said shows some lenience on Roth's part.
HEALTHCARE MATH DOES NOT COMPUTE The day's big story inside-the-Beltway was a meeting of healthcare industry leaders with President Barack Obama. Well, ABC and CBS thought it was a big story, assigning White House correspondents Jake Tapper and Bill Plante to the confab. NBC disagreed, not mentioning it even in passing.
CBS' Plante pointed out that "the same groups representing doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical makers and insurers" had "bitterly and successfully" opposed Bill Clinton's plan for universal healthcare back in 1993. This time "the providers hope to block price controls and also any kind of public insurance plan" but they "also want to mandate that everyone has to be insured." The industry pledged to cut healthcare costs, which ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson saw as a bargaining strategy. "They are trying to build political goodwill in their fight against the public plan," he suggested. "By giving these kind of compromises and goodwill gestures they hope to have more bargaining at the table."
Yet the math of their promise to be more efficient and less bureaucratic was puzzling. ABC's Tapper told us that the industry pledged to save $2tr in healthcare spending over the next decade by cutting costs by 1.5% each year. Yet Tapper's anchor Charles Gibson told us that total annual healthcare spending is $2.5tr, or $25tr per decade. To save $2tr out of $25tr, costs have to be cut by way more than 1.5% annually.
COLGAN, NOT CONTINENTAL, GETS RAP The National Transportation Safety Board is gearing up for hearings into February's commuter plane crash in suburban Buffalo that killed all 50 on board and all three newscasts had a reporter file a preview. The flight was Continental Connection 3407 but all three reporters identified it as being operated by Colgan Air, sparing Continental Airlines any tarnish. "A lot of testimony about human error is expected," NBC's Peter Alexander told us from the upstate New York crash site. In the crosshairs is Marvin Renslow, the plane's dead pilot, who flunked several flight tests, known as check rides. He was inexperienced in the cockpit of the Dash 8 turboprop and had never practiced handling a stall warning in a flight simulator.
ABC's Lisa Stark and CBS' Nancy Cordes covered the story from Washington. Stated Cordes: "Colgan Air points out its training regimen was examined and approved by the FAA. NTSB sources say the FAA's standards will be a prime focus at the hearings." Stark declared that "experts" want to know: "Are these issues unique to Colgan Air? Or are they symptoms of a broader problem with the regional airlines that millions of Americans fly?"
SALTY Want the Tour of Italy Lasagna from Olive Garden? What about the Buffalo Chicken Fajitas at Chili's? Feel hungry for the Admiral's Feast at Red Lobster? Those were the three dishes John McKenzie singled out on ABC's A Closer Look from the nutritional analysis of 102 different meals at national restaurant chains by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
It turns out that you want none of them. Each individual dish contains between two and three times the maximum total intake of salt we are supposed to eat in an entire day. NBC's Rehema Ellis covered the salt story too. She quoted Chili's explanation that the chain prides itself on catering to "health conscious or indulgent" diners. The owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden told Ellis that they "appeal to a broad range of taste preferences and dietary needs."
THOMAS CHANNELS COPS ABC's Pierre Thomas tagged along with federal marshals in Atlanta to see how they served arrest warrants on three fugitives. His anchor Charles Gibson introduced the report by telling us that the targets were violent. Yet the first arrest was of a suspected car thief who was also addicted to methamphetamines and crack cocaine. He was tasered by the marshals when they tackled him. The second bust, at close to midnight, brought "a sad surprise." The marshals busted down a door and brought out a sleeping child before they found their man. The third saw marshals drag a man from his house and throw him to the floor. He was an "innocent associate who grew up with the suspect." Their man was next door in the garage.
Thomas, ABC's justice correspondent, did not even extend to the trio the disclaimer that COPS grants on FOX-TV about the presumption of innocence. He called them "career criminals."
AWESOME IMAGES As Atlantis launched on its mission to repair the Hubble telescope, ABC filed part three of Rescue Mission, its behind-the-scenes profile of the seven astronauts. Ned Potter showed them joking about the space food they will have to eat and the clothes they will wear. On NBC, Tom Costello was more interested in Hubble, "the size of a city bus orbiting 350 miles above Earth." He showed us a selection of awesome images taken since its launch in 1990: "a starburst of galaxies…and planetary gases…star clusters…cosmic pearls…a sculpture of gas…dust from a dying star." Noted ABC anchor Charles Gibson: "The telescope has not had a fix-up in seven years."
CBS' Couric confessed that she had been unable to get the scoop from either Gates or McKiernan during last week's trip to the Afghan war zone. Her unidentified sources "close to the Defense Secretary" told her that McKiernan had demonstrated "extraordinary class" when he was replaced. She had interviewed him "shortly thereafter. He gave no indication his time in this troubled country might be coming to a close."
McKiernan had been commander in Afghanistan for eleven months but had been under pressure because unidentified "military experts," according to CBS' Couric, "felt his expertise in waging a counterinsurgency was inadequate." From the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski quoted McKiernan's "critics" as calling him "old army--focused more on conventional warfare than the counterinsurgency strategy desperately needed." Gates nominated Gen Stanley McChrystal as the new commander, a former Green Beret. "McKiernan's resignation will essentially end his 40-year military career," Miklaszewski predicted.
ABC covered the Afghan story in least detail even though Martha Raddatz thought it was "truly an earthquake." She mentioned it in passing at the end of her Camp Liberty report: "This does not happen very often that a top general is fired." CBS' Couric told us that it has not been since 1951 and Douglas MacArthur that a commanding general has been replaced mid-war.
Next, CBS' Couric continued with what had seemed to be the major story from Afghanistan during her trip. She profiled McKiernan's new tactic for troop deployment, "fanning out into the country setting up smaller operations in local communities." She filed some spectacular landscape videotape from Logar Province, perched on a ridge with snipers from the 10th Mountain Division overlooking the valley. The community-based tactic is based on an experiment in next-door Wardak Province that NBC's Jim Maceda covered last week. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge place, even for 100,000 troops. Soldiers in Logar told Couric that they were the first Americans ever to set foot in some villages "and that is eight years into this war."
CAMP LIBERTY SUFFERS STRESS The Combat Stress Control Center at Camp Liberty where the five soldiers were killed is commanded by Col Beth Salisbury. She had already taken ABC's Martha Raddatz on a guided tour. The dead were two of her clinic workers and three of its patients. Salisbury told Raddatz that patients' "weapons are taken for safety and we secure them" while undergoing treatment. CBS had its Pentagon correspondent David Martin cover the killings. He reported that the killer, an unidentified sergeant, "had gone there looking for help; got into an argument; left in such an agitated state that his weapon was taken away from him; but managed to get another one; came back; and gunned down the workers."
ABC anchor Charles Gibson misspoke concerning the murders, calling them "a tragic accident." NBC did not assign a reporter to cover them. Instead anchor Brian Williams talked generalities with in-house military analyst Jack Jacobs. Jacobs was not surprised that the violence should happen on a base rather than on the battlefield: "It is at times when you have lots of free time on your hands…those are the times when the stress of repeated deployments and other kinds of things get to you."
ROTH LETS RATZINGER’S SHOULDERS DO THE TALKING The day's other major overseas story saw Pope Benedict XVI continue his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Only CBS assigned a reporter to the Pontiff's visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial for the Nazi Holocaust. "Being German-born and once a conscript in Hitler's army added meaning as Benedict crossed the stone floor etched with names of Nazi death camps and laid a wreath," narrated Richard Roth. He noted that the Holy Father did not apologize for the Roman Catholic Church's sins of omission or commission "during one of history's darkest episodes." Yet Roth concluded: "There is a burden in this place that, Israelis say, visitors inevitably feel. For Benedict, some said, you could see it weighing on his shoulders as eloquent as any words."
That some said shows some lenience on Roth's part.
HEALTHCARE MATH DOES NOT COMPUTE The day's big story inside-the-Beltway was a meeting of healthcare industry leaders with President Barack Obama. Well, ABC and CBS thought it was a big story, assigning White House correspondents Jake Tapper and Bill Plante to the confab. NBC disagreed, not mentioning it even in passing.
CBS' Plante pointed out that "the same groups representing doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical makers and insurers" had "bitterly and successfully" opposed Bill Clinton's plan for universal healthcare back in 1993. This time "the providers hope to block price controls and also any kind of public insurance plan" but they "also want to mandate that everyone has to be insured." The industry pledged to cut healthcare costs, which ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson saw as a bargaining strategy. "They are trying to build political goodwill in their fight against the public plan," he suggested. "By giving these kind of compromises and goodwill gestures they hope to have more bargaining at the table."
Yet the math of their promise to be more efficient and less bureaucratic was puzzling. ABC's Tapper told us that the industry pledged to save $2tr in healthcare spending over the next decade by cutting costs by 1.5% each year. Yet Tapper's anchor Charles Gibson told us that total annual healthcare spending is $2.5tr, or $25tr per decade. To save $2tr out of $25tr, costs have to be cut by way more than 1.5% annually.
COLGAN, NOT CONTINENTAL, GETS RAP The National Transportation Safety Board is gearing up for hearings into February's commuter plane crash in suburban Buffalo that killed all 50 on board and all three newscasts had a reporter file a preview. The flight was Continental Connection 3407 but all three reporters identified it as being operated by Colgan Air, sparing Continental Airlines any tarnish. "A lot of testimony about human error is expected," NBC's Peter Alexander told us from the upstate New York crash site. In the crosshairs is Marvin Renslow, the plane's dead pilot, who flunked several flight tests, known as check rides. He was inexperienced in the cockpit of the Dash 8 turboprop and had never practiced handling a stall warning in a flight simulator.
ABC's Lisa Stark and CBS' Nancy Cordes covered the story from Washington. Stated Cordes: "Colgan Air points out its training regimen was examined and approved by the FAA. NTSB sources say the FAA's standards will be a prime focus at the hearings." Stark declared that "experts" want to know: "Are these issues unique to Colgan Air? Or are they symptoms of a broader problem with the regional airlines that millions of Americans fly?"
SALTY Want the Tour of Italy Lasagna from Olive Garden? What about the Buffalo Chicken Fajitas at Chili's? Feel hungry for the Admiral's Feast at Red Lobster? Those were the three dishes John McKenzie singled out on ABC's A Closer Look from the nutritional analysis of 102 different meals at national restaurant chains by the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
It turns out that you want none of them. Each individual dish contains between two and three times the maximum total intake of salt we are supposed to eat in an entire day. NBC's Rehema Ellis covered the salt story too. She quoted Chili's explanation that the chain prides itself on catering to "health conscious or indulgent" diners. The owner of Red Lobster and Olive Garden told Ellis that they "appeal to a broad range of taste preferences and dietary needs."
THOMAS CHANNELS COPS ABC's Pierre Thomas tagged along with federal marshals in Atlanta to see how they served arrest warrants on three fugitives. His anchor Charles Gibson introduced the report by telling us that the targets were violent. Yet the first arrest was of a suspected car thief who was also addicted to methamphetamines and crack cocaine. He was tasered by the marshals when they tackled him. The second bust, at close to midnight, brought "a sad surprise." The marshals busted down a door and brought out a sleeping child before they found their man. The third saw marshals drag a man from his house and throw him to the floor. He was an "innocent associate who grew up with the suspect." Their man was next door in the garage.
Thomas, ABC's justice correspondent, did not even extend to the trio the disclaimer that COPS grants on FOX-TV about the presumption of innocence. He called them "career criminals."
AWESOME IMAGES As Atlantis launched on its mission to repair the Hubble telescope, ABC filed part three of Rescue Mission, its behind-the-scenes profile of the seven astronauts. Ned Potter showed them joking about the space food they will have to eat and the clothes they will wear. On NBC, Tom Costello was more interested in Hubble, "the size of a city bus orbiting 350 miles above Earth." He showed us a selection of awesome images taken since its launch in 1990: "a starburst of galaxies…and planetary gases…star clusters…cosmic pearls…a sculpture of gas…dust from a dying star." Noted ABC anchor Charles Gibson: "The telescope has not had a fix-up in seven years."
