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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 14, 2009
Detroit's woes landed on Main Street. Almost 800 Chrysler dealerships received a hand-delivered letter from UPS, canceling their contracts to sell its new cars. The bankrupt automaker wiped out one quarter of its Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep outlets, which employ almost 40,000 workers. Both ABC and NBC led with the Story of the Day. CBS, with substitute anchor Jeff Glor, kicked off from the Johnson Space Center in Houston as spacewalking astronauts installed a new camera in the Hubble telescope.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 14, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CHRYSLER CANCELS DEALERSHIPS’ CONTRACTS Detroit's woes landed on Main Street. Almost 800 Chrysler dealerships received a hand-delivered letter from UPS, canceling their contracts to sell its new cars. The bankrupt automaker wiped out one quarter of its Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep outlets, which employ almost 40,000 workers. Both ABC and NBC led with the Story of the Day. CBS, with substitute anchor Jeff Glor, kicked off from the Johnson Space Center in Houston as spacewalking astronauts installed a new camera in the Hubble telescope.
Howard Sellz, owner of Big Valley Dodge in Van Nuys Cal, had such a dynamic rendition of the letter that his soundbite was quoted by both NBC's Lee Cowan and CBS' Mark Strassmann: "These are extraordinary times and blah, blah, blah, blah." Jim Anderer of Island Jeep on Long Island also attracted attention. "Why me? That is the question," he asked of CBS' Strassmann while ABC gave him an extended 1st Person soundbite bemoaning his fate: "It is not morally right. It is not ethically right. It might be legal, OK, but there is nothing good about it."
"No new shipments and the signs have to come down by June 9th," was the way CBS' Strassmann summed up the letter. "There is no appealing the verdict," stated ABC's Chris Bury, and "adding insult to injury Chrysler will not take its cars back." NBC's Cowan explained that "most will have to be auctioned off to other dealers, hardly at full price." He noted that smaller, minority-owned, dealerships were "hit especially hard" while ABC's Bury saw big chains like Auto Nation surviving as smaller ones are terminated: "All those dealers cost manufacturers--shipping cars, training workers, providing financing."
CBS' Strassmann suggested that some dealerships will stay in business selling used cars. NBC's Cowan portrayed only the downside. He warned "the ripples will be deep. For starters hundreds of these oddly-configured properties will now be forced on an already ailing real estate market. Cities fear the sales tax revenue that these dealers once generated will dry up."
SPEAKER ACCUSES SPIES OF LIES Wednesday's headlines concerned President Barack Obama and abuses of prisoners by military guards. Thursday the focus moved to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and abuses of prisoners by CIA interrogators. "Madame Speaker, just to be clear," inquired ABC's Jonathan Karl (no link), "you are accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?" "Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States."
Pelosi, at the time, was a member of the House Intelligence Committee receiving top-secret briefings from spooks about which torture methods--"enhanced interrogation techniques," in the bureaucratic lingo--were being used on suspected members of al-Qaeda. At issue was just one practice, the drowning torture known as waterboarding. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reminded us: "The Speaker has long been an opponent of waterboarding." It turns out that the torture had already been tried scores of times on prisoner abu-Zubaydah when Pelosi was briefed yet, she asserted, "the only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed." CBS' Bob Orr softened the starkness of Pelosi's charge against the spies, calling it an accusation of "skirting the truth."
ABC's Karl checked with a pair of other members of Congress who were given the same secret briefings. He quoted Porter Goss, a Republican who later became Director of Central Intelligence: "We understood what the CIA was doing. We gave the CIA our bipartisan support." Bob Graham, then a Democratic Senator, recalled the opposite: "The topic of waterboarding did not come up…It would have been a term that I would have had to have asked them to define."
Both NBC's O'Donnell and CBS' Orr quoted from the CIA's own declassified minutes of the September 2002 briefing. They said it included "a description of particular EITs that had been deployed" on abu-Zubaydah. CBS' Orr noted, however, that "the word waterboarding was not used."
On the vocabulary watch: CBS substitute anchor Jeff Glor referred to "harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding." ABC anchor Charles Gibson, as usual, refuses to let the T-word pass his lips; he could manage nothing more menacing than "the controversy over interrogation techniques." Contrast that to NBC's Brian Williams: "The subject here is torture."
USURY HARMS HOMOSEXUALS AND STUDENTS President Barack Obama turned his attention to college students as commencement season gets underway. NBC's Lisa Myers quoted his call to "clean up practices at universities to protect students from getting stuck in debt before they even get started in life." A college student with plastic graduates with an average of $4,100 in credit card debt, Myers noted. Restrictions on marketing plastic to teenagers were included in a Senate bill that Nancy Cordes covered on CBS. She expects it to pass "but there is a catch. Most of these reforms would not kick in for nine months to a year."
The most noteworthy tidbit in Cordes' reporting was her use of real people's anecdotes to illustrate it. She showed us a Chicago couple hit with an 11% hike in their interest rates without "notice or explanation" by Bank of America. The noteworthy thing was that Cordes found it not noteworthy that the couple happened to be gay.
THIS IS YOUR CROSSING GUARD SPEAKING The third day of the National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the crash of Continental Connection 3407 in Buffalo in February was covered by NBC and ABC. Both switched from the particular circumstances of the fatal crash to the general implications for the airline industry. "Continental Airlines used regional carrier Colgan Air for its Newark-to-Buffalo flight. Continental is not alone. Most of the major airlines outsource regional flights to local carriers." And the upshot may be a two-tier system, NBC's Tom Costello worried. For ABC's A Closer Look, Lisa Stark ticked off disparities in training, crew fatigue, pay--co-pilot Rebecca Shaw's salary was "comparable to that of a crossing guard"--and danger between the majors and the regionals. Regional carriers account for one quarter of all passengers yet "in the last seven years more than 150 people have lost their lives in regional airline accidents compared to just one person in a major airline crash."
HUBBLE GETS A NEW CAMERA For once, CBS decided to make a bigger deal of the repairs to the Hubble telescope than ABC. It took a seven-hour sapcewalk to install a piano-sized new camera. CBS kicked off its newscast with the tag team of technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg and in-house space consultant Bill Harwood at NASA's Space Center in Houston. They took us through the 45 minutes that astronaut Drew Feustel took to unscrew a bolt that held the old camera in place. He needed "an essential tool in space--elbow grease--along with a socket wrench," joked Sieberg. Harwood explained that it is hard to get leverage without weight: "He is anchored to the end of the shuttle's robot arm. As he is moving that big wrench around it tends to rotate your body the other way. It is not a solid footing." ABC's Ned Potter pitched in with some behind-the-scenes footage of spacewalk training. NBC, as usual, mentioned the space mission merely in passing.
INSIDER TRADING OR INCESSANT TRADING? CBS claimed an Exclusive for Armen Keteyian's Investigation into a probe by David Kotz, Inspector General of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Keteyian was unable to name names but he did reveal that the FBI is actively investigating a pair of lawyers at the SEC for insider trading. Suspicious shares were sold in a "large financial services company," a "large healthcare company," and "an oil company," as official SEC scrutiny was pending. The explanation by one of the lawyers, Keteyian reported, is that she is constantly trading as her "main hobby," with almost 250 separate transactions over a two years period.
SCIUTTO SHOWS US THE SLUMS OF DURBAN Efavirenz is the name of an antiretroviral medicine that is saving the lives of 500,000 of South Africa's 5m HIV-positive patients. It also happens to be a cheap narcotic high when crushed and smoked. ABC's Jim Sciutto took a trip to the slums of Durban where the medicine is sold in a thriving black market. Not only does smoking Efavirenz mean that it is not available to cure the sick, Sciutto told us of a second, more serious danger: "The drug abusers are in effect giving HIV a small piece of an antiretroviral medication, not enough to kill the virus but enough for it potentially to develop resistance."
FEW WILL DENY A WELL-MAINTAINED MOAT The British political scandal of Members of Parliament abusing their right to claim expenses for two homes--one in London near the House of Commons, a second in their constituency--is too delicious to ignore. Stopwatch in hand, CBS' Mark Phillips had fun Tuesday, when he demonstrated the distance between one MP's two residences: at a steady walking pace, his commute lasted four minutes and 33 seconds. Now NBC's Stephanie Gosk positions herself outside the Tower of London to report on another MP who claimed country estate expenses for a housekeeper, a piano tuner and moat clearing. Deadpanned Gosk: "Few will deny that a well-maintained most is good protection."
BANQUET HAS BURNT CRUST The New York Times earned a hat tip from NBC's Robert Bazell for its microwave reporting. It turns out that ConAgra's Banquet brand chicken pot pies are not thoroughly cooked at the factory before they are frozen and put on sale. Thus microwavers must not only warm the pies before eating; for safety's sake they have to complete the cooking too. The Times' experiment tried to comply with the pie's detailed microwave instructions and Bazell passed on the bad news. It is "difficult to achieve the correct temperature without burning the crust."
Howard Sellz, owner of Big Valley Dodge in Van Nuys Cal, had such a dynamic rendition of the letter that his soundbite was quoted by both NBC's Lee Cowan and CBS' Mark Strassmann: "These are extraordinary times and blah, blah, blah, blah." Jim Anderer of Island Jeep on Long Island also attracted attention. "Why me? That is the question," he asked of CBS' Strassmann while ABC gave him an extended 1st Person soundbite bemoaning his fate: "It is not morally right. It is not ethically right. It might be legal, OK, but there is nothing good about it."
"No new shipments and the signs have to come down by June 9th," was the way CBS' Strassmann summed up the letter. "There is no appealing the verdict," stated ABC's Chris Bury, and "adding insult to injury Chrysler will not take its cars back." NBC's Cowan explained that "most will have to be auctioned off to other dealers, hardly at full price." He noted that smaller, minority-owned, dealerships were "hit especially hard" while ABC's Bury saw big chains like Auto Nation surviving as smaller ones are terminated: "All those dealers cost manufacturers--shipping cars, training workers, providing financing."
CBS' Strassmann suggested that some dealerships will stay in business selling used cars. NBC's Cowan portrayed only the downside. He warned "the ripples will be deep. For starters hundreds of these oddly-configured properties will now be forced on an already ailing real estate market. Cities fear the sales tax revenue that these dealers once generated will dry up."
SPEAKER ACCUSES SPIES OF LIES Wednesday's headlines concerned President Barack Obama and abuses of prisoners by military guards. Thursday the focus moved to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and abuses of prisoners by CIA interrogators. "Madame Speaker, just to be clear," inquired ABC's Jonathan Karl (no link), "you are accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?" "Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States."
Pelosi, at the time, was a member of the House Intelligence Committee receiving top-secret briefings from spooks about which torture methods--"enhanced interrogation techniques," in the bureaucratic lingo--were being used on suspected members of al-Qaeda. At issue was just one practice, the drowning torture known as waterboarding. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reminded us: "The Speaker has long been an opponent of waterboarding." It turns out that the torture had already been tried scores of times on prisoner abu-Zubaydah when Pelosi was briefed yet, she asserted, "the only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed." CBS' Bob Orr softened the starkness of Pelosi's charge against the spies, calling it an accusation of "skirting the truth."
ABC's Karl checked with a pair of other members of Congress who were given the same secret briefings. He quoted Porter Goss, a Republican who later became Director of Central Intelligence: "We understood what the CIA was doing. We gave the CIA our bipartisan support." Bob Graham, then a Democratic Senator, recalled the opposite: "The topic of waterboarding did not come up…It would have been a term that I would have had to have asked them to define."
Both NBC's O'Donnell and CBS' Orr quoted from the CIA's own declassified minutes of the September 2002 briefing. They said it included "a description of particular EITs that had been deployed" on abu-Zubaydah. CBS' Orr noted, however, that "the word waterboarding was not used."
On the vocabulary watch: CBS substitute anchor Jeff Glor referred to "harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding." ABC anchor Charles Gibson, as usual, refuses to let the T-word pass his lips; he could manage nothing more menacing than "the controversy over interrogation techniques." Contrast that to NBC's Brian Williams: "The subject here is torture."
USURY HARMS HOMOSEXUALS AND STUDENTS President Barack Obama turned his attention to college students as commencement season gets underway. NBC's Lisa Myers quoted his call to "clean up practices at universities to protect students from getting stuck in debt before they even get started in life." A college student with plastic graduates with an average of $4,100 in credit card debt, Myers noted. Restrictions on marketing plastic to teenagers were included in a Senate bill that Nancy Cordes covered on CBS. She expects it to pass "but there is a catch. Most of these reforms would not kick in for nine months to a year."
The most noteworthy tidbit in Cordes' reporting was her use of real people's anecdotes to illustrate it. She showed us a Chicago couple hit with an 11% hike in their interest rates without "notice or explanation" by Bank of America. The noteworthy thing was that Cordes found it not noteworthy that the couple happened to be gay.
THIS IS YOUR CROSSING GUARD SPEAKING The third day of the National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the crash of Continental Connection 3407 in Buffalo in February was covered by NBC and ABC. Both switched from the particular circumstances of the fatal crash to the general implications for the airline industry. "Continental Airlines used regional carrier Colgan Air for its Newark-to-Buffalo flight. Continental is not alone. Most of the major airlines outsource regional flights to local carriers." And the upshot may be a two-tier system, NBC's Tom Costello worried. For ABC's A Closer Look, Lisa Stark ticked off disparities in training, crew fatigue, pay--co-pilot Rebecca Shaw's salary was "comparable to that of a crossing guard"--and danger between the majors and the regionals. Regional carriers account for one quarter of all passengers yet "in the last seven years more than 150 people have lost their lives in regional airline accidents compared to just one person in a major airline crash."
HUBBLE GETS A NEW CAMERA For once, CBS decided to make a bigger deal of the repairs to the Hubble telescope than ABC. It took a seven-hour sapcewalk to install a piano-sized new camera. CBS kicked off its newscast with the tag team of technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg and in-house space consultant Bill Harwood at NASA's Space Center in Houston. They took us through the 45 minutes that astronaut Drew Feustel took to unscrew a bolt that held the old camera in place. He needed "an essential tool in space--elbow grease--along with a socket wrench," joked Sieberg. Harwood explained that it is hard to get leverage without weight: "He is anchored to the end of the shuttle's robot arm. As he is moving that big wrench around it tends to rotate your body the other way. It is not a solid footing." ABC's Ned Potter pitched in with some behind-the-scenes footage of spacewalk training. NBC, as usual, mentioned the space mission merely in passing.
INSIDER TRADING OR INCESSANT TRADING? CBS claimed an Exclusive for Armen Keteyian's Investigation into a probe by David Kotz, Inspector General of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Keteyian was unable to name names but he did reveal that the FBI is actively investigating a pair of lawyers at the SEC for insider trading. Suspicious shares were sold in a "large financial services company," a "large healthcare company," and "an oil company," as official SEC scrutiny was pending. The explanation by one of the lawyers, Keteyian reported, is that she is constantly trading as her "main hobby," with almost 250 separate transactions over a two years period.
SCIUTTO SHOWS US THE SLUMS OF DURBAN Efavirenz is the name of an antiretroviral medicine that is saving the lives of 500,000 of South Africa's 5m HIV-positive patients. It also happens to be a cheap narcotic high when crushed and smoked. ABC's Jim Sciutto took a trip to the slums of Durban where the medicine is sold in a thriving black market. Not only does smoking Efavirenz mean that it is not available to cure the sick, Sciutto told us of a second, more serious danger: "The drug abusers are in effect giving HIV a small piece of an antiretroviral medication, not enough to kill the virus but enough for it potentially to develop resistance."
FEW WILL DENY A WELL-MAINTAINED MOAT The British political scandal of Members of Parliament abusing their right to claim expenses for two homes--one in London near the House of Commons, a second in their constituency--is too delicious to ignore. Stopwatch in hand, CBS' Mark Phillips had fun Tuesday, when he demonstrated the distance between one MP's two residences: at a steady walking pace, his commute lasted four minutes and 33 seconds. Now NBC's Stephanie Gosk positions herself outside the Tower of London to report on another MP who claimed country estate expenses for a housekeeper, a piano tuner and moat clearing. Deadpanned Gosk: "Few will deny that a well-maintained most is good protection."
BANQUET HAS BURNT CRUST The New York Times earned a hat tip from NBC's Robert Bazell for its microwave reporting. It turns out that ConAgra's Banquet brand chicken pot pies are not thoroughly cooked at the factory before they are frozen and put on sale. Thus microwavers must not only warm the pies before eating; for safety's sake they have to complete the cooking too. The Times' experiment tried to comply with the pie's detailed microwave instructions and Bazell passed on the bad news. It is "difficult to achieve the correct temperature without burning the crust."
