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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JANUARY 05, 2011
The swearing-in of the 112th Congress and the ceremonial transfer of a supersized gavel from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to incoming Speaker John Boehner was the Story of the Day. All three newscasts led with news coverage from their Congressional correspondents and a follow-up feature on the House of Representatives under Republican control. The transfer of power was significant enough that each of the three anchors traveled to Washington to cover it in person. ABC's Diane Sawyer anchored from Washington on Tuesday and airs the feature she collected there today. NBC's Brian Williams anchors from Washington today and previews his interview with Speaker Boehner, which airs Thursday. CBS' Katie Couric anchored both days from New York, but fit in a roundtrip to the Capitol for her Congressional Voices profile.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JANUARY 05, 2011: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MR BOEHNER! WHAT A LARGE GAVEL YOU HAVE! The swearing-in of the 112th Congress and the ceremonial transfer of a supersized gavel from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to incoming Speaker John Boehner was the Story of the Day. All three newscasts led with news coverage from their Congressional correspondents and a follow-up feature on the House of Representatives under Republican control. The transfer of power was significant enough that each of the three anchors traveled to Washington to cover it in person. ABC's Diane Sawyer anchored from Washington on Tuesday and airs the feature she collected there today. NBC's Brian Williams anchors from Washington today and previews his interview with Speaker Boehner, which airs Thursday. CBS' Katie Couric anchored both days from New York, but fit in a roundtrip to the Capitol for her Congressional Voices profile.
Kelly O'Donnell's coverage on NBC was straightforward and traditional. On ABC, Jonathan Karl concentrated on the new Speaker and his oversized mallet. CBS' Nancy Cordes made the most of the Tea Party influx and looming partisan frictions. For commentary, ABC's George Stephanopoulos contrasted the humble tone of Boehner's ascension with that of Newt Gingrich in 1995. "Gingrich's overreaching helped reelect Bill Clinton," he recalled. "They do not want to reelect Barack Obama" NBC's David Gregory anticipated as many political cross currents occurring within the Republican caucus as between the GOP and the White House.
As for the anchors, ABC's Sawyer hosted an all-Republican roundtable of eight freshman representatives and a couple of senators, "the Beltway version of a motorcycle gang riding in on a wave of taxpayer and Tea Party discontent." CBS' Couric was less partisan, sitting down with a Tea Party Republican, a moderate GOPer from Illinois and one of the few new Democrats, an African-American lawyer from Alabama.
NBC's preview feature was filed by Andrea Mitchell, on Darrel Issa, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who is on the record telling talkradio's Rusk Limbaugh that Barack Obama is "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times." On Issa's agenda: the secrets exposed by WikiLeaks, USAID in Afghanistan, the FannieMae/FreddieMac fiasco, Obama's attempts at Keynesian stimulus, and TARP. Of those five, aid to Afghanistan has been least heavily covered by the network nightly newscasts, which tend to emphasize the military aspect of the United States' counterinsurgency effort.
Overshadowed amid the Capitol Hill ceremonials was coverage of personnel changes at the White House, the exit of press secretary Robert Gibbs and the expected entry of William Daley as the next Chief of Staff. If NBC's primetime drama had not turned the West Wing corridors of power into household words, neither CBS' Chip Reid nor NBC's Chuck Todd would have warranted the airtime to mention such routine musical chairs behind the scenes.
MEASLES FRAUD & CANCER EXPENSE CBS and ABC filed a couple of medical stories concerning the very beginning and the very end of life. ABC's Dan Harris told us about the stinging accusations of fraud uncovered by Brian Deer, an investigative reporter working for the British Medical Journal, into Dr Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield published research that purported to demonstrate causal links between child immunization with the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism. Deer doublechecked Wakefield's data: he found altered records, and a payment of $750,000 to Wakefield by lawyers suing the vaccine manufacturer. Nowadays, almost the entire effort by the nightly newscasts in reporting on child immunization is focused on debunking the false fears arising from Dr Wakefield's apparent fraud.
CBS turned to CNN's in-house physician Sanjay Gupta to publicize the aggressive treatment developed by the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Moffitt does not shy away from using full-blown chemotherapy on elderly patients, even as late in life as their mid-eighties: "New studies have shown that older patients can do just as well as younger people with aggressive cancer therapy."
No mention from Dr Gupta about how much more expensive Moffitt's approach is, or whether there is a payoff in painfree longevity to warrant such heroic measures. To be sure, talk of death panels and medical rationing is touchy--but it is just irresponsible for Gupta's reporting simply to avoid such issues altogether. Contrast that with ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson, who addressed the trauma of heroic end-of-life care forthrightly last week here and here.
WHICH NEWSCAST IS MOST ROYALIST? When Diane Sawyer was anchor at Good Morning America, ABC's morning show used to be more star-struck by British royalty than its rivals at CBS and NBC. It looks like the same trend is developing in the run-up to the nuptials of William-&-Kate at Westminster Abbey in April. ABC's Nick Watt was the only correspondent assigned to tell us about the latest tweeted minutiae of wedding planning. ABC's previous knot-tying coverage has been here, here, here and here, which is more than NBC (Jim Maceda here and here). CBS has been keeping pace solely through the efforts of Mark Phillips, who has now told us about the princess-to-be's paparazzi and her genealogy as well as three stories (here, here and here) on the engagement and the looming nuptials per se.
HUCK FINN, AS CHILD-FRIENDLY AS KING LEAR It has always been a mystery to me that a novel as hardhearted and as heartbreaking as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--at least its first three quarters, before even Mark Twain's nerve failed him--should be considered suitable to be read by teenagers in the classroom. I defy any adult to reread it and not be stopped cold by the bleakness of its equation of the plight of slaves and of children. The use of the word "nigger" is the least of it.
So, the attempts to expurgate Twain's language to make the novel suitable for a public school curriculum are beside the point as far as I am concerned. This is not a text for children. NBC's Mike Taibbi and CBS' Mark Strassmann cover the controversy anyway. An anodyne Taibbi blandly calls the novel "the rich tale of the adventures and friendships shared by two characters, one white and one black," which is the half of it.
When I was at high school, King Lear was an assigned text--another incomprehensible conception of the worldview of a 17-year-old boy.
THE SPLENDID SPEAKER Doral Chenoweth, videographer for the Columbus Dispatch, found his newspaper a viral hit, when he snatched a soundbite from a panhandler, holding a sign: "I'm an ex-radio announcer who has fallen on hard times." Chenoweth "kept the film and waited for a slow news day," was how CBS' Seth Doane told the story. Ted Williams' golden pipes are now known nationwide. Doane summarized the story from WNCI-AM in Ohio; NBC's Kevin Tibbles narrated a voiceover--in a baritone that is not quite so lush--from Chicago. Tibbles' account disagreed with Doane's: he maintained that Chenoweth did not sit on his scoop, rather that the dispatch.com video got 5m hits "within hours."
Kelly O'Donnell's coverage on NBC was straightforward and traditional. On ABC, Jonathan Karl concentrated on the new Speaker and his oversized mallet. CBS' Nancy Cordes made the most of the Tea Party influx and looming partisan frictions. For commentary, ABC's George Stephanopoulos contrasted the humble tone of Boehner's ascension with that of Newt Gingrich in 1995. "Gingrich's overreaching helped reelect Bill Clinton," he recalled. "They do not want to reelect Barack Obama" NBC's David Gregory anticipated as many political cross currents occurring within the Republican caucus as between the GOP and the White House.
As for the anchors, ABC's Sawyer hosted an all-Republican roundtable of eight freshman representatives and a couple of senators, "the Beltway version of a motorcycle gang riding in on a wave of taxpayer and Tea Party discontent." CBS' Couric was less partisan, sitting down with a Tea Party Republican, a moderate GOPer from Illinois and one of the few new Democrats, an African-American lawyer from Alabama.
NBC's preview feature was filed by Andrea Mitchell, on Darrel Issa, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who is on the record telling talkradio's Rusk Limbaugh that Barack Obama is "one of the most corrupt Presidents in modern times." On Issa's agenda: the secrets exposed by WikiLeaks, USAID in Afghanistan, the FannieMae/FreddieMac fiasco, Obama's attempts at Keynesian stimulus, and TARP. Of those five, aid to Afghanistan has been least heavily covered by the network nightly newscasts, which tend to emphasize the military aspect of the United States' counterinsurgency effort.
Overshadowed amid the Capitol Hill ceremonials was coverage of personnel changes at the White House, the exit of press secretary Robert Gibbs and the expected entry of William Daley as the next Chief of Staff. If NBC's primetime drama had not turned the West Wing corridors of power into household words, neither CBS' Chip Reid nor NBC's Chuck Todd would have warranted the airtime to mention such routine musical chairs behind the scenes.
MEASLES FRAUD & CANCER EXPENSE CBS and ABC filed a couple of medical stories concerning the very beginning and the very end of life. ABC's Dan Harris told us about the stinging accusations of fraud uncovered by Brian Deer, an investigative reporter working for the British Medical Journal, into Dr Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield published research that purported to demonstrate causal links between child immunization with the MMR vaccine and the onset of autism. Deer doublechecked Wakefield's data: he found altered records, and a payment of $750,000 to Wakefield by lawyers suing the vaccine manufacturer. Nowadays, almost the entire effort by the nightly newscasts in reporting on child immunization is focused on debunking the false fears arising from Dr Wakefield's apparent fraud.
CBS turned to CNN's in-house physician Sanjay Gupta to publicize the aggressive treatment developed by the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Moffitt does not shy away from using full-blown chemotherapy on elderly patients, even as late in life as their mid-eighties: "New studies have shown that older patients can do just as well as younger people with aggressive cancer therapy."
No mention from Dr Gupta about how much more expensive Moffitt's approach is, or whether there is a payoff in painfree longevity to warrant such heroic measures. To be sure, talk of death panels and medical rationing is touchy--but it is just irresponsible for Gupta's reporting simply to avoid such issues altogether. Contrast that with ABC's in-house physician Timothy Johnson, who addressed the trauma of heroic end-of-life care forthrightly last week here and here.
WHICH NEWSCAST IS MOST ROYALIST? When Diane Sawyer was anchor at Good Morning America, ABC's morning show used to be more star-struck by British royalty than its rivals at CBS and NBC. It looks like the same trend is developing in the run-up to the nuptials of William-&-Kate at Westminster Abbey in April. ABC's Nick Watt was the only correspondent assigned to tell us about the latest tweeted minutiae of wedding planning. ABC's previous knot-tying coverage has been here, here, here and here, which is more than NBC (Jim Maceda here and here). CBS has been keeping pace solely through the efforts of Mark Phillips, who has now told us about the princess-to-be's paparazzi and her genealogy as well as three stories (here, here and here) on the engagement and the looming nuptials per se.
HUCK FINN, AS CHILD-FRIENDLY AS KING LEAR It has always been a mystery to me that a novel as hardhearted and as heartbreaking as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn--at least its first three quarters, before even Mark Twain's nerve failed him--should be considered suitable to be read by teenagers in the classroom. I defy any adult to reread it and not be stopped cold by the bleakness of its equation of the plight of slaves and of children. The use of the word "nigger" is the least of it.
So, the attempts to expurgate Twain's language to make the novel suitable for a public school curriculum are beside the point as far as I am concerned. This is not a text for children. NBC's Mike Taibbi and CBS' Mark Strassmann cover the controversy anyway. An anodyne Taibbi blandly calls the novel "the rich tale of the adventures and friendships shared by two characters, one white and one black," which is the half of it.
When I was at high school, King Lear was an assigned text--another incomprehensible conception of the worldview of a 17-year-old boy.
THE SPLENDID SPEAKER Doral Chenoweth, videographer for the Columbus Dispatch, found his newspaper a viral hit, when he snatched a soundbite from a panhandler, holding a sign: "I'm an ex-radio announcer who has fallen on hard times." Chenoweth "kept the film and waited for a slow news day," was how CBS' Seth Doane told the story. Ted Williams' golden pipes are now known nationwide. Doane summarized the story from WNCI-AM in Ohio; NBC's Kevin Tibbles narrated a voiceover--in a baritone that is not quite so lush--from Chicago. Tibbles' account disagreed with Doane's: he maintained that Chenoweth did not sit on his scoop, rather that the dispatch.com video got 5m hits "within hours."
