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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 13, 2009
Triggered by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US military prison guards at abu-Ghraib in 2004, the Pentagon launched an investigation into its penal policy throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Its probe came up with a collection of photographs that is evidence of further abuse. That collection was ordered published under a Freedom of Information lawsuit. When President Barack Obama announced that he had decided to appeal, his about-face was newsworthy enough that it was the Story of the Day and the lead item on both ABC and CBS. NBC selected the second day of safety hearings into February's turboprop crash in Buffalo, which had been Tuesday's top story.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 13, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MPS ABUSED POWS, OBAMA WANTS PIX SUPPRESSED Triggered by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US military prison guards at abu-Ghraib in 2004, the Pentagon launched an investigation into its penal policy throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. Its probe came up with a collection of photographs that is evidence of further abuse. That collection was ordered published under a Freedom of Information lawsuit. When President Barack Obama announced that he had decided to appeal, his about-face was newsworthy enough that it was the Story of the Day and the lead item on both ABC and CBS. NBC selected the second day of safety hearings into February's turboprop crash in Buffalo, which had been Tuesday's top story.
First, Obama's suppression of the photographs was headline grabbing because he had changed his mind. "Last month the President agreed to their release after federal courts ordered them made public," NBC's Pete Williams reminded us. ABC's Jake Tapper called it "a complete 180. The White House originally said releasing the photographs would not put US troops in harm's way. Today the President said the opposite." As CBS' Bill Plante put it: "Candidate Obama pushed for full disclosure; President Obama has decided that there are times when transparency is a tough call."
Second, there was confusion about the content of the photographs. Are they inflammatory or not? CBS' Plante quoted President Obama's dismissive description as "not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from abu-Ghrab." Both ABC's Tapper and NBC's Williams contradicted him: Tapper called them "more photographs like the infamous snapshots from abu-Ghraib;" Williams said they were "like those from abu-Ghraib that show prisoner abuse by military captors."
Third, there was the always tricky minefield of euphemism to describe guards abusing prisoners. ABC's Tapper proved to be a surprise given that his network is normally the most convoluted in using formulations that avoid the T-word. He called the American Civil Liberties Union "devastated" because it thought it had "an ally in the White House on issues of transparency about detainee abuse and torture."
Fourth, there were the domestic politics of the dispute. Here, ABC's Tapper overstated the case when he observed that the President "seems to have arrived at the same position" as the former Vice President in concluding that it is dangerous to make abuse public. The soundbite he used did not bear out that generalization. He quoted Dick Cheney as warning against "the risk to the American people of another attack." Whereas, according to Tapper, Obama was concerned about stirring up "anti-US sentiment" in Iraq and Afghanistan not triggering domestic attacks. ABC's George Stephanopoulos noted that a trio of generals--David Petraeus, Raymond Odierno, David McKiernan--"came in hard" lobbying to suppress the images: "Even if this does not succeed," he noted, "the President would have shown that as Commander-in-Chief he is going the extra mile for his troops."
DID TORTURE SAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE? As a sidebar to the Pentagon's suppressed abusive photo collection, a Senate committee held hearings into "the CIA's harsh interrogation methods," as NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Bob Orr (no link) both circumlocuted. Orr also called them "rough interrogations" but he did bring himself to use the T-word, saying they were authorized by the Justice Department in "torture memos." The witness at the hearings was Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully questioned abu-Zubaydah about al-Qaeda in 2002. NBC's Williams quoted Soufan as claiming "it was his questioning, intended to outwit detainees, that got those answers not the CIA's simulated water drowning technique." CBS' Orr aired the former Vice President's justification for harsh methods used on "scores of other terror suspects including many at Guantanamo Bay." Claimed Cheney: "We saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousand of lives."
Do tell. Which plots to kill hundreds of thousands of people were foiled by using torture?
GREGORY’S FACT CHECKING GROWS RUSTY Dick Cheney is making so much news that NBC had Meet the Press anchor David Gregory return to his old Nightly News timeslot to profile him. "Out of office and now out on a limb," was how Gregory characterized Cheney's "newfound fondness for the public spotlight." Gregory used this tendentious Cheney soundbite from Fox News Channel: "I do not think we should just roll over when the new administration says--accuses us of--committing torture, which we did not, or somehow violating the law, which we did not." Gregory really should have pointed out that Barack Obama has explicitly rejected the idea of a war crimes prosecution. It is bad journalism knowingly to run a misleading soundbite without notifying the audience of the deception.
On ABC's A Closer Look, Jonathan Karl, too, noted that Cheney "seems to be everywhere…the most visible Republican in the country these days." Karl depicted a shrinking Grand Old Party, losing a "moderate" like Arlen Specter with Charlie Crist, the newly-announced Senate candidate from Florida, being "one of the few recent bright spots" of ideological diversity. Cheney, like talkshow host Rush Limbaugh "rejects the idea that the party needs to be more moderate to win," Karl commented, adding the history lesson that the last time the Republicans were such an embattled minority was 30 years ago. "They came roaring back just a couple of years later with the Reagan Revolution."
CARD CARRYING MEMBERS The American Civil Liberties Union had a busy news day. Besides its lawsuit against the Pentagon, CBS' Wyatt Andrews also saw the ACLU take on biotech. Firms such as Myriad Genetics in Utah are selling patented diagnostic tests for risk of diseases. Patients can pay to be screened for breast cancer or Alzheimer's Disease or cystic fibrosis, for example. Yet it is not the test that is patented but the underlying gene itself. "The ACLU is challenging the private ownership of body parts," was how Andrews explained it. "The courts and Congress are usually inclined to protect genuine inventions but in this case genes occur naturally in the body. If you cannot patent natural substances like water, the argument goes, how do you patent DNA?"
SHORT HAUL’S SHORTCOMINGS After Tuesday's sensational cockpit transcripts from the doomed Continental Connection flight, only NBC's Tom Costello followed up with day two of the National Transportation Safety Board hearings. Although the Continental logo was on Flight 3407, it was operated by Colgan Airlines. "The major airlines outsource the short haul routes"--this one was from Newark to Buffalo--"to the short haul regional carriers." Yet when the NTSB heard about Colgan's pilots' fatigue and low pay and poor training and inexperience, "all of this may lead to changes in the way the regional airline industry conducts its business," Costello speculated.
13BN LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME ABC continues to go all out in its coverage of the Hubble telescope. Of the eight stories filed so far on the repair mission by Space Shuttle Atlantis, six have been filed by ABC. As the shuttle's robot arm grabbed the telescope and moved it into its cargo bay where the repair spacewalks will take place, ABC filed a news story from Ryan Owens at the Johnson Space Center and part four of its Rescue Mission feature series from Ned Potter. Potter went up close and personal with geophysicist-astronaut Drew Feustel: "For the Hubble repair he and his crewmates mostly play the role of mechanic." Feustel's hobby, it turns out, is restoring classic cars. CBS had Daniel Sieberg preview Thursday's spacewalk to install a new camera, the size of a grand piano, that will see 30 times farther than its predecessor. How far away? 13bn light years, "within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang."
BETHLEHEM IS A PRISON "What the Palestinians most wanted was for him to talk from the special stage they erected right in front of the wall that Israel built but Israel prevented that saying it is way too provocative." Thus NBC's Martin Fletcher covered the stagecraft of Pope Benedict XVI's pilgrimage to Bethlehem to say mass in Manger Square, the reputed birthplace of Jesus Christ. The Palestinians got their photo-op anyway, at least on NBC and CBS, as the 18-foot-high wall loomed over the Popemobile. "Israel calls it a security barrier and Palestinians call it an apartheid land grab," was how NBC's Fletcher narrated the images. On CBS, Richard Roth called it "the barrier around Bethlehem that Israel says has stopped suicide bombers and saved lives; Palestinians say, makes their home a prison."
CBS NEEDS TO SLAP DOWN CHEERIOS TOO Kudos went to NBC's Robert Bazell Wednesday for being the only reporter on the three nightly newscasts to tell us about the slapdown of General Mills' marketing campaign for Cheerios. The cereal's oats do not work as a cholesterol-fighting medicine as its ads assert. A day later John McKenzie does the right thing on ABC: "A company cannot suggest that foods are some kind of magic bullet or that, by itself, a food can reduce the risk of a specific illness," he reprimanded his newscast's longtime advertising sponsor, which has run countless ads claiming precisely that.
STAND UP FOR BASTARDS Unwed Moms--the phrase conjures up visions of single teenage girls struggling on their own to raise bastard babies, producing a deprived generation. ABC sent Sharyn Alfonsi to investigate that stereotype when the latest nationwide data from 2007 showed that fully 40% of all infants were born to a mother who is not married. That rate of illegitimacy has doubled since 1990. Alfonsi exploded the myth. The number of unmarried teenage girls having babies is declining. The cohort with the biggest increase is thirtysomethings and "about half of unwed mothers may live with the children's father." Alfonsi did not inquire into the number of babies born to lesbian couples who would prefer to marry but live in states that forbid it.
First, Obama's suppression of the photographs was headline grabbing because he had changed his mind. "Last month the President agreed to their release after federal courts ordered them made public," NBC's Pete Williams reminded us. ABC's Jake Tapper called it "a complete 180. The White House originally said releasing the photographs would not put US troops in harm's way. Today the President said the opposite." As CBS' Bill Plante put it: "Candidate Obama pushed for full disclosure; President Obama has decided that there are times when transparency is a tough call."
Second, there was confusion about the content of the photographs. Are they inflammatory or not? CBS' Plante quoted President Obama's dismissive description as "not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from abu-Ghrab." Both ABC's Tapper and NBC's Williams contradicted him: Tapper called them "more photographs like the infamous snapshots from abu-Ghraib;" Williams said they were "like those from abu-Ghraib that show prisoner abuse by military captors."
Third, there was the always tricky minefield of euphemism to describe guards abusing prisoners. ABC's Tapper proved to be a surprise given that his network is normally the most convoluted in using formulations that avoid the T-word. He called the American Civil Liberties Union "devastated" because it thought it had "an ally in the White House on issues of transparency about detainee abuse and torture."
Fourth, there were the domestic politics of the dispute. Here, ABC's Tapper overstated the case when he observed that the President "seems to have arrived at the same position" as the former Vice President in concluding that it is dangerous to make abuse public. The soundbite he used did not bear out that generalization. He quoted Dick Cheney as warning against "the risk to the American people of another attack." Whereas, according to Tapper, Obama was concerned about stirring up "anti-US sentiment" in Iraq and Afghanistan not triggering domestic attacks. ABC's George Stephanopoulos noted that a trio of generals--David Petraeus, Raymond Odierno, David McKiernan--"came in hard" lobbying to suppress the images: "Even if this does not succeed," he noted, "the President would have shown that as Commander-in-Chief he is going the extra mile for his troops."
DID TORTURE SAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE? As a sidebar to the Pentagon's suppressed abusive photo collection, a Senate committee held hearings into "the CIA's harsh interrogation methods," as NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Bob Orr (no link) both circumlocuted. Orr also called them "rough interrogations" but he did bring himself to use the T-word, saying they were authorized by the Justice Department in "torture memos." The witness at the hearings was Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully questioned abu-Zubaydah about al-Qaeda in 2002. NBC's Williams quoted Soufan as claiming "it was his questioning, intended to outwit detainees, that got those answers not the CIA's simulated water drowning technique." CBS' Orr aired the former Vice President's justification for harsh methods used on "scores of other terror suspects including many at Guantanamo Bay." Claimed Cheney: "We saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousand of lives."
Do tell. Which plots to kill hundreds of thousands of people were foiled by using torture?
GREGORY’S FACT CHECKING GROWS RUSTY Dick Cheney is making so much news that NBC had Meet the Press anchor David Gregory return to his old Nightly News timeslot to profile him. "Out of office and now out on a limb," was how Gregory characterized Cheney's "newfound fondness for the public spotlight." Gregory used this tendentious Cheney soundbite from Fox News Channel: "I do not think we should just roll over when the new administration says--accuses us of--committing torture, which we did not, or somehow violating the law, which we did not." Gregory really should have pointed out that Barack Obama has explicitly rejected the idea of a war crimes prosecution. It is bad journalism knowingly to run a misleading soundbite without notifying the audience of the deception.
On ABC's A Closer Look, Jonathan Karl, too, noted that Cheney "seems to be everywhere…the most visible Republican in the country these days." Karl depicted a shrinking Grand Old Party, losing a "moderate" like Arlen Specter with Charlie Crist, the newly-announced Senate candidate from Florida, being "one of the few recent bright spots" of ideological diversity. Cheney, like talkshow host Rush Limbaugh "rejects the idea that the party needs to be more moderate to win," Karl commented, adding the history lesson that the last time the Republicans were such an embattled minority was 30 years ago. "They came roaring back just a couple of years later with the Reagan Revolution."
CARD CARRYING MEMBERS The American Civil Liberties Union had a busy news day. Besides its lawsuit against the Pentagon, CBS' Wyatt Andrews also saw the ACLU take on biotech. Firms such as Myriad Genetics in Utah are selling patented diagnostic tests for risk of diseases. Patients can pay to be screened for breast cancer or Alzheimer's Disease or cystic fibrosis, for example. Yet it is not the test that is patented but the underlying gene itself. "The ACLU is challenging the private ownership of body parts," was how Andrews explained it. "The courts and Congress are usually inclined to protect genuine inventions but in this case genes occur naturally in the body. If you cannot patent natural substances like water, the argument goes, how do you patent DNA?"
SHORT HAUL’S SHORTCOMINGS After Tuesday's sensational cockpit transcripts from the doomed Continental Connection flight, only NBC's Tom Costello followed up with day two of the National Transportation Safety Board hearings. Although the Continental logo was on Flight 3407, it was operated by Colgan Airlines. "The major airlines outsource the short haul routes"--this one was from Newark to Buffalo--"to the short haul regional carriers." Yet when the NTSB heard about Colgan's pilots' fatigue and low pay and poor training and inexperience, "all of this may lead to changes in the way the regional airline industry conducts its business," Costello speculated.
13BN LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME ABC continues to go all out in its coverage of the Hubble telescope. Of the eight stories filed so far on the repair mission by Space Shuttle Atlantis, six have been filed by ABC. As the shuttle's robot arm grabbed the telescope and moved it into its cargo bay where the repair spacewalks will take place, ABC filed a news story from Ryan Owens at the Johnson Space Center and part four of its Rescue Mission feature series from Ned Potter. Potter went up close and personal with geophysicist-astronaut Drew Feustel: "For the Hubble repair he and his crewmates mostly play the role of mechanic." Feustel's hobby, it turns out, is restoring classic cars. CBS had Daniel Sieberg preview Thursday's spacewalk to install a new camera, the size of a grand piano, that will see 30 times farther than its predecessor. How far away? 13bn light years, "within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang."
BETHLEHEM IS A PRISON "What the Palestinians most wanted was for him to talk from the special stage they erected right in front of the wall that Israel built but Israel prevented that saying it is way too provocative." Thus NBC's Martin Fletcher covered the stagecraft of Pope Benedict XVI's pilgrimage to Bethlehem to say mass in Manger Square, the reputed birthplace of Jesus Christ. The Palestinians got their photo-op anyway, at least on NBC and CBS, as the 18-foot-high wall loomed over the Popemobile. "Israel calls it a security barrier and Palestinians call it an apartheid land grab," was how NBC's Fletcher narrated the images. On CBS, Richard Roth called it "the barrier around Bethlehem that Israel says has stopped suicide bombers and saved lives; Palestinians say, makes their home a prison."
CBS NEEDS TO SLAP DOWN CHEERIOS TOO Kudos went to NBC's Robert Bazell Wednesday for being the only reporter on the three nightly newscasts to tell us about the slapdown of General Mills' marketing campaign for Cheerios. The cereal's oats do not work as a cholesterol-fighting medicine as its ads assert. A day later John McKenzie does the right thing on ABC: "A company cannot suggest that foods are some kind of magic bullet or that, by itself, a food can reduce the risk of a specific illness," he reprimanded his newscast's longtime advertising sponsor, which has run countless ads claiming precisely that.
STAND UP FOR BASTARDS Unwed Moms--the phrase conjures up visions of single teenage girls struggling on their own to raise bastard babies, producing a deprived generation. ABC sent Sharyn Alfonsi to investigate that stereotype when the latest nationwide data from 2007 showed that fully 40% of all infants were born to a mother who is not married. That rate of illegitimacy has doubled since 1990. Alfonsi exploded the myth. The number of unmarried teenage girls having babies is declining. The cohort with the biggest increase is thirtysomethings and "about half of unwed mothers may live with the children's father." Alfonsi did not inquire into the number of babies born to lesbian couples who would prefer to marry but live in states that forbid it.
