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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 15, 2009
The week started as last week ended. The political ferment on the streets of Teheran was the unanimous choice as Story of the Day. All three newscasts led from Iran, even though Richard Engel, NBC's man in Teheran on Friday, had his visa revoked and was back in New York City. NBC took the feed from its British newsgathering partner ITN. Defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi finally appeared in public to address a mass rally of his supporters. They were protesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been reelected by fraud. The rally culminated in some skirmishing and a single fatality. Both CBS and ABC had substitute anchors on a day of such heavy news that President Barack Obama's major policy speech on healthcare reform was relegated to secondary status. ABC used George Stephanopoulos; CBS had Jeff Glor.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 15, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING TEHERAN The week started as last week ended. The political ferment on the streets of Teheran was the unanimous choice as Story of the Day. All three newscasts led from Iran, even though Richard Engel, NBC's man in Teheran on Friday, had his visa revoked and was back in New York City. NBC took the feed from its British newsgathering partner ITN. Defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi finally appeared in public to address a mass rally of his supporters. They were protesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been reelected by fraud. The rally culminated in some skirmishing and a single fatality. Both CBS and ABC had substitute anchors on a day of such heavy news that President Barack Obama's major policy speech on healthcare reform was relegated to secondary status. ABC used George Stephanopoulos; CBS had Jeff Glor.
CBS' Elizabeth Palmer pointed to non-stop action since the election result was announced: "Extraordinary events every single day have made the outcome of this epic political power struggle impossible to predict." NBC's Engel explained why the complaints of ballot rigging were so plausible. "The timing--people were still in voting stations at 9pm, 10pm, and then just about three hours later the state news agency said that Ahmadinejad had won. All of those ballots, about 35m to 40m ballots, were pieces of paper. It was not computerized at all so it seemed very suspicious." CBS' Palmer reported that the state's "highest religious council" will rule on whether fraud was committed in ten days.
People are not waiting. ABC's Jim Sciutto saw them "flood to downtown Teheran by the hundreds of thousands, possible the largest demonstration here since 1979, the Islamic revolution…Unlike previous protests dominated by young people, today's mixed young and old, students and professionals." ITN's Bill Neely, filing for NBC, noted that "the protestors are taking a defiant but very dangerous stance. This demonstration has been branded not only illegal or criminal but treacherous." He reported on the deadly conclusion to a peaceful day: "Opposition protestors attack a building manned by a militia loyal to President Ahmadinejad. The militia fires shots in the air. The stones keep coming. Then one militiaman fires into the crowd. The protestors take revenge burning the building down."
Iranian authorities revoked ABC's permission to cover the protests with a camera so Sciutto filed from his cellphone. CBS' Palmer told us that "text messaging has been switched off for days; cellphone service is intermittent; and Internet sites and satellite channels from abroad have been blocked." Back in New York, NBC's Engel observed that "the Iranian government has completely failed in its attempts to contain images out of Iran. The Iranian government has cut off international cellphones and has detained many reporters but now a lot of people are using Twitter and Facebook and other online sites to circulate images."
So much for those media analysts who portray old media and new media as incompatible competitors. The old media of the network newscasts seem quite happy to incorporate new media feeds into their packaged reporting.
CBS CALLS NETANYAHU EXTRAORDINARY NEWSMAKER Was the speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, on the future State of Palestine newsworthy? CBS' substitute anchor Jeff Glor thought so. He introduced Richard Roth's report from Ramallah and followed up with an interview with Netanyahu himself. Glor told the prime minister to his face that his speech was "extraordinary." Neither NBC nor ABC concurred. They did not mention Netanyahu's talking points, even in passing. Israel's Arab neighbors seemed similarly unimpressed. Asked Glor: "Are you surprised so far at the negative reaction it has received from Palestinians and other Arab leaders?" "Yes I suppose I would like a better response and maybe it will sink in over time."
Netanyahu's proposal was that Palestine should demilitarize--"certainly not with an army," as CBS' Roth put it; that Israel's settlements on occupied Palestinian territory would continue to expand on their current property but would not expropriate new land; and that Palestine would be obliged to recognize Israel as "the Jewish state." As such, Netanyahu was presumably disowning Israel's current minority of Arab citizens, although Glor did not ask him about that.
CBS' Glor also asked Netanyahu whether he agreed with the protestors on the streets of Teheran that Iran's presidential election had been fixed. Netanyahu thought the question irrelevant: "It is a totalitarian state that perhaps has elections on occasion but we know the true nature of the Iranian regime."
THE 16-HOUR WORK DAY Even as the National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation into February's crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Buffalo, the Federal Aviation Administration tightened safety regulations for regional airlines such as Colgan Air, which operated the fatal flight. New rules are in place for the hiring, training and mentoring of pilots. "That still leaves out a critical safety issue," declared ABC's Lisa Stark. "Fatigue."
CBS' Nancy Cordes reported that the NTSB had been warning about the problems facing regional pilots "long before this Colgan Air crash." ABC's Stark took A Closer Look and disagreed. She put it this way: "Even the government's top aviation officials admitted that the Colgan Air accident is a wake-up call." NBC's Tom Costello sort-of sided with Stark's interpretation: "What is unusual is that the FAA is not waiting for the NTSB's final report on the Buffalo crash."
All three reporters focused on fatigue. Airlines can schedule pilots to be on duty for up to 16 hours each day. CBS' Cordes reported that the pilots' union wants the maximum to be cut to 12. "Due in part to pressure from airlines the rules have gone unaltered since the 1940s."
HEALTHCARE WILL TURN US ALL INTO GENERAL MOTORS All three White House correspondents covered Barack Obama's address to the American Medical Association. ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Chuck Todd both used the President's argument that healthcare poses a national fiscal emergency: "If we do not fix our healthcare system, America may go the way of General Motors--paying more, getting less, going broke." ABC's Tapper cited an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that providing coverage to only 16m of the nation's uninsured would cost $1tr over a decade. ABC's substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos did the math and calculated that each would cost $62,500--which sounds a lot as a lump sum. If he had made it $521 per person per month it would have sounded less outrageous. CBS' Chip Reid, too, quoted the $1tr-per-decade estimate: "Critics say that is about half the real cost."
NBC's Todd acknowledged that healthcare reform is a "complicated issue," ticking off such problems as the lack of preventive care, an excess of unnecessary procedures, mangled performance incentives and a lack of electronic recordkeeping. Todd and his colleagues all agreed that the prospect of offering non-profit federal coverage to compete with for-profit insurance was a key controversy. CBS' Reid suggested that it could be "a step towards socialized medicine" or, as NBC's Todd put it, "not a first step toward a full-fledged government takeover of healthcare." ABC's Tapper wondered whether the public plan might "drive private insurers out of business."
ABC's Stephanopoulos inquired of Timothy Johnson (at the tail of the Tapper videostream), his network's in-house physician, what doctors have against socialized medicine. "The biggest concern, quite frankly, is economic. Medicare, which is a public option plan for the elderly, pays about 20% less to the doctors than private plans do."
NO HARM…NO FOUL…NO STORY All three newscasts filed a healthcare feature after covering the President's AMA speech. CBS was inspired by the health policy wonks at the White House to send Don Teague to follow-up on an article in The New Yorker about McAllen, the city on the Tex-Mex border. McAllen's healthcare costs are twice the national average. "Doctors say the criticism is grossly unfair," Teague found, as they denied running up costs by ordering unnecessary treatments. The Rio Grande city is "the poorest metro area in the nation with the lowest number of doctors per capita. It also has one of the unhealthiest populations with high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease."
ABC's John McKenzie told us about red yeast rice, the Chinese food coloring that gives Peking duck its "signature red glow." Ground up and taken as a nutritional supplement the red rice can reduce harmful levels of cholesterol as efficiently as a prescription statin such as Zocor or Lipitor, without the risk of muscular side effects.
Ron Mott's offered an emotionally manipulative effort for NBC's In Depth. He started with the legitimate story of the investigation by the Veterans Administration into flawed disinfection of diagnostic equipment at its hospitals. The VA found facilities in Miami, Georgia and Tennessee that were using unsanitary procedures. It tested 8,000 veterans and found 53 positive screens for hepatitis and HIV, patients who might have been infected by tainted tests. So what was wrong with Mott's report? He illustrated it with the case of Vietnam veteran Michael Priest, who tested HIV+ after a colonoscopy. The problem was that a second blood test showed no infection; it had been a false positive. No harm. No foul. No story.
SCHOOL FOR SINGERS Music education may face budget cuts at the public schools but it has not lacked airtime this spring. NBC's Ron Mott introduced us to the marching band at New Orleans' Roots of Music middle school in April. CBS' Steve Hartman brought us 70-year-old Andy Mackie, a Pied Piper who hands out harmonicas and strumsticks to the schoolchildren of Washington State. NBC's Chris Jansing told us about highschoolers in Phoenix who teach gradeschoolers to play an instrument in the Sounds of the Community program. Now ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi has uncovered a YouTube video of the fifth grade chorus at New York City's PS22 singing Eye of the Tiger.
HAS WILLIAMS EVER BEEN TO SCOTLAND IN OCTOBER? "Like Scotland in October!" That was the exaggerated complaint from the eastern seaboard by NBC anchor Brian Williams as he introduced Anne Thompson's report about the dismal early summer weather. Thompson told us that Chicago has been "soggy, chilly" and showed us the crowd at a so-called summer festival in Milwaukee "huddled under coats clutching hot cups of coffee." She contacted the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA, which assured her that the jetstream will shift its flow sooner or later: "Hang in there. Summer--and its warmth--is on the horizon."
CBS' Elizabeth Palmer pointed to non-stop action since the election result was announced: "Extraordinary events every single day have made the outcome of this epic political power struggle impossible to predict." NBC's Engel explained why the complaints of ballot rigging were so plausible. "The timing--people were still in voting stations at 9pm, 10pm, and then just about three hours later the state news agency said that Ahmadinejad had won. All of those ballots, about 35m to 40m ballots, were pieces of paper. It was not computerized at all so it seemed very suspicious." CBS' Palmer reported that the state's "highest religious council" will rule on whether fraud was committed in ten days.
People are not waiting. ABC's Jim Sciutto saw them "flood to downtown Teheran by the hundreds of thousands, possible the largest demonstration here since 1979, the Islamic revolution…Unlike previous protests dominated by young people, today's mixed young and old, students and professionals." ITN's Bill Neely, filing for NBC, noted that "the protestors are taking a defiant but very dangerous stance. This demonstration has been branded not only illegal or criminal but treacherous." He reported on the deadly conclusion to a peaceful day: "Opposition protestors attack a building manned by a militia loyal to President Ahmadinejad. The militia fires shots in the air. The stones keep coming. Then one militiaman fires into the crowd. The protestors take revenge burning the building down."
Iranian authorities revoked ABC's permission to cover the protests with a camera so Sciutto filed from his cellphone. CBS' Palmer told us that "text messaging has been switched off for days; cellphone service is intermittent; and Internet sites and satellite channels from abroad have been blocked." Back in New York, NBC's Engel observed that "the Iranian government has completely failed in its attempts to contain images out of Iran. The Iranian government has cut off international cellphones and has detained many reporters but now a lot of people are using Twitter and Facebook and other online sites to circulate images."
So much for those media analysts who portray old media and new media as incompatible competitors. The old media of the network newscasts seem quite happy to incorporate new media feeds into their packaged reporting.
CBS CALLS NETANYAHU EXTRAORDINARY NEWSMAKER Was the speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, on the future State of Palestine newsworthy? CBS' substitute anchor Jeff Glor thought so. He introduced Richard Roth's report from Ramallah and followed up with an interview with Netanyahu himself. Glor told the prime minister to his face that his speech was "extraordinary." Neither NBC nor ABC concurred. They did not mention Netanyahu's talking points, even in passing. Israel's Arab neighbors seemed similarly unimpressed. Asked Glor: "Are you surprised so far at the negative reaction it has received from Palestinians and other Arab leaders?" "Yes I suppose I would like a better response and maybe it will sink in over time."
Netanyahu's proposal was that Palestine should demilitarize--"certainly not with an army," as CBS' Roth put it; that Israel's settlements on occupied Palestinian territory would continue to expand on their current property but would not expropriate new land; and that Palestine would be obliged to recognize Israel as "the Jewish state." As such, Netanyahu was presumably disowning Israel's current minority of Arab citizens, although Glor did not ask him about that.
CBS' Glor also asked Netanyahu whether he agreed with the protestors on the streets of Teheran that Iran's presidential election had been fixed. Netanyahu thought the question irrelevant: "It is a totalitarian state that perhaps has elections on occasion but we know the true nature of the Iranian regime."
THE 16-HOUR WORK DAY Even as the National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation into February's crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Buffalo, the Federal Aviation Administration tightened safety regulations for regional airlines such as Colgan Air, which operated the fatal flight. New rules are in place for the hiring, training and mentoring of pilots. "That still leaves out a critical safety issue," declared ABC's Lisa Stark. "Fatigue."
CBS' Nancy Cordes reported that the NTSB had been warning about the problems facing regional pilots "long before this Colgan Air crash." ABC's Stark took A Closer Look and disagreed. She put it this way: "Even the government's top aviation officials admitted that the Colgan Air accident is a wake-up call." NBC's Tom Costello sort-of sided with Stark's interpretation: "What is unusual is that the FAA is not waiting for the NTSB's final report on the Buffalo crash."
All three reporters focused on fatigue. Airlines can schedule pilots to be on duty for up to 16 hours each day. CBS' Cordes reported that the pilots' union wants the maximum to be cut to 12. "Due in part to pressure from airlines the rules have gone unaltered since the 1940s."
HEALTHCARE WILL TURN US ALL INTO GENERAL MOTORS All three White House correspondents covered Barack Obama's address to the American Medical Association. ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Chuck Todd both used the President's argument that healthcare poses a national fiscal emergency: "If we do not fix our healthcare system, America may go the way of General Motors--paying more, getting less, going broke." ABC's Tapper cited an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office that providing coverage to only 16m of the nation's uninsured would cost $1tr over a decade. ABC's substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos did the math and calculated that each would cost $62,500--which sounds a lot as a lump sum. If he had made it $521 per person per month it would have sounded less outrageous. CBS' Chip Reid, too, quoted the $1tr-per-decade estimate: "Critics say that is about half the real cost."
NBC's Todd acknowledged that healthcare reform is a "complicated issue," ticking off such problems as the lack of preventive care, an excess of unnecessary procedures, mangled performance incentives and a lack of electronic recordkeeping. Todd and his colleagues all agreed that the prospect of offering non-profit federal coverage to compete with for-profit insurance was a key controversy. CBS' Reid suggested that it could be "a step towards socialized medicine" or, as NBC's Todd put it, "not a first step toward a full-fledged government takeover of healthcare." ABC's Tapper wondered whether the public plan might "drive private insurers out of business."
ABC's Stephanopoulos inquired of Timothy Johnson (at the tail of the Tapper videostream), his network's in-house physician, what doctors have against socialized medicine. "The biggest concern, quite frankly, is economic. Medicare, which is a public option plan for the elderly, pays about 20% less to the doctors than private plans do."
NO HARM…NO FOUL…NO STORY All three newscasts filed a healthcare feature after covering the President's AMA speech. CBS was inspired by the health policy wonks at the White House to send Don Teague to follow-up on an article in The New Yorker about McAllen, the city on the Tex-Mex border. McAllen's healthcare costs are twice the national average. "Doctors say the criticism is grossly unfair," Teague found, as they denied running up costs by ordering unnecessary treatments. The Rio Grande city is "the poorest metro area in the nation with the lowest number of doctors per capita. It also has one of the unhealthiest populations with high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease."
ABC's John McKenzie told us about red yeast rice, the Chinese food coloring that gives Peking duck its "signature red glow." Ground up and taken as a nutritional supplement the red rice can reduce harmful levels of cholesterol as efficiently as a prescription statin such as Zocor or Lipitor, without the risk of muscular side effects.
Ron Mott's offered an emotionally manipulative effort for NBC's In Depth. He started with the legitimate story of the investigation by the Veterans Administration into flawed disinfection of diagnostic equipment at its hospitals. The VA found facilities in Miami, Georgia and Tennessee that were using unsanitary procedures. It tested 8,000 veterans and found 53 positive screens for hepatitis and HIV, patients who might have been infected by tainted tests. So what was wrong with Mott's report? He illustrated it with the case of Vietnam veteran Michael Priest, who tested HIV+ after a colonoscopy. The problem was that a second blood test showed no infection; it had been a false positive. No harm. No foul. No story.
SCHOOL FOR SINGERS Music education may face budget cuts at the public schools but it has not lacked airtime this spring. NBC's Ron Mott introduced us to the marching band at New Orleans' Roots of Music middle school in April. CBS' Steve Hartman brought us 70-year-old Andy Mackie, a Pied Piper who hands out harmonicas and strumsticks to the schoolchildren of Washington State. NBC's Chris Jansing told us about highschoolers in Phoenix who teach gradeschoolers to play an instrument in the Sounds of the Community program. Now ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi has uncovered a YouTube video of the fifth grade chorus at New York City's PS22 singing Eye of the Tiger.
HAS WILLIAMS EVER BEEN TO SCOTLAND IN OCTOBER? "Like Scotland in October!" That was the exaggerated complaint from the eastern seaboard by NBC anchor Brian Williams as he introduced Anne Thompson's report about the dismal early summer weather. Thompson told us that Chicago has been "soggy, chilly" and showed us the crowd at a so-called summer festival in Milwaukee "huddled under coats clutching hot cups of coffee." She contacted the Climate Prediction Center at NOAA, which assured her that the jetstream will shift its flow sooner or later: "Hang in there. Summer--and its warmth--is on the horizon."
