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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM SEPTEMBER 10, 2010
It did not surface until the week after Labor Day--but finally the network newscasts came up with a silly season news story worthy of the dog days of summer. Meet Terry Jones, preacher at the Dove World Church in Gainesville, with a congregation numbering fewer than 50 souls. It is a news axiom that an overcovered story always climaxes with a self-flagellating think piece about the perils of overcoverage. Thus Pastor Jones' weeklong controversy formally achieved silly season status when it culminated in David Muir's thumbsucker for ABC. "Why have we paid so much attention to this lone pastor in Florida, not just the media--but the White House, Cabinet secretaries and America in general?" In answer he invoked nameless others, as in: "Ignoring the story and the pastor's rhetoric, others argue, would have been impossible, especially when you see how quickly it spread in this Internet age."
TYNDALL PICKS FOR SEPTEMBER 10, 2010: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
WHO IS TO BLAME FOR KORAN BONFIRE MEDIA FRENZY? It did not surface until the week after Labor Day--but finally the network newscasts came up with a silly season news story worthy of the dog days of summer. Meet Terry Jones, preacher at the Dove World Church in Gainesville, with a congregation numbering fewer than 50 souls. It is a news axiom that an overcovered story always climaxes with a self-flagellating think piece about the perils of overcoverage. Thus Pastor Jones' weeklong controversy formally achieved silly season status when it culminated in David Muir's thumbsucker for ABC. "Why have we paid so much attention to this lone pastor in Florida, not just the media--but the White House, Cabinet secretaries and America in general?" In answer he invoked nameless others, as in: "Ignoring the story and the pastor's rhetoric, others argue, would have been impossible, especially when you see how quickly it spread in this Internet age."
Wrong! This media frenzy did not just happen. The network newscasts were not forced to pay so much attention to the story. This was their choice--and this is how they made it.
Jones had devised a never-to-be-executed publicity stunt that nevertheless managed to qualify as the networks' Story of the Week. It was the lead item on CBS on three days; on two days on NBC and ABC. His plan was to desecrate the Holy Koran by building a bonfire of some 200 copies. "We feel what we are doing is we are actually revealing the nature of Islam," the pastor explained to CBS' Kelly Cobiella. Next day, Jones told Cobiella he had never actually read the book he was fixing to burn. "If we do not do it, when do we stop backing down?" he inquired of Terry Moran, anchor of ABC's Nightline, who traveled to Gainesville to preview the book burning.
The bonfire that the preacher claimed to be planning was Story of the Day on Tuesday and Wednesday; and again on Thursday when he announced its cancelation, explaining that his scheme all along had been to persuade the Cordoba Initiative to relocate its planned Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan. NBC's Kerry Sanders asked Jones if he had been "hoodwinked or tricked" when it turned out that the cultural center had no plans to move. "Tricked and lied to," was his response.
Until the Dove World Church came along, it had seemed that the summer's news agenda would turn out to have been bereft of such foolishness. The bedbug infestation (check those thumbnail images) failed to generate anxiety attacks worthy of a shark summer. The intrigue of the Russian spies-next-door did not linger summer-long like the mystery of a missing inside-the-Beltway intern. Salmonella-tainted eggs from Iowa factory farms stirred none of the agita of last year's swine 'flu pandemic. There had been no sudden superstar deaths to rival Michael Jackson's--the summer's celebrity sightings were no more newsworthy than Chelsea Clinton getting married or Dr Laura repeating the n-word ad nauseam on the radio. Even Steven Slater, the flamboyant jetBlue flight attendant, achieved only fleeting fame with his emergency job exit.
According to other news outlets, the incendiary Pastor Jones might have seemed like a continuation of the summer-long drumbeat of coverage of rising sentiment against Islam. Our media-monitoring colleagues at the Project for Excellence in Journalism found an earlier spike of Islam in the headlines during the third week of August, when opposition to the Cordoba Initiative's project--the so-called Ground Zero Mosque--was designated PEJ's Story of the Week. A closer look at PEJ's statistics, however, shows that the attention paid to Islam-bashing was concentrated disproportionately on the opinion outlets of talkradio and cable TV. Neither newspapers nor network television paid the matter much mind.
On the network nightly newscasts during that week in August, the Cordoba Initiative was only the seventh-most heavily covered story. Properly--and much to the disgrace of cable news networks for their failure to come to the same news judgment--the Story of that Week was the monsoon floods in Pakistan, which drove millions of Indus Valley peasants off their land, killing at least 1,500 and leaving survivors at risk of cholera. That was the week that CBS anchor Katie Couric traveled to Afghanistan to join Gen David Petraeus as he inspected troops on the eastern front in Khost (check out Terry McCarthy's Hurt Locker packages, here and here). Also that week, NBC's Richard Engel joined the last elements of the USArmy's combat forces as they motored overnight out of Iraq into Kuwait, in a southbound tribute to his late colleague David Bloom's fatal northwards journey into combat seven years earlier.
So, to contradict David Muir's unnamed "other" sources, it is, too, possible for the network nightly newscasts to downplay their coverage of controversies concerning Islam, even in this Internet age. They had done so successfully just three weeks earlier.
Granted there had been some reckless reporting concerning the Cordoba Initiative that did find itself on the networks' own air. But those sparks did not touch off a full blown summertime frenzy. NBC's Chuck Todd, for example, was wrong when he found "a reversal of the White House position" when President Obama asserted the Constitutional right of the Cordoba Initiative to develop its property while withholding judgment as to whether such a development was wise or not. Earlier the White House had declared that the project was "rightly a matter for New York City and the local community to decide." Later, the President noted that those rights applied "in accordance with local laws and ordinance." No reversal there. Obama made the first half of his statement, about Constitutional rights, one day and the second half, about the project's wisdom, the next. The fact that these two non-contradictory statements were not simultaneous was enough for CBS' Chip Reid to claim: "He later watered it down." ABC's Dan Harris was yet more tendentious: "He gave a speech on Friday that seemed to support the project only to seemingly backtrack somewhat the next day."
Harris' seeming and somewhat carry plenty of insinuation but little substance.
All three networks--ABC's Muir in May, CBS' Jeff Glor and NBC's Ron Allen in July--had already reported on the zoning permission granted to the Cordoba Initiative in a 29-1 vote by the local community board. So some of the networks' August coverage concerned the outrageous comments made in the course of the cable news gabfest rather than the project itself. Chief among these was FOX News Channel's incendiary commentator Newt Gingrich invoking Godwin's Law: "Nazis do not have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum." Gingrich's defamatory analogy was cited by both ABC's Harris and CBS' Glor. Colby Hall notes at Mediaite.com that FNC, a leader in propelling anti-Islamic sentiment into the headlines in August, covered Pastor Jones least heavily among the cable news networks last week. The pattern on the network nightly newscasts was the opposite.
There had been no evidence as the summer went on that the nightly newscasts would join talkradio and cable news in turning talk of a culture war with Islam into a headline fare. Sure, NBC's Todd and ABC's Jake Tapper followed up on a Pew Research poll that found that 18% of Americans (up from 11% in March 2009) believe that their President is a Moslem. Such a belief, both pointed out, is mistaken, although neither added the Seinfeldesque disclaimer, as they should, "not that there would be anything wrong with that." Other smatterings of coverage included ABC's Steve Osunsami telling us about the NIMBY zoning opposition to a so-called supermosque in Murfreesboro Tenn and his colleague Pierre Thomas pointing to a total of just 34 Moslem-Americans arrested on suspicions of ties to international terrorism over the past 18 months. CBS' Glor and ABC's Jeremy Hubbard covered the interfaith peace activist who allegedly tried to kill his New York City taxi driver because he was a Moslem.
Indeed, both Harris and Hubbard mentioned in passing in their ABC surveys of scattered incidents of bigotry against Moslems that they included a planned bonfire in Gainesville on September 11th. Yet there was no sign, until the Labor Day weekend, that the nightly newscasts had a silly season sensation on their hands.
Enter David Petraeus.
It was as if the networks' news judgment had been dazzled by the glitter reflecting off the four-star general's stars. A single soundbite from Kabul was all it took to open Pandora's Box. Petreaus' words provided the pretext for the nightly newscasts to categorize Pastor Jones' bonfire as worthy of hard news coverage. No matter that the actual coverage from the Dove World Church concerned his tiny congregation, his checkered past in a German ministry, his eBay business selling church furniture, his feud with Gainesville's out-of-the-closet gay mayor. These silly season details from ABC's Moran, CBS' Cobiella and NBC's Sanders all passed muster because of the veneer of national security respectability afforded by the general.
What did Petraeus actually say? From Kabul, ABC's Martha Raddatz quoted him as saying the Koran bonfire "could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort." She reported that a Death to America protest in Kabul numbered "nearly 500" participants, with rocks thrown harmlessly at passing a US military convoy. NBC's Richard Engel reported that the protests involved the burning of American "flags and effigies." He quoted Petraeus as worrying that pictures of burning Korans "would" put the safety of soldiers and civilians "in jeopardy" and that they "could be used as a propaganda tool." CBS' Mandy Clark found evidence of such propaganda. She reported that a handwritten leaflet about the Koran burning had been distributed to some villages in Paktia Province by Taliban motorcycle messengers: "Most villagers are illiterate so the leaflets would have been left with imams to read out at mosques."
Such subjunctive fears, qualified with "coulds" and "woulds," are thin gruel to justify a national security alert. Furthermore, if the rationale for the Yankee Go Home rally in Kabul was opposition to military occupation by forces of a nation that refuses to criminalize the desecration of the Holy Koran, then the protests were both accurate and justified. Refusing to ban that bonfire is precisely what the United States does stand for. "As long as those are his Korans on his property the government cannot stop him," CBS' legal eagle Jan Crawford (at the tail of the Cobiella videostream) reminded us.
Even as NBC's Andrea Mitchell quoted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton imploring the news media not to pay any attention to the "outrageous and distressful, disgraceful" Gainesville stunt, Petraeus pitched in yet again to ABC. Terry Moran quoted the general while on a helicopter ride over Afghanistan with his ABC colleague Raddatz. Petraeus supported Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights before adding an even more extreme warning that his bonfire "could nonetheless endanger the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens…" There is that "could" again--but this time attached to a casualty count running into the six figures!
"I hardly think we are the ones who elevated this story," Barack Obama asserted at his news conference to end the week. If by "we," the President was referring to the White House, he was correct. If by "we," the Commander in Chief was referring to his chain of command, he was wrong. Absent Petraeus' hyperbolic contributions, the network nightly newscasts would have continued to treat the Gainesville stunt with the disdain it deserved. Someone as supposedly media savvy as the general should have known better. On the other hand, a camera-shy four-star general is a rarity indeed. Petraeus is not responsible for the overreaction to the story that his unnecessary contribution enabled; he played the reckless enabler nonetheless.
Wrong! This media frenzy did not just happen. The network newscasts were not forced to pay so much attention to the story. This was their choice--and this is how they made it.
Jones had devised a never-to-be-executed publicity stunt that nevertheless managed to qualify as the networks' Story of the Week. It was the lead item on CBS on three days; on two days on NBC and ABC. His plan was to desecrate the Holy Koran by building a bonfire of some 200 copies. "We feel what we are doing is we are actually revealing the nature of Islam," the pastor explained to CBS' Kelly Cobiella. Next day, Jones told Cobiella he had never actually read the book he was fixing to burn. "If we do not do it, when do we stop backing down?" he inquired of Terry Moran, anchor of ABC's Nightline, who traveled to Gainesville to preview the book burning.
The bonfire that the preacher claimed to be planning was Story of the Day on Tuesday and Wednesday; and again on Thursday when he announced its cancelation, explaining that his scheme all along had been to persuade the Cordoba Initiative to relocate its planned Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan. NBC's Kerry Sanders asked Jones if he had been "hoodwinked or tricked" when it turned out that the cultural center had no plans to move. "Tricked and lied to," was his response.
Until the Dove World Church came along, it had seemed that the summer's news agenda would turn out to have been bereft of such foolishness. The bedbug infestation (check those thumbnail images) failed to generate anxiety attacks worthy of a shark summer. The intrigue of the Russian spies-next-door did not linger summer-long like the mystery of a missing inside-the-Beltway intern. Salmonella-tainted eggs from Iowa factory farms stirred none of the agita of last year's swine 'flu pandemic. There had been no sudden superstar deaths to rival Michael Jackson's--the summer's celebrity sightings were no more newsworthy than Chelsea Clinton getting married or Dr Laura repeating the n-word ad nauseam on the radio. Even Steven Slater, the flamboyant jetBlue flight attendant, achieved only fleeting fame with his emergency job exit.
According to other news outlets, the incendiary Pastor Jones might have seemed like a continuation of the summer-long drumbeat of coverage of rising sentiment against Islam. Our media-monitoring colleagues at the Project for Excellence in Journalism found an earlier spike of Islam in the headlines during the third week of August, when opposition to the Cordoba Initiative's project--the so-called Ground Zero Mosque--was designated PEJ's Story of the Week. A closer look at PEJ's statistics, however, shows that the attention paid to Islam-bashing was concentrated disproportionately on the opinion outlets of talkradio and cable TV. Neither newspapers nor network television paid the matter much mind.
On the network nightly newscasts during that week in August, the Cordoba Initiative was only the seventh-most heavily covered story. Properly--and much to the disgrace of cable news networks for their failure to come to the same news judgment--the Story of that Week was the monsoon floods in Pakistan, which drove millions of Indus Valley peasants off their land, killing at least 1,500 and leaving survivors at risk of cholera. That was the week that CBS anchor Katie Couric traveled to Afghanistan to join Gen David Petraeus as he inspected troops on the eastern front in Khost (check out Terry McCarthy's Hurt Locker packages, here and here). Also that week, NBC's Richard Engel joined the last elements of the USArmy's combat forces as they motored overnight out of Iraq into Kuwait, in a southbound tribute to his late colleague David Bloom's fatal northwards journey into combat seven years earlier.
So, to contradict David Muir's unnamed "other" sources, it is, too, possible for the network nightly newscasts to downplay their coverage of controversies concerning Islam, even in this Internet age. They had done so successfully just three weeks earlier.
Granted there had been some reckless reporting concerning the Cordoba Initiative that did find itself on the networks' own air. But those sparks did not touch off a full blown summertime frenzy. NBC's Chuck Todd, for example, was wrong when he found "a reversal of the White House position" when President Obama asserted the Constitutional right of the Cordoba Initiative to develop its property while withholding judgment as to whether such a development was wise or not. Earlier the White House had declared that the project was "rightly a matter for New York City and the local community to decide." Later, the President noted that those rights applied "in accordance with local laws and ordinance." No reversal there. Obama made the first half of his statement, about Constitutional rights, one day and the second half, about the project's wisdom, the next. The fact that these two non-contradictory statements were not simultaneous was enough for CBS' Chip Reid to claim: "He later watered it down." ABC's Dan Harris was yet more tendentious: "He gave a speech on Friday that seemed to support the project only to seemingly backtrack somewhat the next day."
Harris' seeming and somewhat carry plenty of insinuation but little substance.
All three networks--ABC's Muir in May, CBS' Jeff Glor and NBC's Ron Allen in July--had already reported on the zoning permission granted to the Cordoba Initiative in a 29-1 vote by the local community board. So some of the networks' August coverage concerned the outrageous comments made in the course of the cable news gabfest rather than the project itself. Chief among these was FOX News Channel's incendiary commentator Newt Gingrich invoking Godwin's Law: "Nazis do not have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum." Gingrich's defamatory analogy was cited by both ABC's Harris and CBS' Glor. Colby Hall notes at Mediaite.com that FNC, a leader in propelling anti-Islamic sentiment into the headlines in August, covered Pastor Jones least heavily among the cable news networks last week. The pattern on the network nightly newscasts was the opposite.
There had been no evidence as the summer went on that the nightly newscasts would join talkradio and cable news in turning talk of a culture war with Islam into a headline fare. Sure, NBC's Todd and ABC's Jake Tapper followed up on a Pew Research poll that found that 18% of Americans (up from 11% in March 2009) believe that their President is a Moslem. Such a belief, both pointed out, is mistaken, although neither added the Seinfeldesque disclaimer, as they should, "not that there would be anything wrong with that." Other smatterings of coverage included ABC's Steve Osunsami telling us about the NIMBY zoning opposition to a so-called supermosque in Murfreesboro Tenn and his colleague Pierre Thomas pointing to a total of just 34 Moslem-Americans arrested on suspicions of ties to international terrorism over the past 18 months. CBS' Glor and ABC's Jeremy Hubbard covered the interfaith peace activist who allegedly tried to kill his New York City taxi driver because he was a Moslem.
Indeed, both Harris and Hubbard mentioned in passing in their ABC surveys of scattered incidents of bigotry against Moslems that they included a planned bonfire in Gainesville on September 11th. Yet there was no sign, until the Labor Day weekend, that the nightly newscasts had a silly season sensation on their hands.
Enter David Petraeus.
It was as if the networks' news judgment had been dazzled by the glitter reflecting off the four-star general's stars. A single soundbite from Kabul was all it took to open Pandora's Box. Petreaus' words provided the pretext for the nightly newscasts to categorize Pastor Jones' bonfire as worthy of hard news coverage. No matter that the actual coverage from the Dove World Church concerned his tiny congregation, his checkered past in a German ministry, his eBay business selling church furniture, his feud with Gainesville's out-of-the-closet gay mayor. These silly season details from ABC's Moran, CBS' Cobiella and NBC's Sanders all passed muster because of the veneer of national security respectability afforded by the general.
What did Petraeus actually say? From Kabul, ABC's Martha Raddatz quoted him as saying the Koran bonfire "could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort." She reported that a Death to America protest in Kabul numbered "nearly 500" participants, with rocks thrown harmlessly at passing a US military convoy. NBC's Richard Engel reported that the protests involved the burning of American "flags and effigies." He quoted Petraeus as worrying that pictures of burning Korans "would" put the safety of soldiers and civilians "in jeopardy" and that they "could be used as a propaganda tool." CBS' Mandy Clark found evidence of such propaganda. She reported that a handwritten leaflet about the Koran burning had been distributed to some villages in Paktia Province by Taliban motorcycle messengers: "Most villagers are illiterate so the leaflets would have been left with imams to read out at mosques."
Such subjunctive fears, qualified with "coulds" and "woulds," are thin gruel to justify a national security alert. Furthermore, if the rationale for the Yankee Go Home rally in Kabul was opposition to military occupation by forces of a nation that refuses to criminalize the desecration of the Holy Koran, then the protests were both accurate and justified. Refusing to ban that bonfire is precisely what the United States does stand for. "As long as those are his Korans on his property the government cannot stop him," CBS' legal eagle Jan Crawford (at the tail of the Cobiella videostream) reminded us.
Even as NBC's Andrea Mitchell quoted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton imploring the news media not to pay any attention to the "outrageous and distressful, disgraceful" Gainesville stunt, Petraeus pitched in yet again to ABC. Terry Moran quoted the general while on a helicopter ride over Afghanistan with his ABC colleague Raddatz. Petraeus supported Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights before adding an even more extreme warning that his bonfire "could nonetheless endanger the lives of thousands, hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens…" There is that "could" again--but this time attached to a casualty count running into the six figures!
"I hardly think we are the ones who elevated this story," Barack Obama asserted at his news conference to end the week. If by "we," the President was referring to the White House, he was correct. If by "we," the Commander in Chief was referring to his chain of command, he was wrong. Absent Petraeus' hyperbolic contributions, the network nightly newscasts would have continued to treat the Gainesville stunt with the disdain it deserved. Someone as supposedly media savvy as the general should have known better. On the other hand, a camera-shy four-star general is a rarity indeed. Petraeus is not responsible for the overreaction to the story that his unnecessary contribution enabled; he played the reckless enabler nonetheless.
