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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 20, 2013
Monday's devastating tornado in Moore Okla was headline news all right. It was just not the type of story that the network nightly newscasts are designed to handle best. Yet it was so awe-inspiring and so dynamic and so heartbreaking that it could not be ignored. Fully 91% of the three-network newshole (54 min out of 60) was devoted to the Oklahoma twister. NBC's Brian Williams anchored on the road, but unhelpfully, from Los Angeles. His newscast was 100% Oklahoma; CBS and ABC each sneaked in a single extraneous item.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 20, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
| click to play | story | angle | reporter | dateline | |
| CBS | Tornado season | Mile-wide twister devastates family homes in Moore | Anna Werner | Oklahoma |
| NBC | Tornado season | Highways blocked, power outages around Moore | Mike Bettes | Oklahoma |
| NBC | Tornado season | Elementary school in Moore directly devastated | Lance West | Oklahoma |
| ABC | Tornado season | Massive twister in Moore, part of severe system | Sam Champion | Oklahoma |
| NBC | Tornado season | Shelter below ground, debris flying through air | Chris Warren | Weather Channel |
| ABC | Tornado season | Stormchasers act as early warning for EMS 911 | Ginger Zee | Oklahoma |
| NBC | Tornado season | Moore suffered similar massive twister in 1999 | Mike Seidel | Oklahoma |
| CBS | Tornado season | Forecast for line of twisters from Texas to Ill | David Bernard | No Dateline |
| CBS | IRS targeted Tea Party conservatives for scrutiny | Office handling claims is overworked, apolitical | Dean Reynolds | Cincinnati |
| ABC | Police: Long Island hostage siege fatal error | Cop rushes in; kills captive coed in crossfire | Gio Benitez | Long Island |
OKLAHOMA! WHERE THE WIND COMES WHISTLING… Monday's devastating tornado in Moore Okla was headline news all right. It was just not the type of story that the network nightly newscasts are designed to handle best. Yet it was so awe-inspiring and so dynamic and so heartbreaking that it could not be ignored. Fully 91% of the three-network newshole (54 min out of 60) was devoted to the Oklahoma twister. NBC's Brian Williams anchored on the road, but unhelpfully, from Los Angeles. His newscast was 100% Oklahoma; CBS and ABC each sneaked in a single extraneous item.
This is what I mean when I say that this is not the type of story the nightly newscasts are designed to handle:
The idea of airing a newscast in a once-in-every-24-hour cycle is that it gives correspondents time to think through the implications of each day's stories, to collect the best soundbites, to edit the events properly, to write the story clearly, to separate the essential from the incidental, to discover that special vignette or anecdotal image that summarizes the whole.
In all, this is useful, if anachronistic journalism. It means that, for important stories, we viewers can get on with our lives for the remainder of the day, secure in the knowledge that the latest breaking developments are being monitored, evaluated and filtered by professionals on our behalf.
In the wake of the tornado in Moore, the newshour arrived too soon, the situation on the ground was changing too rapidly, and the logistics of reaching the scene to start reporting were too time-consuming, for the network newscasts to differentiate themselves from the non-stop, non-reflexive style of breaking news on the 24-hour cable channels.
So if, in the first hours after the devastation, you were looking for considered, properly-reported stories on, say, the role of global warming in exacerbating severe weather, or the wisdom of zoning laws that allow single-family and trailer homes in a well-traveled path of Tornado Alley, or the costs and subsidies of storm shelters for working class residents, then you were bound to be disappointed.
The only category of expertise, able to take the long view, that was immediately available for the newscasts was meteorology. Thus…
NBC went to two correspondents from its sibling network, the Weather Channel, who were already deployed in the field in Oklahoma to cover earlier, smaller twisters: Mike Bettes and Mike Seidel.
The morning shows were also represented: Sam Champion of ABC's Good Morning America, who was already in Shawnee; Al Roker of NBC's Today, who filed briefly from Moore.
By remote, CBS relied on forecaster Dave Bernard from WFOR-TV, its Miami affiliate. NBC went to Weather Channel headquarters in Atlanta where Chris Warren offered detailed, expert radar analysis.
And from ABC's xTreme Weather Team, Ginger Zee showed off her stormchasing Dominator trucks complete with footage from tvnweather.com. Of all the TV meteorologists, Zee is the true weather-porn star.
ELSEWHERE… This is the outline of the remainder of the tornado coverage.
For general network news reporters, CBS managed to get Anna Werner on the scene, complete with a crew, from her bureau in Dallas. ABC's Mike Boettcher, by coincidence, happens to live in Oklahoma. He filed by telephone, as an eyewitness, but did not have a camera crew, and there is no online link to his call-in.
NBC made most use of, and best use of, its local affiliate, which is KFOR-TV. Lance West reported by news helicopter on the Plaza Towers Elementary School, directly hit, perhaps with children still inside. NBC also aired a compilation of KFOR-TV's live coverage, which is well worth the look.
All three newscasts consulted local municipal officials, none of whom told us much: Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore on NBC; City Manager Stephen Eddy of Moore on ABC; City Manager Jim Couch of Oklahoma City on CBS. CBS anchor Scott Pelley also interviewed Mary Fallin, Oklahoma's Republican Governor, but she was unenlightening too.
Then there was vox pop eyewitness testimony. Again, we can expect individuals' first-person accounts to be more finely honed, more selectively chosen, and better edited for impact, as the coverage unravels. For starters, NBC gave us Todd and Jennifer Tabor; ABC chose Melissa Newtown (at the tail of the city manager videostream); CBS did not identify its storm survivor.
About those two extraneous stories: CBS, which has covered the Internal Revenue Service scandal of the tax-exempt Tea Party applicants more heavily than its rivals, sent Dean Reynolds to Cincinnati, where the office accused of the targeting is located. Bonnie Esrig, a onetime manager there, offered a mundane explanation. Overwork.
Why was Andrea Rebello, a 21-year-old Hofstra University student shot dead? ABC's Gio Benitez suggested that a cop messed up. Instead of following procedure and waiting out a hostage siege, Officer Nikolas Budimlic rushed in and killed the coed in the crossfire. What is spooky about Benitez' report is that he shows how VirTra's virtual reality simulator is used to train cops how to shoot guns safely and then he depicts the standoff where Budimlic misfires using his own network's Virtual View computer animation. It's a Hall of Mirrors.
This is what I mean when I say that this is not the type of story the nightly newscasts are designed to handle:
The idea of airing a newscast in a once-in-every-24-hour cycle is that it gives correspondents time to think through the implications of each day's stories, to collect the best soundbites, to edit the events properly, to write the story clearly, to separate the essential from the incidental, to discover that special vignette or anecdotal image that summarizes the whole.
In all, this is useful, if anachronistic journalism. It means that, for important stories, we viewers can get on with our lives for the remainder of the day, secure in the knowledge that the latest breaking developments are being monitored, evaluated and filtered by professionals on our behalf.
In the wake of the tornado in Moore, the newshour arrived too soon, the situation on the ground was changing too rapidly, and the logistics of reaching the scene to start reporting were too time-consuming, for the network newscasts to differentiate themselves from the non-stop, non-reflexive style of breaking news on the 24-hour cable channels.
So if, in the first hours after the devastation, you were looking for considered, properly-reported stories on, say, the role of global warming in exacerbating severe weather, or the wisdom of zoning laws that allow single-family and trailer homes in a well-traveled path of Tornado Alley, or the costs and subsidies of storm shelters for working class residents, then you were bound to be disappointed.
The only category of expertise, able to take the long view, that was immediately available for the newscasts was meteorology. Thus…
NBC went to two correspondents from its sibling network, the Weather Channel, who were already deployed in the field in Oklahoma to cover earlier, smaller twisters: Mike Bettes and Mike Seidel.
The morning shows were also represented: Sam Champion of ABC's Good Morning America, who was already in Shawnee; Al Roker of NBC's Today, who filed briefly from Moore.
By remote, CBS relied on forecaster Dave Bernard from WFOR-TV, its Miami affiliate. NBC went to Weather Channel headquarters in Atlanta where Chris Warren offered detailed, expert radar analysis.
And from ABC's xTreme Weather Team, Ginger Zee showed off her stormchasing Dominator trucks complete with footage from tvnweather.com. Of all the TV meteorologists, Zee is the true weather-porn star.
ELSEWHERE… This is the outline of the remainder of the tornado coverage.
For general network news reporters, CBS managed to get Anna Werner on the scene, complete with a crew, from her bureau in Dallas. ABC's Mike Boettcher, by coincidence, happens to live in Oklahoma. He filed by telephone, as an eyewitness, but did not have a camera crew, and there is no online link to his call-in.
NBC made most use of, and best use of, its local affiliate, which is KFOR-TV. Lance West reported by news helicopter on the Plaza Towers Elementary School, directly hit, perhaps with children still inside. NBC also aired a compilation of KFOR-TV's live coverage, which is well worth the look.
All three newscasts consulted local municipal officials, none of whom told us much: Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore on NBC; City Manager Stephen Eddy of Moore on ABC; City Manager Jim Couch of Oklahoma City on CBS. CBS anchor Scott Pelley also interviewed Mary Fallin, Oklahoma's Republican Governor, but she was unenlightening too.
Then there was vox pop eyewitness testimony. Again, we can expect individuals' first-person accounts to be more finely honed, more selectively chosen, and better edited for impact, as the coverage unravels. For starters, NBC gave us Todd and Jennifer Tabor; ABC chose Melissa Newtown (at the tail of the city manager videostream); CBS did not identify its storm survivor.
About those two extraneous stories: CBS, which has covered the Internal Revenue Service scandal of the tax-exempt Tea Party applicants more heavily than its rivals, sent Dean Reynolds to Cincinnati, where the office accused of the targeting is located. Bonnie Esrig, a onetime manager there, offered a mundane explanation. Overwork.
Why was Andrea Rebello, a 21-year-old Hofstra University student shot dead? ABC's Gio Benitez suggested that a cop messed up. Instead of following procedure and waiting out a hostage siege, Officer Nikolas Budimlic rushed in and killed the coed in the crossfire. What is spooky about Benitez' report is that he shows how VirTra's virtual reality simulator is used to train cops how to shoot guns safely and then he depicts the standoff where Budimlic misfires using his own network's Virtual View computer animation. It's a Hall of Mirrors.
