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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 22, 2013
The mystery of a dead ex-con, shot after a car chase in rural Texas, was the lead on all three newscasts and the Story of the Day. He was identified as Evan Ebel, said to be a member of the 2-11 white supremacist prison gang. What, otherwise, would have been only a local story attracted national attention from the network nightly newscasts because Ebel may have been an assassin: possibly a suspect in the execution of Tom Clements, the Supervisor of the Colorado state prison system. ABC, with substitute anchor David Muir, led with the murder mystery, as it had on Wednesday. CBS, with substitute anchor Bob Schieffer, led with it, as it had on Thursday. For NBC, this was the first time that the Clements assassination had been in its lead.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 22, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
WHITE SUPREMACIST PRISON GANG ATTRACTS SPECULATION The mystery of a dead ex-con, shot after a car chase in rural Texas, was the lead on all three newscasts and the Story of the Day. He was identified as Evan Ebel, said to be a member of the 2-11 white supremacist prison gang. What, otherwise, would have been only a local story attracted national attention from the network nightly newscasts because Ebel may have been an assassin: possibly a suspect in the execution of Tom Clements, the Supervisor of the Colorado state prison system. ABC, with substitute anchor David Muir, led with the murder mystery, as it had on Wednesday. CBS, with substitute anchor Bob Schieffer, led with it, as it had on Thursday. For NBC, this was the first time that the Clements assassination had been in its lead.
On Thursday, CBS' Mark Strassmann had drawn a possible connection between the Clements killing and the January assassination of a prosecutor in Kaufman County, Texas, that CBS' Anna Werner had covered at the time. Now Pierre Thomas, in ABC's Washington bureau, raises the same possible connection. So far, NBC's Kristen Dahlgren has confined herself to the Colorado angle and CBS, with Werner, did not revisit the possible Texan link.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS President Barack Obama's diplomacy in the Middle East was not newsworthy enough to qualify as Story of the Day for a third day straight. NBC's Chuck Todd was the only White House correspondent to file a full report, covering the President's talks with King Abdullah of Jordan. ABC, briefly, quoted the unfortunately-worded question by Jonathan Karl (at the head of the Marquardt videostream), its own White House correspondent on the possibility of war with Iran. I think Karl was speaking metaphorically when he asked about the potential fallout from a raid on Teheran's nuclear facilities. Yet, the fallout could also be literal.
On Wednesday, NBC's Richard Engel used vivid video to depict the prisonlike fortifications around Israel's borders. On Thursday, ABC's Jonathan Karl stood next to Israel's intimidating wall in the heart of Palestinian Bethlehem. Now ABC's Alex Marquardt shows the fence that separates the Gharib family from its olive groves in Beit Ijza on the lush green hills of the West Bank -- and the incomprehension of a Jewish settler that this separation might constitute a problem.
Meanwhile, CBS' Barry Petersen was in Damascus, preparing for a national day of mourning for Sheikh Mohammad Said al-Buti, the cleric assassinated by a suicide bomber's embrace in his own mosque. Petersen should have told us which sect of Islam Sheikh al-Buti adhered to, but he did not.
It was only a trivial piece of municipal corruption by a Communist Party boss in a village in China's Zhengzhou Province -- but the image of protesting locals, lashing out at the boss' lackluster hired thug, from CBS' Wyatt Andrews, was priceless.
It was 18 months ago that ABC anchor Diane Sawyer lavished praise on Jacqueline Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy's oral history of her mother's years in Camelot. Now ABC's substitute anchor David Muir follows in those footsteps, making Caroline his Person of the Week in order to give free publicity to her book Poems to Learn by Heart. Her greatest hit: The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes.
Targeting Big Food, NBC's Diana Alvear badmouthed agribusiness seed makers, naming DuPont, Dow, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Bayer as most egregious. ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser gave thumbs-down to salt-heavy Olive Garden and Applebee's.
ABC has consistently hyped the excitement of gotta-be-innit-to-win-it state lotteries in the past year but Gio Benitez -- no Nate Silver, he -- offered a pretty low bar in his example of how likely a ticketbuying gambler is to hit the jackpot: you have a better chance with Powerball than you do of filling out a perfect bracket for March Madness. Well, duh!
CBS' On The Road feature from Steve Hartman did not think it worth the effort to come up with a fresh basketball story to illustrate his network's tournament. He just replayed a favorite from four weeks ago.
In cross-promotion for primetime magazine shows…
Elizabeth Vargas turned up for the second time this week (here on Monday) with a preview of 20/20's After The Party's Over on ABC, her investigation into the drunken teenage rapes at the party thrown by the high school football players of Steubenville, Ohio. Vargas publicized a documentary movie by Denice Evans entitled The Spitting Game without offering any information about it -- which makes sense since, drunkenness aside, according to IMDb, it does not seem to be relevant: IMDb says The Spitting Game is about consensual promiscuity not rape; and about adults in college not under-age teenagers in high school.
NBC anchor Brian Williams showed us a preview of him on Rock Center yukking it up with the three boisterous Brothers Emanuel -- a disconcerting clip, given that earlier in Williams' own newscast Rehema Ellis had run a clip of Brother Rahm, the Mayor of Chicago, being denounced as a cowardly bully.
Jeff Rossen previewed his report on worries about fire alarms on NBC's Dateline. Only six months ago, Rossen was also on the nightly news -- worrying about fire alarms.
Lastly, how dreadful was David Kerley's story on ABC about Philippe Jennard, a 61-year-old wannabe-pilot who wandered into the cockpit of a USAirways jetliner before takeoff in Philadelphia in a fake Air France uniform? First, Kerley relied on Virtual View computer animation to retell the completely mundane facts of an airline check-in and an open cockpit door. Second, he illustrated the story with fictional Hollywood footage from Catch Me If You Can, with a connection that was so tenuous -- via a totally unconnected wannabe-pilot in Italy last year -- as to be non-existent. Third, he called Jennard an "imposter"…or was it "impostor"? He was an imposter during substitute anchor David Muir's tease at the start of the newscast and an impostor during commentary by ABC News' aviation analyst John Nance. Fourth, nothing newsworthy happened -- no harm, no foul, no story. No wonder it went unmentioned by the other two newscasts.
On Thursday, CBS' Mark Strassmann had drawn a possible connection between the Clements killing and the January assassination of a prosecutor in Kaufman County, Texas, that CBS' Anna Werner had covered at the time. Now Pierre Thomas, in ABC's Washington bureau, raises the same possible connection. So far, NBC's Kristen Dahlgren has confined herself to the Colorado angle and CBS, with Werner, did not revisit the possible Texan link.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS President Barack Obama's diplomacy in the Middle East was not newsworthy enough to qualify as Story of the Day for a third day straight. NBC's Chuck Todd was the only White House correspondent to file a full report, covering the President's talks with King Abdullah of Jordan. ABC, briefly, quoted the unfortunately-worded question by Jonathan Karl (at the head of the Marquardt videostream), its own White House correspondent on the possibility of war with Iran. I think Karl was speaking metaphorically when he asked about the potential fallout from a raid on Teheran's nuclear facilities. Yet, the fallout could also be literal.
On Wednesday, NBC's Richard Engel used vivid video to depict the prisonlike fortifications around Israel's borders. On Thursday, ABC's Jonathan Karl stood next to Israel's intimidating wall in the heart of Palestinian Bethlehem. Now ABC's Alex Marquardt shows the fence that separates the Gharib family from its olive groves in Beit Ijza on the lush green hills of the West Bank -- and the incomprehension of a Jewish settler that this separation might constitute a problem.
Meanwhile, CBS' Barry Petersen was in Damascus, preparing for a national day of mourning for Sheikh Mohammad Said al-Buti, the cleric assassinated by a suicide bomber's embrace in his own mosque. Petersen should have told us which sect of Islam Sheikh al-Buti adhered to, but he did not.
It was only a trivial piece of municipal corruption by a Communist Party boss in a village in China's Zhengzhou Province -- but the image of protesting locals, lashing out at the boss' lackluster hired thug, from CBS' Wyatt Andrews, was priceless.
It was 18 months ago that ABC anchor Diane Sawyer lavished praise on Jacqueline Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy's oral history of her mother's years in Camelot. Now ABC's substitute anchor David Muir follows in those footsteps, making Caroline his Person of the Week in order to give free publicity to her book Poems to Learn by Heart. Her greatest hit: The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes.
Targeting Big Food, NBC's Diana Alvear badmouthed agribusiness seed makers, naming DuPont, Dow, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Bayer as most egregious. ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser gave thumbs-down to salt-heavy Olive Garden and Applebee's.
ABC has consistently hyped the excitement of gotta-be-innit-to-win-it state lotteries in the past year but Gio Benitez -- no Nate Silver, he -- offered a pretty low bar in his example of how likely a ticketbuying gambler is to hit the jackpot: you have a better chance with Powerball than you do of filling out a perfect bracket for March Madness. Well, duh!
CBS' On The Road feature from Steve Hartman did not think it worth the effort to come up with a fresh basketball story to illustrate his network's tournament. He just replayed a favorite from four weeks ago.
In cross-promotion for primetime magazine shows…
Elizabeth Vargas turned up for the second time this week (here on Monday) with a preview of 20/20's After The Party's Over on ABC, her investigation into the drunken teenage rapes at the party thrown by the high school football players of Steubenville, Ohio. Vargas publicized a documentary movie by Denice Evans entitled The Spitting Game without offering any information about it -- which makes sense since, drunkenness aside, according to IMDb, it does not seem to be relevant: IMDb says The Spitting Game is about consensual promiscuity not rape; and about adults in college not under-age teenagers in high school.
NBC anchor Brian Williams showed us a preview of him on Rock Center yukking it up with the three boisterous Brothers Emanuel -- a disconcerting clip, given that earlier in Williams' own newscast Rehema Ellis had run a clip of Brother Rahm, the Mayor of Chicago, being denounced as a cowardly bully.
Jeff Rossen previewed his report on worries about fire alarms on NBC's Dateline. Only six months ago, Rossen was also on the nightly news -- worrying about fire alarms.
Lastly, how dreadful was David Kerley's story on ABC about Philippe Jennard, a 61-year-old wannabe-pilot who wandered into the cockpit of a USAirways jetliner before takeoff in Philadelphia in a fake Air France uniform? First, Kerley relied on Virtual View computer animation to retell the completely mundane facts of an airline check-in and an open cockpit door. Second, he illustrated the story with fictional Hollywood footage from Catch Me If You Can, with a connection that was so tenuous -- via a totally unconnected wannabe-pilot in Italy last year -- as to be non-existent. Third, he called Jennard an "imposter"…or was it "impostor"? He was an imposter during substitute anchor David Muir's tease at the start of the newscast and an impostor during commentary by ABC News' aviation analyst John Nance. Fourth, nothing newsworthy happened -- no harm, no foul, no story. No wonder it went unmentioned by the other two newscasts.
