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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 12, 2009
There was no doubt about the Story of the Day. All three newscasts kicked off from the Washington DC bureaus with the headlines from the day's National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the commuter turboprop plane crash in February that killed 50 people in suburban Buffalo. We did not hear the cockpit conversation but the NTSB did release the transcript from pilot Marvin Renslow and his crewmate Rebecca Shaw. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed when he realized that he had responded wrongly to a warning that the plane was about to stall. As the plane plummeted into the ground, Shaw let out a dying scream.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 12, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
COCKPIT GOSSIP, A COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER There was no doubt about the Story of the Day. All three newscasts kicked off from the Washington DC bureaus with the headlines from the day's National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the commuter turboprop plane crash in February that killed 50 people in suburban Buffalo. We did not hear the cockpit conversation but the NTSB did release the transcript from pilot Marvin Renslow and his crewmate Rebecca Shaw. "Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed when he realized that he had responded wrongly to a warning that the plane was about to stall. As the plane plummeted into the ground, Shaw let out a dying scream.
CBS' Nancy Cordes characterized Renslow and Shaw as "deeply engaged in shoptalk." She pointed out that the conversation "violated a basic flight rule: no non-essential chatter below 10,000 ft--especially when flight conditions were poor." Those conditions included a build-up of ice on the wings that made Shaw think: "Oh my gosh! We are going to crash." Cordes commented that "five minutes later they did," although the stall, not the ice, was the cause. ABC's Lisa Stark summed up the NTSB inquiry as having revealed problems of "fatigue, pilot training and competence, cockpit behavior." She concluded that "these are not new concerns and this accident underscores that those longstanding issues may never have been addressed adequately." John Nance, ABC's in-house aviation consultant, reinforced Stark's point: "This is a training issue and it is a checking issue. It is an FAA issue."
The newscasts disagreed about which airline should take the negative public relations hit from being associated with such sloppy piloting. CBS kicked off Cordes' report with the Continental Connection logo. ABC identified the flight as Colgan Air Flight 3407 and did not mention Continental. NBC's Tom Costello called the flight "Colgan Air, which was flying as Continental Connection." He added, "by the way, Continental Airlines still uses Colgan for 173 daily Continental Connection flights."
CBS' punning Ben Tracy saw "the number of regional aircraft, smaller planes that are cheaper to fly, take off," a 42% increase since 2003. "Overall regional pilots have less experience and are paid much less than big jet pilots." The entire airline industry has lower levels of pilot experience than 40 years ago, he generalized. Back then 85% had a background flying military jets; now just 25% do. As for the turboprop airplane that Renslow was flying, ABC's consultant Nance was categorical: "The planes are definitely not less safe. We have got wonderful equipment compared to what we had 10 or 20 years ago."
ATLANTIS SUFFERS SOME NICKS Up until now, the focus of the Atlantis space mission has been on the Hubble telescope that its crew is being dispatched to repair. That changed for CBS' Daniel Sieberg and NBC's Jay Barbree. They both covered the Space Shuttle itself. CBS' Sieberg told us about "a string of nicks about 21 inches long on the underwing" that were caused by a gouge from falling insulating foam some 106 seconds after liftoff. "It is not a showstopper yet, but it could be," NBC's Barbree warned. The damage will be scrutinized by lasers to make sure it is not too deep. As for Hubble, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked in-house consultant Bill Harwood (at the tail of the Sieberg videostream) why NASA is spending $1bn to make such risky repairs: "The pictures from Hubble are in everything from college textbooks to kindergarten books. It has revolutionized optical astronomy," Harwood exclaimed. ABC, whose Rescue Mission series on Hubble ran Thursday, Friday and Monday, skipped a day.
NOT KILLED BUT MURDERED Pope Benedict XVI may call himself "a pilgrim of peace," observed ABC's Simon McGregor-Wood, but he is visiting "a place of conflict." The Pontiff's visit to the Holy Land is hardly attracting saturation coverage on the network newscasts. CBS was the lone network to assign the Pope a reporter Monday with Richard Roth at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust. Now Simon McGregor-Wood in Jerusalem for ABC is the lone correspondent as the Bishop of Rome visited the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall. The Holy Father is "finding it hard to separate religion and politics," McGregor-Wood noted. He was even nitpickingly criticized for referring to the millions of Jews in his speech on the Holocaust as having been "killed" not "murdered."
CORRUPT SCHOOLHOUSES This is the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake in China that killed 70,000, according to ABC, or 90,000, according to NBC and CBS. All three newscasts dispatched a correspondent to Sichuan for the first time this year to cover the mourning. NBC's Ian Williams and CBS' Celia Hatton both focused on the calamity of so many crushed schoolhouses, especially pitiful in a society that forces couples to give birth to just one child. CBS' Hatton was in Mianyang where she contrasted the failure rate of government buildings--at 13%--with the 65% found in schools: many bereaved parents believe "corrupt builders cut corners while officials looked the other way." Sichuan police questioned CBS' Hatton during her reporting; a Financial Times journalist was assaulted. Williams filed an NBC In Depth report from Hanwang, where authorities barred parents from mourning en masse at the site of the collapsed school "to maintain social order."
Both Hatton and Williams noted the official statistic that 5,300 schoolchildren died. NBC's Williams called it "a figure ridiculed by parents;" "the real total is thought to be far higher," was how CBS' Hatton put it.
ABC's Terry McCarthy traveled to the mountainous town of Beichuan closest to the earthquake's epicenter. Some 13,000 people died there, fully half of Beichuan's population. "Today the whole area has been fenced off and Beichuan has literally become a ghost town." The surviving population lives in temporary housing 40 miles away while a new Beichuan is being constructed away from the valley on the open plain.
STRESSED OUT Monday, ABC's Martha Raddatz made use of fortuitous feature footage from her reporting at Camp Liberty outside Baghdad to cover the shooting spree at the base's Combat Stress Control Center. Now she returns to her own videotape for the macabre introduction that Col Beth Salisbury made to Cmdr Keith Springle (CBS and NBC called him Charles), a social worker at the center, who turned out to be one of the five slain. "It is in this very office where he likely died," Raddatz related. Springle's specialties were "combat stress, anger management and suicidal tendencies."
All three newscasts had a reporter file an update on the Camp Liberty killings as Sgt John Russell was formally charged with five counts of murder. Russell's family in Texas offered soundbites. CBS' Bob Orr quoted Russell's father (ABC and CBS called him Wilburn, NBC William) as speculating that the sergeant, with 20 years of service (ABC said he was 42 years old, CBS and NBC 44), "snapped, fearing his military career could be ended by a stress diagnosis." NBC's Jim Miklaszewski quoted the father about his son's commanding officers: "They broke him. They told him: 'That is it. You are out.'" Gen Peter Chiarelli offered this response: "We have got to change the culture in the army--and, I think, in society--that seeking help for these problems is not a bad thing. It is exactly what we want folks to do."
OUTRAGEOUS USER GENERATED CONTENT The cellphone videotape was grainy but its content was outrageous enough to qualify for broadcast. Brian Ross filed an Investigates feature that doubled for ABC's A Closer Look and a preview for Tuesday's Nightline. The images were of a so-called fight club at the Corpus Christi State School, one of 13 state-run residential facilities for mentally disabled teenagers. The fights were between the teens under the coercion of the night shift staff. "Residents were told they would be sent to prison or beaten if they did not fight." All six members of the night shift have been fired and indicted. Ross added the astonishing statistic that some 800 employees of the Texas mentally disabled school system have been suspended or fired for the abuse of residents over the past five years, according to a federal civil rights investigation.
How did Ross obtain the footage? "The fight club came to an end only because one of the staff lost his phone two months ago and it was turned in to police, who then discovered the video."
BRIAN WILLIAMS WATCHES BATTLE OF THE BULGE Brian Williams' special skill as an anchor is his knack for deadpan understatement. Contrast his passing mention of the Carrie Prejean brouhaha with Dan Harris' labored complete report on ABC. Harris had to spell it out the "delicious absurdity of the spectacle" as Miss California, a celebrity champion of the campaign to prevent homosexuals from getting married, was forgiven by Donald Trump for posing in modest topless photographs. On NBC, a straightfaced Williams called the Miss USA press conference "a rare moment of media exposure for Donald Trump" and observed that Miss California "invoked Gen Patton, World War II and the Battle of the Bulge in her own emotional defense."
ONLY NBC SETS CHEERIOS RECORD STRAIGHT All three network news divisions have made enough money from General Mills, selling time to Cheerios so that the cereal could advertise its oats as a cure for high cholesterol. When the Food & Drug Administration raised a red flag about Cheerios' boasts, the right thing for the newscasts to do was to warn their viewers to beware of the message they had been sold so assiduously. Only NBC treated its audience with such due consideration. Robert Bazell conceded that there is no question that Cheerios are considered by nutritionists to be "a healthy product" but warned that General Mills' ads were making "druglike claims that can only be made after studies had been submitted to the agency and approved."
So eat your Cheerios for the taste and the nutrition, if you like; but not as a medicine.
CBS' Nancy Cordes characterized Renslow and Shaw as "deeply engaged in shoptalk." She pointed out that the conversation "violated a basic flight rule: no non-essential chatter below 10,000 ft--especially when flight conditions were poor." Those conditions included a build-up of ice on the wings that made Shaw think: "Oh my gosh! We are going to crash." Cordes commented that "five minutes later they did," although the stall, not the ice, was the cause. ABC's Lisa Stark summed up the NTSB inquiry as having revealed problems of "fatigue, pilot training and competence, cockpit behavior." She concluded that "these are not new concerns and this accident underscores that those longstanding issues may never have been addressed adequately." John Nance, ABC's in-house aviation consultant, reinforced Stark's point: "This is a training issue and it is a checking issue. It is an FAA issue."
The newscasts disagreed about which airline should take the negative public relations hit from being associated with such sloppy piloting. CBS kicked off Cordes' report with the Continental Connection logo. ABC identified the flight as Colgan Air Flight 3407 and did not mention Continental. NBC's Tom Costello called the flight "Colgan Air, which was flying as Continental Connection." He added, "by the way, Continental Airlines still uses Colgan for 173 daily Continental Connection flights."
CBS' punning Ben Tracy saw "the number of regional aircraft, smaller planes that are cheaper to fly, take off," a 42% increase since 2003. "Overall regional pilots have less experience and are paid much less than big jet pilots." The entire airline industry has lower levels of pilot experience than 40 years ago, he generalized. Back then 85% had a background flying military jets; now just 25% do. As for the turboprop airplane that Renslow was flying, ABC's consultant Nance was categorical: "The planes are definitely not less safe. We have got wonderful equipment compared to what we had 10 or 20 years ago."
ATLANTIS SUFFERS SOME NICKS Up until now, the focus of the Atlantis space mission has been on the Hubble telescope that its crew is being dispatched to repair. That changed for CBS' Daniel Sieberg and NBC's Jay Barbree. They both covered the Space Shuttle itself. CBS' Sieberg told us about "a string of nicks about 21 inches long on the underwing" that were caused by a gouge from falling insulating foam some 106 seconds after liftoff. "It is not a showstopper yet, but it could be," NBC's Barbree warned. The damage will be scrutinized by lasers to make sure it is not too deep. As for Hubble, CBS anchor Katie Couric asked in-house consultant Bill Harwood (at the tail of the Sieberg videostream) why NASA is spending $1bn to make such risky repairs: "The pictures from Hubble are in everything from college textbooks to kindergarten books. It has revolutionized optical astronomy," Harwood exclaimed. ABC, whose Rescue Mission series on Hubble ran Thursday, Friday and Monday, skipped a day.
NOT KILLED BUT MURDERED Pope Benedict XVI may call himself "a pilgrim of peace," observed ABC's Simon McGregor-Wood, but he is visiting "a place of conflict." The Pontiff's visit to the Holy Land is hardly attracting saturation coverage on the network newscasts. CBS was the lone network to assign the Pope a reporter Monday with Richard Roth at the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust. Now Simon McGregor-Wood in Jerusalem for ABC is the lone correspondent as the Bishop of Rome visited the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall. The Holy Father is "finding it hard to separate religion and politics," McGregor-Wood noted. He was even nitpickingly criticized for referring to the millions of Jews in his speech on the Holocaust as having been "killed" not "murdered."
CORRUPT SCHOOLHOUSES This is the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake in China that killed 70,000, according to ABC, or 90,000, according to NBC and CBS. All three newscasts dispatched a correspondent to Sichuan for the first time this year to cover the mourning. NBC's Ian Williams and CBS' Celia Hatton both focused on the calamity of so many crushed schoolhouses, especially pitiful in a society that forces couples to give birth to just one child. CBS' Hatton was in Mianyang where she contrasted the failure rate of government buildings--at 13%--with the 65% found in schools: many bereaved parents believe "corrupt builders cut corners while officials looked the other way." Sichuan police questioned CBS' Hatton during her reporting; a Financial Times journalist was assaulted. Williams filed an NBC In Depth report from Hanwang, where authorities barred parents from mourning en masse at the site of the collapsed school "to maintain social order."
Both Hatton and Williams noted the official statistic that 5,300 schoolchildren died. NBC's Williams called it "a figure ridiculed by parents;" "the real total is thought to be far higher," was how CBS' Hatton put it.
ABC's Terry McCarthy traveled to the mountainous town of Beichuan closest to the earthquake's epicenter. Some 13,000 people died there, fully half of Beichuan's population. "Today the whole area has been fenced off and Beichuan has literally become a ghost town." The surviving population lives in temporary housing 40 miles away while a new Beichuan is being constructed away from the valley on the open plain.
STRESSED OUT Monday, ABC's Martha Raddatz made use of fortuitous feature footage from her reporting at Camp Liberty outside Baghdad to cover the shooting spree at the base's Combat Stress Control Center. Now she returns to her own videotape for the macabre introduction that Col Beth Salisbury made to Cmdr Keith Springle (CBS and NBC called him Charles), a social worker at the center, who turned out to be one of the five slain. "It is in this very office where he likely died," Raddatz related. Springle's specialties were "combat stress, anger management and suicidal tendencies."
All three newscasts had a reporter file an update on the Camp Liberty killings as Sgt John Russell was formally charged with five counts of murder. Russell's family in Texas offered soundbites. CBS' Bob Orr quoted Russell's father (ABC and CBS called him Wilburn, NBC William) as speculating that the sergeant, with 20 years of service (ABC said he was 42 years old, CBS and NBC 44), "snapped, fearing his military career could be ended by a stress diagnosis." NBC's Jim Miklaszewski quoted the father about his son's commanding officers: "They broke him. They told him: 'That is it. You are out.'" Gen Peter Chiarelli offered this response: "We have got to change the culture in the army--and, I think, in society--that seeking help for these problems is not a bad thing. It is exactly what we want folks to do."
OUTRAGEOUS USER GENERATED CONTENT The cellphone videotape was grainy but its content was outrageous enough to qualify for broadcast. Brian Ross filed an Investigates feature that doubled for ABC's A Closer Look and a preview for Tuesday's Nightline. The images were of a so-called fight club at the Corpus Christi State School, one of 13 state-run residential facilities for mentally disabled teenagers. The fights were between the teens under the coercion of the night shift staff. "Residents were told they would be sent to prison or beaten if they did not fight." All six members of the night shift have been fired and indicted. Ross added the astonishing statistic that some 800 employees of the Texas mentally disabled school system have been suspended or fired for the abuse of residents over the past five years, according to a federal civil rights investigation.
How did Ross obtain the footage? "The fight club came to an end only because one of the staff lost his phone two months ago and it was turned in to police, who then discovered the video."
BRIAN WILLIAMS WATCHES BATTLE OF THE BULGE Brian Williams' special skill as an anchor is his knack for deadpan understatement. Contrast his passing mention of the Carrie Prejean brouhaha with Dan Harris' labored complete report on ABC. Harris had to spell it out the "delicious absurdity of the spectacle" as Miss California, a celebrity champion of the campaign to prevent homosexuals from getting married, was forgiven by Donald Trump for posing in modest topless photographs. On NBC, a straightfaced Williams called the Miss USA press conference "a rare moment of media exposure for Donald Trump" and observed that Miss California "invoked Gen Patton, World War II and the Battle of the Bulge in her own emotional defense."
ONLY NBC SETS CHEERIOS RECORD STRAIGHT All three network news divisions have made enough money from General Mills, selling time to Cheerios so that the cereal could advertise its oats as a cure for high cholesterol. When the Food & Drug Administration raised a red flag about Cheerios' boasts, the right thing for the newscasts to do was to warn their viewers to beware of the message they had been sold so assiduously. Only NBC treated its audience with such due consideration. Robert Bazell conceded that there is no question that Cheerios are considered by nutritionists to be "a healthy product" but warned that General Mills' ads were making "druglike claims that can only be made after studies had been submitted to the agency and approved."
So eat your Cheerios for the taste and the nutrition, if you like; but not as a medicine.
