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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 02, 2010
NBC anchor Brian Williams filed from the Louisiana coast for a second day as the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster continued relentlessly to dominate the news agenda. It has now been Story of the Day for the last 17 weekdays, every night since May 11th. ABC led with the looming threat to the tourist beaches of the Florida Panhandle. CBS took us ten miles off the Louisiana shore to find floating globs of crude. NBC started with the effort to saw through a broken pipe to create a neat enough aperture to fit a cap to siphon the oil off to the surface.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 02, 2010: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
GIANT ROBOTIC DIAMOND-STUDDED SAW GETS STUCK NBC anchor Brian Williams filed from the Louisiana coast for a second day as the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster continued relentlessly to dominate the news agenda. It has now been Story of the Day for the last 17 weekdays, every night since May 11th. ABC led with the looming threat to the tourist beaches of the Florida Panhandle. CBS took us ten miles off the Louisiana shore to find floating globs of crude. NBC started with the effort to saw through a broken pipe to create a neat enough aperture to fit a cap to siphon the oil off to the surface.
NBC's Anne Thompson was clear about the confusion on the seabed a mile beneath the surface. "There are conflicting reports tonight," she told us, about BP's so-called Cut & Cap procedure. Her anchor Brian Williams joked about "almost cartoonish easy-to-remember names." The difficulty of the procedure belied the simplicity of the nomenclature. ABC's Matt Gutman called it "a day of deepwater setbacks." A giant robotic diamond-studded saw that is supposed to create a smooth surface in the 21-inch diameter pipeline out of which the crude oil is gushing has jammed. Gutman offered a show-&-tell, standing next to one of the 8,000lb, $6m robot submarines. "My goodness. They are so much bigger than I imagined," exclaimed his anchor Diane Sawyer.
RAISING A STINK Reporters fanned out all over the coastal ecosystem and brought back uniformly bad news. ABC's Ryan Owens traveled to the white sands of the Florida Panhandle where the local tourism industry is using BP's money to run an advertising campaign to persuade tourists not to stay away. The Gulf Coast is Open for Business & for Fun. Owens demonstrated that even clear-looking water can still stink from the petroleum sheen. NBC's Ron Mott gave Pensacola a day or two before it starts to be slimed.
NBC anchor Brian Williams took a boat into the coastal marshes to check out a rookery for roseate spoonbills: "The edge of the vegetation at the water line is already dead," he showed us. "It has gone gray. It was hit by oil nine days ago." And out in the Gulf itself, ten miles off shore, CBS' Mark Strassmann was astonished at the volume of crude: "This is so heavy I can barely lift it…That was a solid sheet of oil the consistency of cake mix."
Back on shore CBS' Strassmann told us "the overwhelming impression was the smell. I mean, I have a fairly strong stomach. I felt queasy for 45 minutes after we left the water." NBC turned to Nancy Snyderman, its in-house physician, who offered this scary scenario: "Crude oil can affect every organ in the body. When it comes in close contact with the skin, it can cause burns or blistering. Within seconds of being inhaled, it hits the brain, causing dizziness and headaches. In the lungs, people can experience shortness of breath and wheezing, which forces the heart to pump harder. From the lungs, it passes into the bloodstream, where it targets the liver and kidneys."
WILLIAMS’ SUPERTANKERSIZEDFIB FLUB NBC anchor Brian Williams filed a second interview with John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil. You remember the last time Hofmeister appeared on Nightly News eight days ago? Williams posed his question thus: "You are an advocate of something that has worked in the Arabian Gulf and that is surrounding it with supertanker ships." Hofmeister replied: "You could take these supertankers in formation; take water and oil together off the surface, 1m barrels per copy; go unload it in tanks; separate the oil and the water; discharge the water back into the sea. I think we should be seriously considering some kind of a tank formation with three, four, five supertankers. Get this oil off the surface so it does not wash up into the wetlands."
This is how Williams remembers that exchange: "When you were last on air with us I asked you about the idea that some have proffered about surrounding it with supertankers. You said it would not work with this kind of spill."
I must say, that was the easiest Fact Check I have ever done. FALSE!
UPDATE: Williams is on the record at TVNewser admitting that he made an honest mistake. He has apologized to Hofmeister, accounting for the error because he was away from the studio, anchoring from the field and interviewing by remote. So let's call it a FLUB not a FIB.
BOYCOTT BP How is BP responding to this calamity? ABC has assigned 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo as its corporate watchdog. He checked on whether the firm is providing enough containment booms and hiring enough local fishermen as oil skimmers. CBS' Kelly Cobiella updated us on BP's vetting of the 10,000-or-so ideas for containment and clean-up submitted to BP's suggestion box. Engineers are currently testing the feasibility of 250 of them. "Remember those booms made of hair?" Cobiella reminded us. "Well, they do soak up the oil but, BP says, they also sink."
CBS' Ben Tracy alerted us to expect a public relations blitz from the oil conglomerate. He quoted BP's promise in a newspaper advertising campaign: "We will continue working for as long as it takes and our efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers." He warned us that TV ads are next. Meanwhile a boycott of BP gasoline filling stations is being organized on a Facebook page with 300K followers. There are almost 12,000 stations nationwide, Tracy told us, "but BP actually owns a small fraction of them; most are owned by small business owners who then sell BP gas."
OBAMA IS NO BRANDO At the White House, ABC's Jake Tapper decided to report on the complaints of "some television pundits and newspaper columnists, even some supporters" that Barack Obama "is not showing energy, passion or connection" in response to the oily threat to the Gulf Coast. The President's aides, Tapper told us, "scoff at what they see as noise from the chattering class." Here is their defense of their boss: "If the President thought that yelling at the top of his lungs would solve this crisis, he would stand on top of the White House and do that but he believes the crisis will be solved by plugging the hole and responding to the damage done, not by Method Acting."
PREMONITIONS OF DISASTER NBC claimed an Exclusive for Lisa Myers' sitdown with Shelley Anderson, the widow of a 35-year-old manager on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig. She recounted how her husband Jason had premonitions of disaster--"getting things in order in case something happened"--in his final shore leave before the rig exploded, including drawing up his will. She recalled her husband's telephone message from the rig: "Something is going on but I cannot talk about it right now. The walls are too thin. I will tell you about it when I get home." He never did nor did ten of his crewmates.
NOT THE LOVE BOAT That blast of publicity about the plight of the blockaded Gaza Strip did not last long. The self-styled Freedom Flotilla from Turkey purchased an unaccustomed focus on Israel's policy towards Gaza with the lives of nine activists, shot by IDF commandos before dawn on Monday. All three newscasts covered the bid to bust the blockade on Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday, Gaza had already been dropped from ABC's agenda. CBS had London-based Richard Roth quote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the cruise liner Marmara: "It was not a Love Boat. It was a hate boat." NBC treated the story most seriously, sending Andrea Mitchell to Tel Aviv.
Mitchell found Netanyahu "defiant about the commando raid, saying Israel has to defend itself from weapons smuggled into Gaza but he offered no proof that there were weapons on board and he claimed there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." Mitchell conceded that a Gaza family, made homeless by the Israeli invasion 18 months ago, does have "cooking oil and a small bag of vegetables." Nevertheless, the entire 1.5m population is "strangled by poverty, unemployment and hopelessness," she asserted.
CIA’S LICENSE TO KILL FROM 50,000 FEET The Brookings Institution estimates that the Central Intelligence Agency has launched 137 missile attacks from unmanned drones flying high over the Hindu Kush into the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan. Those missiles have probably killed about 30 civilians over the past two years in the process of assassinating 500-or-so al-Qaeda terrorists, CBS' David Martin guessed. "Impressive numbers," he admitted," but there is no way to verify them because no one will officially admit the strikes are taking place." That shroud of secrecy is maintained "because neither the United States nor Pakistan wants to admit that the CIA routinely violates Pakistani sovereignty." It also means, according to a United Nations report, that the drone strikes "amount to a license to kill without being accountable."
HIT INTO THE HAZARD CBS did not send Michelle Miller to Helmand Province to play on the world's most dangerous driving range so she waggled her driver in a fairway in Massachusetts to illustrate her story. Troops in Afghanistan practice their swings over "one of the biggest sand traps in the world…With almost every swing a ball is sacrificed. It is too risky to retrieve them from the hazard of a minefield." Callaway Golf picked up the free publicity for donating balls to the Helmand River range.
NBC's Anne Thompson was clear about the confusion on the seabed a mile beneath the surface. "There are conflicting reports tonight," she told us, about BP's so-called Cut & Cap procedure. Her anchor Brian Williams joked about "almost cartoonish easy-to-remember names." The difficulty of the procedure belied the simplicity of the nomenclature. ABC's Matt Gutman called it "a day of deepwater setbacks." A giant robotic diamond-studded saw that is supposed to create a smooth surface in the 21-inch diameter pipeline out of which the crude oil is gushing has jammed. Gutman offered a show-&-tell, standing next to one of the 8,000lb, $6m robot submarines. "My goodness. They are so much bigger than I imagined," exclaimed his anchor Diane Sawyer.
RAISING A STINK Reporters fanned out all over the coastal ecosystem and brought back uniformly bad news. ABC's Ryan Owens traveled to the white sands of the Florida Panhandle where the local tourism industry is using BP's money to run an advertising campaign to persuade tourists not to stay away. The Gulf Coast is Open for Business & for Fun. Owens demonstrated that even clear-looking water can still stink from the petroleum sheen. NBC's Ron Mott gave Pensacola a day or two before it starts to be slimed.
NBC anchor Brian Williams took a boat into the coastal marshes to check out a rookery for roseate spoonbills: "The edge of the vegetation at the water line is already dead," he showed us. "It has gone gray. It was hit by oil nine days ago." And out in the Gulf itself, ten miles off shore, CBS' Mark Strassmann was astonished at the volume of crude: "This is so heavy I can barely lift it…That was a solid sheet of oil the consistency of cake mix."
Back on shore CBS' Strassmann told us "the overwhelming impression was the smell. I mean, I have a fairly strong stomach. I felt queasy for 45 minutes after we left the water." NBC turned to Nancy Snyderman, its in-house physician, who offered this scary scenario: "Crude oil can affect every organ in the body. When it comes in close contact with the skin, it can cause burns or blistering. Within seconds of being inhaled, it hits the brain, causing dizziness and headaches. In the lungs, people can experience shortness of breath and wheezing, which forces the heart to pump harder. From the lungs, it passes into the bloodstream, where it targets the liver and kidneys."
WILLIAMS’ SUPERTANKERSIZED
This is how Williams remembers that exchange: "When you were last on air with us I asked you about the idea that some have proffered about surrounding it with supertankers. You said it would not work with this kind of spill."
I must say, that was the easiest Fact Check I have ever done. FALSE!
UPDATE: Williams is on the record at TVNewser admitting that he made an honest mistake. He has apologized to Hofmeister, accounting for the error because he was away from the studio, anchoring from the field and interviewing by remote. So let's call it a FLUB not a FIB.
BOYCOTT BP How is BP responding to this calamity? ABC has assigned 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo as its corporate watchdog. He checked on whether the firm is providing enough containment booms and hiring enough local fishermen as oil skimmers. CBS' Kelly Cobiella updated us on BP's vetting of the 10,000-or-so ideas for containment and clean-up submitted to BP's suggestion box. Engineers are currently testing the feasibility of 250 of them. "Remember those booms made of hair?" Cobiella reminded us. "Well, they do soak up the oil but, BP says, they also sink."
CBS' Ben Tracy alerted us to expect a public relations blitz from the oil conglomerate. He quoted BP's promise in a newspaper advertising campaign: "We will continue working for as long as it takes and our efforts will not come at any cost to taxpayers." He warned us that TV ads are next. Meanwhile a boycott of BP gasoline filling stations is being organized on a Facebook page with 300K followers. There are almost 12,000 stations nationwide, Tracy told us, "but BP actually owns a small fraction of them; most are owned by small business owners who then sell BP gas."
OBAMA IS NO BRANDO At the White House, ABC's Jake Tapper decided to report on the complaints of "some television pundits and newspaper columnists, even some supporters" that Barack Obama "is not showing energy, passion or connection" in response to the oily threat to the Gulf Coast. The President's aides, Tapper told us, "scoff at what they see as noise from the chattering class." Here is their defense of their boss: "If the President thought that yelling at the top of his lungs would solve this crisis, he would stand on top of the White House and do that but he believes the crisis will be solved by plugging the hole and responding to the damage done, not by Method Acting."
PREMONITIONS OF DISASTER NBC claimed an Exclusive for Lisa Myers' sitdown with Shelley Anderson, the widow of a 35-year-old manager on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig. She recounted how her husband Jason had premonitions of disaster--"getting things in order in case something happened"--in his final shore leave before the rig exploded, including drawing up his will. She recalled her husband's telephone message from the rig: "Something is going on but I cannot talk about it right now. The walls are too thin. I will tell you about it when I get home." He never did nor did ten of his crewmates.
NOT THE LOVE BOAT That blast of publicity about the plight of the blockaded Gaza Strip did not last long. The self-styled Freedom Flotilla from Turkey purchased an unaccustomed focus on Israel's policy towards Gaza with the lives of nine activists, shot by IDF commandos before dawn on Monday. All three newscasts covered the bid to bust the blockade on Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday, Gaza had already been dropped from ABC's agenda. CBS had London-based Richard Roth quote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the cruise liner Marmara: "It was not a Love Boat. It was a hate boat." NBC treated the story most seriously, sending Andrea Mitchell to Tel Aviv.
Mitchell found Netanyahu "defiant about the commando raid, saying Israel has to defend itself from weapons smuggled into Gaza but he offered no proof that there were weapons on board and he claimed there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza." Mitchell conceded that a Gaza family, made homeless by the Israeli invasion 18 months ago, does have "cooking oil and a small bag of vegetables." Nevertheless, the entire 1.5m population is "strangled by poverty, unemployment and hopelessness," she asserted.
CIA’S LICENSE TO KILL FROM 50,000 FEET The Brookings Institution estimates that the Central Intelligence Agency has launched 137 missile attacks from unmanned drones flying high over the Hindu Kush into the so-called tribal areas of Pakistan. Those missiles have probably killed about 30 civilians over the past two years in the process of assassinating 500-or-so al-Qaeda terrorists, CBS' David Martin guessed. "Impressive numbers," he admitted," but there is no way to verify them because no one will officially admit the strikes are taking place." That shroud of secrecy is maintained "because neither the United States nor Pakistan wants to admit that the CIA routinely violates Pakistani sovereignty." It also means, according to a United Nations report, that the drone strikes "amount to a license to kill without being accountable."
HIT INTO THE HAZARD CBS did not send Michelle Miller to Helmand Province to play on the world's most dangerous driving range so she waggled her driver in a fairway in Massachusetts to illustrate her story. Troops in Afghanistan practice their swings over "one of the biggest sand traps in the world…With almost every swing a ball is sacrificed. It is too risky to retrieve them from the hazard of a minefield." Callaway Golf picked up the free publicity for donating balls to the Helmand River range.
