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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 11, 2010
The looming rescue of the 33 trapped miners of Copiapo in Chile was the unanimous choice for Story of the Day. All three networks kicked off their newscasts from Chile, where the cramped capsule that will lift each miner 2,000 feet to the surface went through its final tests. Each individual journey is expected to take 20 minutes, with the rescues scheduled to start on Wednesday. Expect the countdown, the rescues and the celebrations to hog headlines all week long. On Columbus Day, Harry Smith substituted as anchor at CBS. The quasi-holiday domestically saw unusual interest in foreign news--not just Chile, but Afghanistan, North Korea, Sudan and Indonesia.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 11, 2010: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
THE 33 ACES IN THE HOLE The looming rescue of the 33 trapped miners of Copiapo in Chile was the unanimous choice for Story of the Day. All three networks kicked off their newscasts from Chile, where the cramped capsule that will lift each miner 2,000 feet to the surface went through its final tests. Each individual journey is expected to take 20 minutes, with the rescues scheduled to start on Wednesday. Expect the countdown, the rescues and the celebrations to hog headlines all week long. On Columbus Day, Harry Smith substituted as anchor at CBS. The quasi-holiday domestically saw unusual interest in foreign news--not just Chile, but Afghanistan, North Korea, Sudan and Indonesia.
ABC's Jeffrey Kofman and CBS' Seth Doane, with six reports each, have become regulars on the copper mine story since the cave-in happened ten weeks ago. NBC has rotated its correspondents. At the moment, Kerry Sanders is playing the Kirk Douglas role.
AFGHANISTAN IS NOT FEMALE FRIENDLY All three newscasts filed an Afghanistan story, although none actually carried an Afghanistan dateline. On ABC, anchor Diane Sawyer publicized the work of the Grossman Burn Foundation in California, where a 12-year-old child bride awaits free plastic surgery to restore her mutilated nose and ears. This was Sawyer's third report on Bebe (they met in March and the girl traveled to California in August). The new news is that Bebe now glues a Hollywood special effects prosthetic nose on her face each morning.
Bebe "became an emblem of brutality," Sawyer reminded us, when TIME put her picture on the cover to warn us what could happen to the women and girls of Afghanistan if the United States ended its war on behalf of Hamid Karzai's government. CBS anchor Katie Couric made a similar argument from a Kabul women's shelter six weeks ago. The flaw in that logic is that Bebe was not abused when the Taliban was in power but under the current US-supported government. Furthermore, Sawyer told us, Bebe is a Farsi speaker--so her torturing in-laws cannot have been Pashtun Taliban.
The other woman to meet a horrible fate in Afghanistan was Linda Norgrove, a 36-year-old British aid worker. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and NBC's Michelle Kosinski both reported on Norgrove's fate from London. She had been kidnapped two weeks ago in Kunar Province and American special forces tried to rescue her last weekend. She was killed, apparently by a hand grenade thrown by the commandos during their nighttime raid. All three newscasts (NBC's Tom Aspell and ABC's Nick Schifrin in Afghanistan; CBS' Jim Axelrod narrating from New York) covered the murder of ten Christian aid workers in Badakhshan last August.
By the way, this was Kosinski's first Nightly News report from London since she was moved from NBC's Miami bureau. Chris Ariens at TVNewser reports that Kosinski will be replaced by Lilia Luciano from TeleFutura. A review of Kosinski's playlist over the past four years reveals how NBC uses its Miami bureau not only for its domestic coverage along the Gulf Coast but also as a base for its foreign coverage of the Americas--stories such as the Haiti earthquake, the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba, the H1N1 swine 'flu outbreak in Mexico and hurricane season in the Caribbean. So in a way, Kosinski has not switched from a domestic beat to a foreign one, but from Latin to Euro.
DEITY IN TRAINING ABC and CBS both responded to Pyongyang's invitation for foreign correspondents to cover a massive military parade to introduce the next leader to the population, Kim Jong Il's 22-year-old son Kim Jong Un. "I have been to this square several times before but never have journalists ever been able to stand so close," remarked ABC's Bob Woodruff in his Reporting special. CBS' Jim Axelrod estimated that 16,000 troops marched past the reviewing stand. Check out Un's giant grandfather, Kim Il Sung, hovering over a wedding party. Axelrod quoted Korea-watcher Wendy Sherman: "To keep this dynasty going, they need to really make Kim Jong Un into another almost cult-like deity because North Korea is more like a cult than it is a country."
GEORGE CLOONEY’S VISIONS OF GENOCIDE NBC's foreign reporting sent Today newscaster Ann Curry to Abyei in southern Sudan. After 20 years of civil war, a referendum is scheduled for January in which the majority-black south is expected to vote for partition from the majority-Arab north. Abyei is such an unusual dateline for an American nightly newscast that you may wonder how Curry managed to persuade NBC News to finance the trip. The answer is celebrity. Curry was traveling with movie star George Clooney, who predicts that the north will go to war rather than permit secession. Clooney warned of 200,000 deaths within the next 100 days.
How rare is a Sudan dateline? There have only been five other reports on all three newscasts combined (all on Darfur) in the past four years. Curry's package was the first since the summer of 2008.
UPDATE: Norman Charles at Nightly Daily sees a recurrent Clooney as Exhibit A in NBC's celebrity trend: "It's becoming more and more difficult to tell Nightly News apart from the shows that follow it--Extra and Access Hollywood."
STUCK IN THE MIDTERM FORMULA In Tyndall Report's survey of Campaign 2010 coverage last month, I pointed to the difficulty that the nightly newscasts have face in trying to turn a series of local and state contests into a national story. I isolated two apparent solutions: first, to turn the election into a referendum on Barack Obama; second, to focus on the idiosyncratic, even downright flakey, policy proposals of Tea Party insurgents running on the Republican line.
Here I a trio of perfect exhibits. CBS and ABC both jumped on a gay-bashing libel by Carl Paladino, the Tea Party's candidate for Governor of New York. Paladino accused homosexuals of brainwashing children. In particular, he objected to Gay Pride marchers who "wear little Speedos" and "grind at each other." ABC's Linsey Davis called the remarks "especially insensitive." CBS' Byron Pitts did not characterize Paladino's words himself, one way or the other himself. "Those attitudes kill," was how he quoted Jarrett Barrios of GLAAD. NBC turned to Chuck Todd for an explanation of the uphill battle Democrats are facing so he personalized it around the figure of Barack Obama, tracing his campaign stops in Philadelphia and Miami. "The White House is still searching for a message that is going to resonate, now with the President focusing all of his efforts on trying to get Democratic voters to the polls."
On the other hand, ABC's man on the White House beat was not so predictable. Jake Tapper looked into the funding of pro-Republican campaign ads, reporting that the Chamber of Commerce alone is outspending the Democratic National Committee. The Chamber as a whole accepts funds from foreign companies and foreign-based affiliates, Tapper noted. "Is there any proof that foreign money is funding political ads or activities? No." And NBC's Ron Mott in Florida managed a report on a likely Tea Party winner, Marco Rubio, without choosing the angle of outrageous soundbites. He quoted Rubio thus: "If you think the stimulus is a good idea, if you think Obamacare is a good idea, if you think this runaway debt is a good idea, then I am probably not your candidate." That pitch should win Rubio 40% of the vote, Mott predicted, and with the remaining 60% divided between Democrat Kendrick Meek and independent Charlie Crist, 40% should be a winning total.
GEE WHIZ All three newscasts gazed into the hi-tech future. NBC's George Lewis offered free publicity to Google's fleet of seven robotically controled driverless cars. He reported that one has even driven on public highways, 350 miles down the coast from Silicon Valley to Santa Monica. CBS' John Blackstone showed us that same Stanford-based experiment in April.
CBS and ABC looked at biotech instead as the Shepherd Center in Atlanta began clinical trials of Geron Corporation's spinal cord experiment. The plan is to inject embryonic stem cells into the spines of ten newly-paralyzed patients over the next two years. The cells worked in Geron's laboratories, CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook told us: "Paralyzed rats stand up and walk." Cautioned ABC's David Wright: "The company is playing down expectations for the human trial."
HARTMAN’S FLACCID EFFORT IN BALI When Steve Hartman launched his Everybody in the World has a Story project for CBS he made the debatable claim that there is no member of the human race, anywhere on the globe, who is not newsworthy. After a recent encounter with a fabulist in the Australian Outback--yes, he did have a story; no, it was not true--Hartman has moderated his claim. Now the limit of his ambition is to prove this theory: "If you ask people about the things that matter most in their lives you will discover we really are all just the same." Hartman's latest tale in Bali of "the honeymoon and the headache" was supposed to illustrate his point.
He found a husband who is hornier than his wife--not very impressive.
Hartman's efforts usually have more oomph. Try the Handbag Millionairess of Chengdu…or the Mud Hut Labor Activist of Oman…or the Cold War Muscle Man of Latvia…or the Blind Patriarch of Rewari in northern India.
ABC's Jeffrey Kofman and CBS' Seth Doane, with six reports each, have become regulars on the copper mine story since the cave-in happened ten weeks ago. NBC has rotated its correspondents. At the moment, Kerry Sanders is playing the Kirk Douglas role.
AFGHANISTAN IS NOT FEMALE FRIENDLY All three newscasts filed an Afghanistan story, although none actually carried an Afghanistan dateline. On ABC, anchor Diane Sawyer publicized the work of the Grossman Burn Foundation in California, where a 12-year-old child bride awaits free plastic surgery to restore her mutilated nose and ears. This was Sawyer's third report on Bebe (they met in March and the girl traveled to California in August). The new news is that Bebe now glues a Hollywood special effects prosthetic nose on her face each morning.
Bebe "became an emblem of brutality," Sawyer reminded us, when TIME put her picture on the cover to warn us what could happen to the women and girls of Afghanistan if the United States ended its war on behalf of Hamid Karzai's government. CBS anchor Katie Couric made a similar argument from a Kabul women's shelter six weeks ago. The flaw in that logic is that Bebe was not abused when the Taliban was in power but under the current US-supported government. Furthermore, Sawyer told us, Bebe is a Farsi speaker--so her torturing in-laws cannot have been Pashtun Taliban.
The other woman to meet a horrible fate in Afghanistan was Linda Norgrove, a 36-year-old British aid worker. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer and NBC's Michelle Kosinski both reported on Norgrove's fate from London. She had been kidnapped two weeks ago in Kunar Province and American special forces tried to rescue her last weekend. She was killed, apparently by a hand grenade thrown by the commandos during their nighttime raid. All three newscasts (NBC's Tom Aspell and ABC's Nick Schifrin in Afghanistan; CBS' Jim Axelrod narrating from New York) covered the murder of ten Christian aid workers in Badakhshan last August.
By the way, this was Kosinski's first Nightly News report from London since she was moved from NBC's Miami bureau. Chris Ariens at TVNewser reports that Kosinski will be replaced by Lilia Luciano from TeleFutura. A review of Kosinski's playlist over the past four years reveals how NBC uses its Miami bureau not only for its domestic coverage along the Gulf Coast but also as a base for its foreign coverage of the Americas--stories such as the Haiti earthquake, the Natalee Holloway case in Aruba, the H1N1 swine 'flu outbreak in Mexico and hurricane season in the Caribbean. So in a way, Kosinski has not switched from a domestic beat to a foreign one, but from Latin to Euro.
DEITY IN TRAINING ABC and CBS both responded to Pyongyang's invitation for foreign correspondents to cover a massive military parade to introduce the next leader to the population, Kim Jong Il's 22-year-old son Kim Jong Un. "I have been to this square several times before but never have journalists ever been able to stand so close," remarked ABC's Bob Woodruff in his Reporting special. CBS' Jim Axelrod estimated that 16,000 troops marched past the reviewing stand. Check out Un's giant grandfather, Kim Il Sung, hovering over a wedding party. Axelrod quoted Korea-watcher Wendy Sherman: "To keep this dynasty going, they need to really make Kim Jong Un into another almost cult-like deity because North Korea is more like a cult than it is a country."
GEORGE CLOONEY’S VISIONS OF GENOCIDE NBC's foreign reporting sent Today newscaster Ann Curry to Abyei in southern Sudan. After 20 years of civil war, a referendum is scheduled for January in which the majority-black south is expected to vote for partition from the majority-Arab north. Abyei is such an unusual dateline for an American nightly newscast that you may wonder how Curry managed to persuade NBC News to finance the trip. The answer is celebrity. Curry was traveling with movie star George Clooney, who predicts that the north will go to war rather than permit secession. Clooney warned of 200,000 deaths within the next 100 days.
How rare is a Sudan dateline? There have only been five other reports on all three newscasts combined (all on Darfur) in the past four years. Curry's package was the first since the summer of 2008.
UPDATE: Norman Charles at Nightly Daily sees a recurrent Clooney as Exhibit A in NBC's celebrity trend: "It's becoming more and more difficult to tell Nightly News apart from the shows that follow it--Extra and Access Hollywood."
STUCK IN THE MIDTERM FORMULA In Tyndall Report's survey of Campaign 2010 coverage last month, I pointed to the difficulty that the nightly newscasts have face in trying to turn a series of local and state contests into a national story. I isolated two apparent solutions: first, to turn the election into a referendum on Barack Obama; second, to focus on the idiosyncratic, even downright flakey, policy proposals of Tea Party insurgents running on the Republican line.
Here I a trio of perfect exhibits. CBS and ABC both jumped on a gay-bashing libel by Carl Paladino, the Tea Party's candidate for Governor of New York. Paladino accused homosexuals of brainwashing children. In particular, he objected to Gay Pride marchers who "wear little Speedos" and "grind at each other." ABC's Linsey Davis called the remarks "especially insensitive." CBS' Byron Pitts did not characterize Paladino's words himself, one way or the other himself. "Those attitudes kill," was how he quoted Jarrett Barrios of GLAAD. NBC turned to Chuck Todd for an explanation of the uphill battle Democrats are facing so he personalized it around the figure of Barack Obama, tracing his campaign stops in Philadelphia and Miami. "The White House is still searching for a message that is going to resonate, now with the President focusing all of his efforts on trying to get Democratic voters to the polls."
On the other hand, ABC's man on the White House beat was not so predictable. Jake Tapper looked into the funding of pro-Republican campaign ads, reporting that the Chamber of Commerce alone is outspending the Democratic National Committee. The Chamber as a whole accepts funds from foreign companies and foreign-based affiliates, Tapper noted. "Is there any proof that foreign money is funding political ads or activities? No." And NBC's Ron Mott in Florida managed a report on a likely Tea Party winner, Marco Rubio, without choosing the angle of outrageous soundbites. He quoted Rubio thus: "If you think the stimulus is a good idea, if you think Obamacare is a good idea, if you think this runaway debt is a good idea, then I am probably not your candidate." That pitch should win Rubio 40% of the vote, Mott predicted, and with the remaining 60% divided between Democrat Kendrick Meek and independent Charlie Crist, 40% should be a winning total.
GEE WHIZ All three newscasts gazed into the hi-tech future. NBC's George Lewis offered free publicity to Google's fleet of seven robotically controled driverless cars. He reported that one has even driven on public highways, 350 miles down the coast from Silicon Valley to Santa Monica. CBS' John Blackstone showed us that same Stanford-based experiment in April.
CBS and ABC looked at biotech instead as the Shepherd Center in Atlanta began clinical trials of Geron Corporation's spinal cord experiment. The plan is to inject embryonic stem cells into the spines of ten newly-paralyzed patients over the next two years. The cells worked in Geron's laboratories, CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook told us: "Paralyzed rats stand up and walk." Cautioned ABC's David Wright: "The company is playing down expectations for the human trial."
HARTMAN’S FLACCID EFFORT IN BALI When Steve Hartman launched his Everybody in the World has a Story project for CBS he made the debatable claim that there is no member of the human race, anywhere on the globe, who is not newsworthy. After a recent encounter with a fabulist in the Australian Outback--yes, he did have a story; no, it was not true--Hartman has moderated his claim. Now the limit of his ambition is to prove this theory: "If you ask people about the things that matter most in their lives you will discover we really are all just the same." Hartman's latest tale in Bali of "the honeymoon and the headache" was supposed to illustrate his point.
He found a husband who is hornier than his wife--not very impressive.
Hartman's efforts usually have more oomph. Try the Handbag Millionairess of Chengdu…or the Mud Hut Labor Activist of Oman…or the Cold War Muscle Man of Latvia…or the Blind Patriarch of Rewari in northern India.
