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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JANUARY 29, 2013
President Barack Obama followed in the footsteps of Monday's bipartisan group of senators as he traveled to Las Vegas to deliver a speech to outline his, similar, proposals for immigration legislation. He suggested that he would only submit his bill if Congress failed to act independently, so his speech may have been moot. None of the three newscasts treated his talking points as important enough to warrant the lead position -- but it did qualify as Story of the Day, with White House coverage by NBC's Peter Alexander and ABC's Reena Ninan, and a background feature from Bill Whitaker in Los Angeles on CBS. Whitaker described how a single immigrant family may include members with three different types of legal status: undocumented, dreamer and citizen.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JANUARY 29, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
IMMIGRATION AGAIN -- PRESIDENT GETS LESS BUZZ THAN SENATE President Barack Obama followed in the footsteps of Monday's bipartisan group of senators as he traveled to Las Vegas to deliver a speech to outline his, similar, proposals for immigration legislation. He suggested that he would only submit his bill if Congress failed to act independently, so his speech may have been moot. None of the three newscasts treated his talking points as important enough to warrant the lead position -- but it did qualify as Story of the Day, with White House coverage by NBC's Peter Alexander and ABC's Reena Ninan, and a background feature from Bill Whitaker in Los Angeles on CBS. Whitaker described how a single immigrant family may include members with three different types of legal status: undocumented, dreamer and citizen.
So what did each newscast select as its lead item instead?
NBC's decision was lame, assigning Mike Seidel of its sibling network, The Weather Channel, to tell us that storms are coming. ABC, too, found the weather newsworthy, assigning Good Morning America's Sam Champion to forecasting duties. CBS gave it a pass.
ABC's decision was an outlier: neither of the other two newscasts considered David Muir's statistic that home sale prices rose an average of 5.5% in 2012 to be worthy of note. I am inclined to agree with NBC and CBS. It does not sound like a big deal.
CBS had the inside track on its lead item, since the hero of the tale, Sgt Brendan Marrocco, had been profiled by its Pentagon correspondent David Martin in May of 2010. Check out this playlist of Martin's coverage of mutilated and disabled military veterans and you will see that Marrocco was no aberration. Both Martin and Jim Miklaszewski, his Pentagon counterpart at NBC, covered the news conference at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where the sergeant, who had both arms and both legs blown off while fighting in Iraq, displayed two newly transplanted arms. CBS found the surgery so interesting that in-house physician Jon LaPook followed up with a quick how-to guide.
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS Each of the newscasts tried a foreign policy story. From Cairo, ABC's Lama Hasan really explained very little about the politics of the street protests there. CBS, as usual, was committed to covering the rebellion in Syria: Clarissa Ward aired the State Department explanation for limiting its aid to humanitarian funds. From the State Department, Andrea Mitchell played highlights of her exit interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton: more on her health and on Campaign 2016 than on her actual tenure.
Last week both ABC's David Kerley and ABC's Pierre Thomas took advantage of CCTV security video of retail store burglaries to instill gritty realism into crime coverage. Now Jim Axelrod does the same. By the way, Axelrod of CBS filed from New Orleans where the Super Bowl will be aired by CBS. Yesterday and today, Mark Strassmann of CBS, too, filed from a New Orleans dateline. How many more times will CBS make New Orleans newsworthy before the big game?
Atlanta-based Steve Osunsami also filed a Super Bowl feature on ABC. He reminded us of the Hollywood biopic The Blind Side about Michael Oher, the poor black boy adopted by a white family who grew up playing football to win a scholarship to Ole Miss. Osunsami found Patrick Willis, another Ole Miss alumnus, also born into extreme poverty, also raised by a white family, also a football player. Willis and Oher are both playing on Sunday.
ABC did not have a correspondent based in Portugal to interview extreme surfer Garrett McNamara in person about his success in sliding down a hundred-foot wall of water. Nick Watt had to conduct his q-&-a by telephone while voicing-over images of the tiny daredevil surrounded by the enormous wave. The joke was that Watt decided that his end of the conversation should take place on a beach in Ventura -- wave height, five feet. You should have filed the story in a wetsuit, Nick.
It was odd that NBC should decide to cover research from Spain about the best time to eat lunch when on the Mediterranean Diet. Robert Bazell filed the sort of story that normally belongs on ABC's newscast.
The idea of Seth Meyers' Weekend Update satire on Saturday Night Live is to make fun of the foibles of the news agenda of the mainstream media. So it is journalistically nonsensical to quote a Meyers joke -- especially an unfunny one -- as evidence that the story being ridiculed was indeed actually newsworthy. Yet that is what Tom Costello resorted to in his closing feature on orangutans and iPads at the National Zoo. Oh wait! Meyers and Costello both work for NBC! This was not journalism after all, just cross-promotion.
CBS' closing feature was superior. Charlie d'Agata from Moscow on skullduggery at the Bolshoi Ballet.
So what did each newscast select as its lead item instead?
NBC's decision was lame, assigning Mike Seidel of its sibling network, The Weather Channel, to tell us that storms are coming. ABC, too, found the weather newsworthy, assigning Good Morning America's Sam Champion to forecasting duties. CBS gave it a pass.
ABC's decision was an outlier: neither of the other two newscasts considered David Muir's statistic that home sale prices rose an average of 5.5% in 2012 to be worthy of note. I am inclined to agree with NBC and CBS. It does not sound like a big deal.
CBS had the inside track on its lead item, since the hero of the tale, Sgt Brendan Marrocco, had been profiled by its Pentagon correspondent David Martin in May of 2010. Check out this playlist of Martin's coverage of mutilated and disabled military veterans and you will see that Marrocco was no aberration. Both Martin and Jim Miklaszewski, his Pentagon counterpart at NBC, covered the news conference at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where the sergeant, who had both arms and both legs blown off while fighting in Iraq, displayed two newly transplanted arms. CBS found the surgery so interesting that in-house physician Jon LaPook followed up with a quick how-to guide.
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS Each of the newscasts tried a foreign policy story. From Cairo, ABC's Lama Hasan really explained very little about the politics of the street protests there. CBS, as usual, was committed to covering the rebellion in Syria: Clarissa Ward aired the State Department explanation for limiting its aid to humanitarian funds. From the State Department, Andrea Mitchell played highlights of her exit interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton: more on her health and on Campaign 2016 than on her actual tenure.
Last week both ABC's David Kerley and ABC's Pierre Thomas took advantage of CCTV security video of retail store burglaries to instill gritty realism into crime coverage. Now Jim Axelrod does the same. By the way, Axelrod of CBS filed from New Orleans where the Super Bowl will be aired by CBS. Yesterday and today, Mark Strassmann of CBS, too, filed from a New Orleans dateline. How many more times will CBS make New Orleans newsworthy before the big game?
Atlanta-based Steve Osunsami also filed a Super Bowl feature on ABC. He reminded us of the Hollywood biopic The Blind Side about Michael Oher, the poor black boy adopted by a white family who grew up playing football to win a scholarship to Ole Miss. Osunsami found Patrick Willis, another Ole Miss alumnus, also born into extreme poverty, also raised by a white family, also a football player. Willis and Oher are both playing on Sunday.
ABC did not have a correspondent based in Portugal to interview extreme surfer Garrett McNamara in person about his success in sliding down a hundred-foot wall of water. Nick Watt had to conduct his q-&-a by telephone while voicing-over images of the tiny daredevil surrounded by the enormous wave. The joke was that Watt decided that his end of the conversation should take place on a beach in Ventura -- wave height, five feet. You should have filed the story in a wetsuit, Nick.
It was odd that NBC should decide to cover research from Spain about the best time to eat lunch when on the Mediterranean Diet. Robert Bazell filed the sort of story that normally belongs on ABC's newscast.
The idea of Seth Meyers' Weekend Update satire on Saturday Night Live is to make fun of the foibles of the news agenda of the mainstream media. So it is journalistically nonsensical to quote a Meyers joke -- especially an unfunny one -- as evidence that the story being ridiculed was indeed actually newsworthy. Yet that is what Tom Costello resorted to in his closing feature on orangutans and iPads at the National Zoo. Oh wait! Meyers and Costello both work for NBC! This was not journalism after all, just cross-promotion.
CBS' closing feature was superior. Charlie d'Agata from Moscow on skullduggery at the Bolshoi Ballet.
