 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JANUARY 13, 2011
President Barack Obama left Tucson after paying tribute to the six killed in Saturday's Safeway supermarket shooting and so did NBC anchor Brian Williams after three straight weekdays of special reports. NBC did not let up on its coverage, however (14 min v ABC 10, CBS 8), as the aftermath of the shooting continued to dominate coverage with 57% of the three-network newshole (33 min out of 57), compared with 56% Wednesday, 46% Tuesday and 89% Monday. NBC and CBS both led with the funeral of Christina Green, the nine-year-old girl who was one of the six dead. ABC kicked off with an update on Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), one of the 13 injured. The congresswoman opened her eyes and moved her legs, despite suffering a bullet shot that flew clear through her brain.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JANUARY 13, 2011: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
OBAMA LEAVES TUCSON AND SO DOES NBC’S WILLIAMS President Barack Obama left Tucson after paying tribute to the six killed in Saturday's Safeway supermarket shooting and so did NBC anchor Brian Williams after three straight weekdays of special reports. NBC did not let up on its coverage, however (14 min v ABC 10, CBS 8), as the aftermath of the shooting continued to dominate coverage with 57% of the three-network newshole (33 min out of 57), compared with 56% Wednesday, 46% Tuesday and 89% Monday. NBC and CBS both led with the funeral of Christina Green, the nine-year-old girl who was one of the six dead. ABC kicked off with an update on Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), one of the 13 injured. The congresswoman opened her eyes and moved her legs, despite suffering a bullet shot that flew clear through her brain.
Only CBS assigned its White House correspondent to recap the old news of the highlights of the President's televised primetime speech. It is a marker of the acceleration of the news cycle and the redundancy of the nightly newscasts traditional role as a newscast of record, that reaction to an important set-piece event that happened within their 24-hour cycle would not be covered automatically. As few as a dozen years ago that would have been the case.
Anyhow, Chip Reid offered his assessment of Obama's "comfort and consolation." He contrasted the Tucson speech with the President's tone in previous crises, such as his speech about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which had seemed "detached and slow to lead." This time, "his soaring, heartfelt words brought many listeners to tears," including one corny tearjerker about the slain girl. "If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today."
HER EYES CAN SEE In the course of his speech, President Barack Obama announced breaking news from the hospital vigil to a cheering crowd. Their brain damaged congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, had opened her eyes for the first time. "Just imagine the excitement," ABC's David Wright exclaimed. NBC anchor Brian Williams tried to do just that, sitting down with Sen Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), a friend and former House colleague of Giffords, to get an eyewitness recap of the bedside scene. Williams tried but failed Wednesday to land an inspirational soundbite from Gifford' Chief of Staff Pia Carusone. He had better luck with the senator, who confessed herself inspired by the congresswoman's "strength and courage."
CBS anchor Katie Couric also aired a sitdown with Sen Gillibrand, one of her six Congressional Voices from Wednesday, yet for some reason her Thursday videostream is unavailable online. The hospital press conference about Giffords' prognosis was covered by NBC's Kristen Welker and ABC's Wright. ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser followed up with a q-&-a about the symptoms of brain damage.
GENOCIDE SCHOOL NBC's Mike Taibbi continued the dogged task of reconstructing the life of the accused killer. He went through 50 pages on Loughner's life as a student from Pima County Community College and found complaints of creepy behavior, jittery eyes, confused looks, bizarre talk. "My genocide school," Loughner called the college on YouTube. "Why did Loughner want to kill Rep Giffords?" asked ABC's Pierre Thomas plaintively, as he replayed 911 dispatch audiotapes from that day. "Police, friends and neighbors say we may never know why this happened."
Tuesday, Taibbi had been critical: "How could the parents of Jared Loughner have been unaware of what their only child was thinking and allegedly planning living in the same house?" Upon further reporting, Taibbi's tone has moderated. He covered the visit of Eric Fuller, one of the 13 Loughner wounded, to the family home to offer his forgiveness. He quoted Loughner's aunt pleading for forgiveness or at least compassion for the man's parents: "They have to live with this for the rest of their lives."
THE DAYS OF HER LIFE All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover Christina Green's funeral. The girl was born on September 11th, 2001, "a day when America came together," as ABC's Dan Harris put it, tracing the days of her life as a "chart of the ups and downs of American civility." NBC's Lee Cowan stretched for a similar figure of speech, describing the girl as "an artist, an A student, a dancer, the only girl on her Little League baseball team, just elected to her student council, who never saw her 9/11 birthday as a grim day, but, as she told her mom, as a day to make a change." CBS' John Blackstone focused on the impact of this girl's death on the other grade-schoolers of Tucson. Meanwhile, NBC's Kate Snow looked for national lessons learned, as the Tucson shooting enters the curriculum of grade schools and high schools nationwide as a so-called teachable moment.
MENTAL ILLNESS LACKS FOCUS CBS used the tragedy in Tucson as the news hook for a confused and imprecise In Focus feature on treatment of mental illness in the national healthcare system. UnFocused is more like it. This is the statistic anchor Katie Couric used to describe the scope of the problem: "For every 100 American adults, 20 have some form of mental illness; five have disorders classified as severe. They rarely pose a danger but those odds increase without proper treatment." Watch how severe mental illness becomes conflated with schizophrenia and then how schizophrenia becomes conflated with violent psychosis and then how coerced mental healthcare becomes, not treatment, but a violent-crime-prevention technique.
This is not how mental illness is usually covered on the nightly newscasts. Search the Tyndall Report database over the past four years and you will find almost 300 stories with a MentalHealth tag. They fall broadly into two types: coverage of specific diseases and disorders and their treatments; and extraneous news events--like the shooting in Tucson--where psychiatric illness turns out to be a major angle of the coverage.
As a newsworthy mental illness per se schizophrenia, let alone its violent manifestations, has been literally non-existent on the news agenda over the past four years. Top of the list is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (54 reports), followed by the autistic spectrum (52), then dementia (Alzheimer's Disease--40), then major psychological depression (2) and problems with its medication (10). There has been a smattering of addictions (7) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity (5). Of all the severe mental illnesses, the one that may well be afflicting Jared Loughner never warrants attention.
ABC RELIES ON ABC AS AN IN-HOUSE STORY SOURCE ABC's Ron Claiborne watched the love and support of the bedside vigil surrounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords and was inspired to report on how friends and family aid a patient's recovery from injury and the convalescence from illness. His report was one part research-based, one part anecdotal. For research he went to the Archives of Internal Medicine for a Duke University study into the role of social support in surviving heart disease. For the anecdote, Claiborne turned to his own colleague Bob Woodruff, who swears that his family's presence at his bedside enabled him to recover from his own traumatic brain damage, suffered while reporting from the warzone in Iraq.
If you think that this use of an anecdote concerning the personal life of an ABC News anchor as a source for an ABC news story has a whiff of narcissism, this is nothing compared with Andrea Canning's obituary for a star of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on Wednesday. You would think that the central fact of David Nelson's life was the regard in which he was held by a certain Good Morning America anchor.
By the way, Canning referred to the days of Ozzie and Harriet as "a simpler time in this country." What, pray tell, was simpler about Jim Crow…the Cold War…systematic shaming of homosexuals and unmarried mothers…the military draft…lack of workplace opportunity for women…McCarthyism…the absence of guaranteed healthcare for the elderly?
WARMING MEANS SNOWFALL When the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico rose to the top as 2010's Story of the Year, Tyndall Report complained about the lack of follow through in coverage of fossil fuel energy policy and its impact on global warming and climate change. Finally, Linsey Davis connects some dots on ABC. For only the fourth time in the last twelve months (two other reports were on ABC by Jonathan Karl and Clayton Sandell; one was by CBS' Mark Phillips) the nightly newscasts filed on the topic. Davis pointed to the floods in Queensland (covered by NBC's Ian Williams and Network Ten's Danielle Isdale for CBS) and the mudslides outside Rio de Janeiro (covered by NBC's Mark Potter) and this week's record snowstorm in southern New England (covered by ABC's Jeremy Hubbard) and predicted only more and more extremes.
Here is how a warmer globe means a snowier winter: "The decade that just ended had nine out of the ten warmest years since they started keeping record in 1880. Scientists say that means more moisture in the air…In America that means snow."
Only CBS assigned its White House correspondent to recap the old news of the highlights of the President's televised primetime speech. It is a marker of the acceleration of the news cycle and the redundancy of the nightly newscasts traditional role as a newscast of record, that reaction to an important set-piece event that happened within their 24-hour cycle would not be covered automatically. As few as a dozen years ago that would have been the case.
Anyhow, Chip Reid offered his assessment of Obama's "comfort and consolation." He contrasted the Tucson speech with the President's tone in previous crises, such as his speech about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which had seemed "detached and slow to lead." This time, "his soaring, heartfelt words brought many listeners to tears," including one corny tearjerker about the slain girl. "If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today."
HER EYES CAN SEE In the course of his speech, President Barack Obama announced breaking news from the hospital vigil to a cheering crowd. Their brain damaged congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, had opened her eyes for the first time. "Just imagine the excitement," ABC's David Wright exclaimed. NBC anchor Brian Williams tried to do just that, sitting down with Sen Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), a friend and former House colleague of Giffords, to get an eyewitness recap of the bedside scene. Williams tried but failed Wednesday to land an inspirational soundbite from Gifford' Chief of Staff Pia Carusone. He had better luck with the senator, who confessed herself inspired by the congresswoman's "strength and courage."
CBS anchor Katie Couric also aired a sitdown with Sen Gillibrand, one of her six Congressional Voices from Wednesday, yet for some reason her Thursday videostream is unavailable online. The hospital press conference about Giffords' prognosis was covered by NBC's Kristen Welker and ABC's Wright. ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser followed up with a q-&-a about the symptoms of brain damage.
GENOCIDE SCHOOL NBC's Mike Taibbi continued the dogged task of reconstructing the life of the accused killer. He went through 50 pages on Loughner's life as a student from Pima County Community College and found complaints of creepy behavior, jittery eyes, confused looks, bizarre talk. "My genocide school," Loughner called the college on YouTube. "Why did Loughner want to kill Rep Giffords?" asked ABC's Pierre Thomas plaintively, as he replayed 911 dispatch audiotapes from that day. "Police, friends and neighbors say we may never know why this happened."
Tuesday, Taibbi had been critical: "How could the parents of Jared Loughner have been unaware of what their only child was thinking and allegedly planning living in the same house?" Upon further reporting, Taibbi's tone has moderated. He covered the visit of Eric Fuller, one of the 13 Loughner wounded, to the family home to offer his forgiveness. He quoted Loughner's aunt pleading for forgiveness or at least compassion for the man's parents: "They have to live with this for the rest of their lives."
THE DAYS OF HER LIFE All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover Christina Green's funeral. The girl was born on September 11th, 2001, "a day when America came together," as ABC's Dan Harris put it, tracing the days of her life as a "chart of the ups and downs of American civility." NBC's Lee Cowan stretched for a similar figure of speech, describing the girl as "an artist, an A student, a dancer, the only girl on her Little League baseball team, just elected to her student council, who never saw her 9/11 birthday as a grim day, but, as she told her mom, as a day to make a change." CBS' John Blackstone focused on the impact of this girl's death on the other grade-schoolers of Tucson. Meanwhile, NBC's Kate Snow looked for national lessons learned, as the Tucson shooting enters the curriculum of grade schools and high schools nationwide as a so-called teachable moment.
MENTAL ILLNESS LACKS FOCUS CBS used the tragedy in Tucson as the news hook for a confused and imprecise In Focus feature on treatment of mental illness in the national healthcare system. UnFocused is more like it. This is the statistic anchor Katie Couric used to describe the scope of the problem: "For every 100 American adults, 20 have some form of mental illness; five have disorders classified as severe. They rarely pose a danger but those odds increase without proper treatment." Watch how severe mental illness becomes conflated with schizophrenia and then how schizophrenia becomes conflated with violent psychosis and then how coerced mental healthcare becomes, not treatment, but a violent-crime-prevention technique.
This is not how mental illness is usually covered on the nightly newscasts. Search the Tyndall Report database over the past four years and you will find almost 300 stories with a MentalHealth tag. They fall broadly into two types: coverage of specific diseases and disorders and their treatments; and extraneous news events--like the shooting in Tucson--where psychiatric illness turns out to be a major angle of the coverage.
As a newsworthy mental illness per se schizophrenia, let alone its violent manifestations, has been literally non-existent on the news agenda over the past four years. Top of the list is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (54 reports), followed by the autistic spectrum (52), then dementia (Alzheimer's Disease--40), then major psychological depression (2) and problems with its medication (10). There has been a smattering of addictions (7) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity (5). Of all the severe mental illnesses, the one that may well be afflicting Jared Loughner never warrants attention.
ABC RELIES ON ABC AS AN IN-HOUSE STORY SOURCE ABC's Ron Claiborne watched the love and support of the bedside vigil surrounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords and was inspired to report on how friends and family aid a patient's recovery from injury and the convalescence from illness. His report was one part research-based, one part anecdotal. For research he went to the Archives of Internal Medicine for a Duke University study into the role of social support in surviving heart disease. For the anecdote, Claiborne turned to his own colleague Bob Woodruff, who swears that his family's presence at his bedside enabled him to recover from his own traumatic brain damage, suffered while reporting from the warzone in Iraq.
If you think that this use of an anecdote concerning the personal life of an ABC News anchor as a source for an ABC news story has a whiff of narcissism, this is nothing compared with Andrea Canning's obituary for a star of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on Wednesday. You would think that the central fact of David Nelson's life was the regard in which he was held by a certain Good Morning America anchor.
By the way, Canning referred to the days of Ozzie and Harriet as "a simpler time in this country." What, pray tell, was simpler about Jim Crow…the Cold War…systematic shaming of homosexuals and unmarried mothers…the military draft…lack of workplace opportunity for women…McCarthyism…the absence of guaranteed healthcare for the elderly?
WARMING MEANS SNOWFALL When the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico rose to the top as 2010's Story of the Year, Tyndall Report complained about the lack of follow through in coverage of fossil fuel energy policy and its impact on global warming and climate change. Finally, Linsey Davis connects some dots on ABC. For only the fourth time in the last twelve months (two other reports were on ABC by Jonathan Karl and Clayton Sandell; one was by CBS' Mark Phillips) the nightly newscasts filed on the topic. Davis pointed to the floods in Queensland (covered by NBC's Ian Williams and Network Ten's Danielle Isdale for CBS) and the mudslides outside Rio de Janeiro (covered by NBC's Mark Potter) and this week's record snowstorm in southern New England (covered by ABC's Jeremy Hubbard) and predicted only more and more extremes.
Here is how a warmer globe means a snowier winter: "The decade that just ended had nine out of the ten warmest years since they started keeping record in 1880. Scientists say that means more moisture in the air…In America that means snow."
