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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 12, 2010
The subterranean drama of the last 24 hours beneath Chile's Atacama Desert is grabbing global headlines. Tuesday night, all three network nightly newscasts led with the countdown to the beginning of the rescue of the 33 miners trapped for ten weeks half a mile below ground. They each followed up with a background feature. Altogether the prospect of a happy ending accounted for 36% of the three-network newshole (20 mins out of 57) and not a single live miner had yet surfaced. By the end of the week the 33 live Chileans are bound to attract more coverage than was devoted to the 29 dead West Virginians (79 mins) in April's Big Branch explosion.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 12, 2010: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
PREPARING FOR A LIVE FEED OF CHILEAN LIVES SAVED The subterranean drama of the last 24 hours beneath Chile's Atacama Desert is grabbing global headlines. Tuesday night, all three network nightly newscasts led with the countdown to the beginning of the rescue of the 33 miners trapped for ten weeks half a mile below ground. They each followed up with a background feature. Altogether the prospect of a happy ending accounted for 36% of the three-network newshole (20 mins out of 57) and not a single live miner had yet surfaced. By the end of the week the 33 live Chileans are bound to attract more coverage than was devoted to the 29 dead West Virginians (79 mins) in April's Big Branch explosion.
The human interest appeal of these trapped miners rescued from a claustrophobic doom is certainly compelling. CBS' Seth Doane visualized a "nail-biting, terrifying, hair-raising" journey to the surface. ABC's Jeffrey Kofman visited families who had imagined "the hardship, the horror of what their husbands, fathers and sons have been going through." NBC's Kerry Sanders told us that this rescue "once seemed impossible."
Human interest aside, the story is also instructive for the confused and disorderly way in which it has been covered.
Video journalism finds itself at a crossroads. Old television forms are still popular even as they are fading. New online video forms supersede the old even as they struggle to build audiences. The coverage of the Chilean mining disaster epitomizes the dislocation of this churning.
Never was a story more suited to a continual live videostream than the stakeout at the top of the rescue shaft. The story consists of its visuals and little besides--the gloomy cavern underground where the trapped men await their rescue; the sunlit surface where bleary-eyed, they emerge from the darkness into the embrace of their loved ones. Yet it would have been perverse for the nightly newscasts, scheduled for a 24-hour news cycle, not to have led off with an update from Chile…perverse, despite the fact that the packages thus filed had no chance of having a useful life of anything close to 24 hours. How could they ignore a story that was on everybody's mind?
The newscasts on Tuesday evening were in effect participating in a charade. Their reporting purported to fulfill the mission of covering the day's headlines even as their content consisted of a minute-by-minute update of an ongoing event that they knew would be streamed live throughout the next 24 hours. We find ourselves in a liminal state, embracing both legacy television news and embryonic online video news, and so there is no clear demarcation about what form of coverage best suits what type of news story. Some three decades ago, the nightly newscasts would have been the go-to source for breaking--not summary--coverage of a story such as the Chilean rescue. It is no longer such a source…but neither has it completely relinquished that role.
So what we find is inefficiency, waste and overkill.
From London, Richard Sambrook, now in public relations but formerly of BBC-TV News, tweets us that his old employer offers "5-star coverage." From The New York Times, Brian Stelter, the onetime CableNewser blogger, offers a survey that mentions not only BBC's live streaming, with its posse of 25 journalists dispatched to the Chilean desert, but also the coverage plans at CNN, MSNBC, Univision and so on. ABC News plans to expand its broadcast coverage to include live reports on Nightline and in primetime on Wednesday. PressThink professor Jay Rosen summed up the entire orgy of coverage with a plaintiff tweet. "Wait: you've got 1300 reporters at the miners rescue AND you're asking, 'Who's gonna pay for the Baghdad bureau, people...' You're sure now?"
Mentioned only in passing was an irony. "The Chilean government has really orchestrated everything, choreographed everything. They do not want any pictures--if any problems should occur--to get out to the world media. So we are seeing a lot of pictures but mostly happy ones," CBS' Doane explained. Indeed this afternoon, I checked out the live online feed of the rescue at CBS and at NBC and at ABC and the images turned out to be identical and simultaneous to those on my cable TV screen from CNN and CNNI and FOX News Channel. All video was courtesy of TVN, Chile's national broadcaster. So a swarm of journalists is over-assigned to saturate a story yet the images consist of a single, government-controled non-exclusive feed.
There is another ridiculous aspect of this phenomenon. As extreme as the coverage has been and as riveting as the human drama, I am sorry to say that this feelgood story is actually no big deal. It attracts headlines because it resonates with our atavistic anxieties about helplessness and our desperate desires for happy endings but the fate of these 33 miners has no global significance. None. Nothing can demonstrate more vividly that timeworn journalistic axiom: what is newsworthy and what is important often do not amount to the same thing.
What lesson should the nightly newscasts draw from this wretched and wasteful display of journalistic overkill?
It is futile for them to try to match the ubiquity and the currency of the 24-hour cable news channels and videostreams online. Instead the 24-hour news cycle can become the nightly newscasts' friend. It offers enough breathing room to provide substance in competition with superficiality. The best use of a newscast's resources is to produce packages that will still be interesting a day later, even a week later--not those that compete with the breathless evanescence of the never ending live stream.
There were hints of such coverage on Tuesday night. ABC's John Quinones explored the group dynamics of the 33 as they organized to survive their ordeal. NBC's Natalie Morales introduced us to the miners' families in their makeshift camp where the escape shaft was drilled. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook explored the medical and psychological complications that the miners might face upon their release. LaPook was clearly proud of his closing line: "It is one thing to try to handle the sunlight but it is a whole other thing to handle the limelight."
I say that such a balance should be shifted yet further. Make the introductory news story from the site briefer and make the explanatory follow-up feature deeper and more permanent. What is the psychology of claustrophobia? How dangerous was this copper mine compared with other mining conditions around the world? Why is the management of this story so important to the government of Chile? These are the types of longer-lasting angles that should be the beat of nightly newscast reporters covering this story. There is no need for them to compete with the other 1,300 on site for access to those fleeting, breaking moments that are better seen live and online--and whose half-life of interest is measured in minutes, not even hours, let alone days.
UPDATE: Juan Cole at Informed Comment points out that TV news in general has avoided covering the labor angle. He accuses the San Estaban mining company of skimping on safety and the government of Chile of a failure to regulate the mining industry. Commodity prices for copper and gold are booming, yet those good times have not trickled down to this workforce. Cole's comments are certainly accurate, at least so far, as far as the network nightly news is concerned. Shades of their coverage of this spring's West Virginia disaster.
FINDING TIME FOR DRILLING That maxim about what is newsworthy not being coterminous with what is important was demonstrated in spades by the impact the Chilean miners had on the remainder of the newshole. CBS, for example was the only network to allocate time for a package on the federal government's decision to end its moratorium on deepwater exploration for offshore oil, even though the commission investigating BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has yet to make its recommendations. Mark Strassmann told us that 36 rigs can now tool up in the Gulf of Mexico. Before drilling will restart, they will have to adopt new standards for blowout preventers and cement in wells.
POLS WITH GUNS NBC skipped Campaign 2010 to make room for its extra Chile coverage. CBS filed a couple of updates on close Senate races: Dean Reynolds in Wisconsin for the Russ Feingold-Ron Johnson match-up; Nancy Cordes in the coal country of West Virginia, where Democrat Joe Manchin's latest ad shows him literally blasting away at the Democrats' carbon trading legislation with a rifle.
So far, almost all of the coverage of individual contests--as opposed to general campaign trends--has been on statewide races for senator or governor. ABC is the only nightly newscast to file packages on individual Congressional contests. Last week, Jake Tapper took us to South Carolina where Chairman John Spratt of the House Budget Committee faces an advertising onslaught from the American Future Fund and Citizens for a Working America and American Crossroads. Spending by such outside groups is leaning Republican by a five-to-one ratio nationwide, Tapper calculated. Now Jonathan Karl introduces us to his House Race to Watch. Funnily enough, this House race also happens to be a statewide race, on the depopulated plains of South Dakota, where rancher Kristi Noem campaigns on horseback and Democratic incumbent Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin "hunts too."
THE PENTAGON MAY GIVE UP Probably a tight deadline, rather than Chilean miners, should be blamed for the scant coverage of Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell. Judge Virginia Phillips found the rules for military homosexuals unConstitutional and ordered the Pentagon to halt enforcement worldwide. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to the story but they each filed a brief live stand-up rather than a produced package: ABC's Jake Tapper, CBS' Jan Crawford and NBC's Pete Williams. Williams relayed this tidbit from unidentified sources for his colleague Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon: "As a practical matter the military may now simply give up on any further attempts to enforce it."
ISIKOFF IMPLIES THAT TORTURE IS NOT PUNITIVE ENOUGH More military coverage came from NBC's newly arrived investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, filing only his second report for Nightly News (the first, in August, found corruption in Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul). Isikoff marks the tenth anniversary of the dinghybomb attack on USS Cole in Aden Harbor that killed 17 sailorssoldiers. He quoted then-President Bill Clinton issuing a threat to al-Qaeda: "You will not find safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail." Then Isikoff made the odd assertion that Clinton's promise "has gone largely unfulfilled." According to Isikoff, the past decade has seen the United States leave al-Qaeda in peace.
To make his case, Isikoff pointed out that the Justice Department has failed to prosecute anyone for the USS Cole attack. Exactly how has alleged mastermind abdal-Rahim al-Nashiri eluded the law? Because he was "captured by the CIA in 2002, waterboarded and shipped to Guantanamo and has never been prosecuted due to political deadlock over how to try terrorists."
Does Isikoff mean that "justice" has not prevailed because al-Nashiri has not been punished? Torture certainly amounts to punishment in spades. Does he mean that "justice" has not prevailed because al-Nashiri has not received due process? If so, blame the CIA and its Bush Administration taskmasters not al-Qaeda's impunity or Bill Clinton's fecklessness.
Isikoff also dug up a propaganda video via MEMRI.org of alleged dinghybomb plotter Fahd al-Quso bragging that "we destroyed the Cole." No such thing happened. As Isikoff pointed out, the destroyer was repaired and has just completed yet another mission to Yemen and back to Virginia unscathed.
LOSING THEIR HEADS "The search was on then off then on again--amid threats of an ambush from the drug cartel." Thus NBC's Janet Shamlian recounted the search for 30-year-old vacationer David Hartley, who disappeared while jetskiing in the Mexican waters of Lake Falcon along the Texas border. His wife claims he was shot in the head and persuaded Mexican police to mount a search for his body. Rolando Flores, the leader of the search "has now himself been murdered, his severed head delivered to Mexican military."
The human interest appeal of these trapped miners rescued from a claustrophobic doom is certainly compelling. CBS' Seth Doane visualized a "nail-biting, terrifying, hair-raising" journey to the surface. ABC's Jeffrey Kofman visited families who had imagined "the hardship, the horror of what their husbands, fathers and sons have been going through." NBC's Kerry Sanders told us that this rescue "once seemed impossible."
Human interest aside, the story is also instructive for the confused and disorderly way in which it has been covered.
Video journalism finds itself at a crossroads. Old television forms are still popular even as they are fading. New online video forms supersede the old even as they struggle to build audiences. The coverage of the Chilean mining disaster epitomizes the dislocation of this churning.
Never was a story more suited to a continual live videostream than the stakeout at the top of the rescue shaft. The story consists of its visuals and little besides--the gloomy cavern underground where the trapped men await their rescue; the sunlit surface where bleary-eyed, they emerge from the darkness into the embrace of their loved ones. Yet it would have been perverse for the nightly newscasts, scheduled for a 24-hour news cycle, not to have led off with an update from Chile…perverse, despite the fact that the packages thus filed had no chance of having a useful life of anything close to 24 hours. How could they ignore a story that was on everybody's mind?
The newscasts on Tuesday evening were in effect participating in a charade. Their reporting purported to fulfill the mission of covering the day's headlines even as their content consisted of a minute-by-minute update of an ongoing event that they knew would be streamed live throughout the next 24 hours. We find ourselves in a liminal state, embracing both legacy television news and embryonic online video news, and so there is no clear demarcation about what form of coverage best suits what type of news story. Some three decades ago, the nightly newscasts would have been the go-to source for breaking--not summary--coverage of a story such as the Chilean rescue. It is no longer such a source…but neither has it completely relinquished that role.
So what we find is inefficiency, waste and overkill.
From London, Richard Sambrook, now in public relations but formerly of BBC-TV News, tweets us that his old employer offers "5-star coverage." From The New York Times, Brian Stelter, the onetime CableNewser blogger, offers a survey that mentions not only BBC's live streaming, with its posse of 25 journalists dispatched to the Chilean desert, but also the coverage plans at CNN, MSNBC, Univision and so on. ABC News plans to expand its broadcast coverage to include live reports on Nightline and in primetime on Wednesday. PressThink professor Jay Rosen summed up the entire orgy of coverage with a plaintiff tweet. "Wait: you've got 1300 reporters at the miners rescue AND you're asking, 'Who's gonna pay for the Baghdad bureau, people...' You're sure now?"
Mentioned only in passing was an irony. "The Chilean government has really orchestrated everything, choreographed everything. They do not want any pictures--if any problems should occur--to get out to the world media. So we are seeing a lot of pictures but mostly happy ones," CBS' Doane explained. Indeed this afternoon, I checked out the live online feed of the rescue at CBS and at NBC and at ABC and the images turned out to be identical and simultaneous to those on my cable TV screen from CNN and CNNI and FOX News Channel. All video was courtesy of TVN, Chile's national broadcaster. So a swarm of journalists is over-assigned to saturate a story yet the images consist of a single, government-controled non-exclusive feed.
There is another ridiculous aspect of this phenomenon. As extreme as the coverage has been and as riveting as the human drama, I am sorry to say that this feelgood story is actually no big deal. It attracts headlines because it resonates with our atavistic anxieties about helplessness and our desperate desires for happy endings but the fate of these 33 miners has no global significance. None. Nothing can demonstrate more vividly that timeworn journalistic axiom: what is newsworthy and what is important often do not amount to the same thing.
What lesson should the nightly newscasts draw from this wretched and wasteful display of journalistic overkill?
It is futile for them to try to match the ubiquity and the currency of the 24-hour cable news channels and videostreams online. Instead the 24-hour news cycle can become the nightly newscasts' friend. It offers enough breathing room to provide substance in competition with superficiality. The best use of a newscast's resources is to produce packages that will still be interesting a day later, even a week later--not those that compete with the breathless evanescence of the never ending live stream.
There were hints of such coverage on Tuesday night. ABC's John Quinones explored the group dynamics of the 33 as they organized to survive their ordeal. NBC's Natalie Morales introduced us to the miners' families in their makeshift camp where the escape shaft was drilled. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook explored the medical and psychological complications that the miners might face upon their release. LaPook was clearly proud of his closing line: "It is one thing to try to handle the sunlight but it is a whole other thing to handle the limelight."
I say that such a balance should be shifted yet further. Make the introductory news story from the site briefer and make the explanatory follow-up feature deeper and more permanent. What is the psychology of claustrophobia? How dangerous was this copper mine compared with other mining conditions around the world? Why is the management of this story so important to the government of Chile? These are the types of longer-lasting angles that should be the beat of nightly newscast reporters covering this story. There is no need for them to compete with the other 1,300 on site for access to those fleeting, breaking moments that are better seen live and online--and whose half-life of interest is measured in minutes, not even hours, let alone days.
UPDATE: Juan Cole at Informed Comment points out that TV news in general has avoided covering the labor angle. He accuses the San Estaban mining company of skimping on safety and the government of Chile of a failure to regulate the mining industry. Commodity prices for copper and gold are booming, yet those good times have not trickled down to this workforce. Cole's comments are certainly accurate, at least so far, as far as the network nightly news is concerned. Shades of their coverage of this spring's West Virginia disaster.
FINDING TIME FOR DRILLING That maxim about what is newsworthy not being coterminous with what is important was demonstrated in spades by the impact the Chilean miners had on the remainder of the newshole. CBS, for example was the only network to allocate time for a package on the federal government's decision to end its moratorium on deepwater exploration for offshore oil, even though the commission investigating BP's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe has yet to make its recommendations. Mark Strassmann told us that 36 rigs can now tool up in the Gulf of Mexico. Before drilling will restart, they will have to adopt new standards for blowout preventers and cement in wells.
POLS WITH GUNS NBC skipped Campaign 2010 to make room for its extra Chile coverage. CBS filed a couple of updates on close Senate races: Dean Reynolds in Wisconsin for the Russ Feingold-Ron Johnson match-up; Nancy Cordes in the coal country of West Virginia, where Democrat Joe Manchin's latest ad shows him literally blasting away at the Democrats' carbon trading legislation with a rifle.
So far, almost all of the coverage of individual contests--as opposed to general campaign trends--has been on statewide races for senator or governor. ABC is the only nightly newscast to file packages on individual Congressional contests. Last week, Jake Tapper took us to South Carolina where Chairman John Spratt of the House Budget Committee faces an advertising onslaught from the American Future Fund and Citizens for a Working America and American Crossroads. Spending by such outside groups is leaning Republican by a five-to-one ratio nationwide, Tapper calculated. Now Jonathan Karl introduces us to his House Race to Watch. Funnily enough, this House race also happens to be a statewide race, on the depopulated plains of South Dakota, where rancher Kristi Noem campaigns on horseback and Democratic incumbent Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin "hunts too."
THE PENTAGON MAY GIVE UP Probably a tight deadline, rather than Chilean miners, should be blamed for the scant coverage of Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell. Judge Virginia Phillips found the rules for military homosexuals unConstitutional and ordered the Pentagon to halt enforcement worldwide. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to the story but they each filed a brief live stand-up rather than a produced package: ABC's Jake Tapper, CBS' Jan Crawford and NBC's Pete Williams. Williams relayed this tidbit from unidentified sources for his colleague Jim Miklaszewski at the Pentagon: "As a practical matter the military may now simply give up on any further attempts to enforce it."
ISIKOFF IMPLIES THAT TORTURE IS NOT PUNITIVE ENOUGH More military coverage came from NBC's newly arrived investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff, filing only his second report for Nightly News (the first, in August, found corruption in Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul). Isikoff marks the tenth anniversary of the dinghybomb attack on USS Cole in Aden Harbor that killed 17 sailors
To make his case, Isikoff pointed out that the Justice Department has failed to prosecute anyone for the USS Cole attack. Exactly how has alleged mastermind abdal-Rahim al-Nashiri eluded the law? Because he was "captured by the CIA in 2002, waterboarded and shipped to Guantanamo and has never been prosecuted due to political deadlock over how to try terrorists."
Does Isikoff mean that "justice" has not prevailed because al-Nashiri has not been punished? Torture certainly amounts to punishment in spades. Does he mean that "justice" has not prevailed because al-Nashiri has not received due process? If so, blame the CIA and its Bush Administration taskmasters not al-Qaeda's impunity or Bill Clinton's fecklessness.
Isikoff also dug up a propaganda video via MEMRI.org of alleged dinghybomb plotter Fahd al-Quso bragging that "we destroyed the Cole." No such thing happened. As Isikoff pointed out, the destroyer was repaired and has just completed yet another mission to Yemen and back to Virginia unscathed.
LOSING THEIR HEADS "The search was on then off then on again--amid threats of an ambush from the drug cartel." Thus NBC's Janet Shamlian recounted the search for 30-year-old vacationer David Hartley, who disappeared while jetskiing in the Mexican waters of Lake Falcon along the Texas border. His wife claims he was shot in the head and persuaded Mexican police to mount a search for his body. Rolando Flores, the leader of the search "has now himself been murdered, his severed head delivered to Mexican military."
