 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM NOVEMBER 12, 2013
The Philippines continued as Story of the Day with a total of four separate packages filed from the debris left by Typhoon Haiyan. NBC and CBS both led with the storm. ABC made the astonishing decision to give a routine early winter storm over the Great Lakes precedence over the unprecedented disaster in the western Pacific. What warped priorities led ABC to select meteorologist Ginger Zee -- with her winter driving tips for kitty litter in the trunk and penny grooves in the tire tracks -- over Terry Moran amid the would-be evacuees standing in line at Tacloban Airport?
TYNDALL PICKS FOR NOVEMBER 12, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
ABC’S ZEE TREATS PHILIPPINES DISASTER WITH DISDAIN The Philippines continued as Story of the Day with a total of four separate packages filed from the debris left by Typhoon Haiyan. NBC and CBS both led with the storm. ABC made the astonishing decision to give a routine early winter storm over the Great Lakes precedence over the unprecedented disaster in the western Pacific. What warped priorities led ABC to select meteorologist Ginger Zee -- with her winter driving tips for kitty litter in the trunk and penny grooves in the tire tracks -- over Terry Moran amid the would-be evacuees standing in line at Tacloban Airport?
On CBS, Seth Doane too was at Tacloban Airport, while his colleague Bill Whitaker filed an eyewitness report of the landfall from stormchaser Josh Morgerman, now safely returned to Los Angeles. On NBC, Angus Walker filed the relief story, surveying the lack of food, water, and shelter, while the network's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman worried about diarrhea, dysentery, diphtheria and typhoid fever, as she surveyed the rotting corpses, the raw sewage, the wrecked property, and the dead animals polluting the water supply.
POP MORE PILLS Because of her assignment to the typhoon, NBC's Dr Nancy was not on hand for the Big Pharma story that was covered by the in-house physicians at the other two newscasts, Richard Besser at ABC and Jon LaPook at CBS. On the agenda was the recommendation that many more patients -- even some of us with healthy levels of cholesterol in our bloodstream -- should take prescription statin pills every day for the rest of our lives. The guidelines, organized by Dr Neil Stone of Northwestern Memorial, suggested that fully one third of all adults should by hooked on statins: that means anyone with a 7.5% risk of suffering a heart attack at any time in the next decade.
NBC assigned the story to Stephanie Gosk, a non-specialist correspondent, before finding a back-up in-house physician for a quick q-&-a (at the tail of the Gosk videostream). Tanya Benenson is not a reporter; she is management, the Chief Medical Officer for the NBC-Universal corporation.
None of the packages told us how much these extra pills will cost the healthcare system, nor how many extra lives will likely be saved as a consequence. Dr Rich at ABC did warn us of the side effect that statin-poppers will have to give up grapefruit juice.
HEALTHCARE POLICY Former President Bill Clinton waded into the politics of healthcare with his suggestion that the Affordable Care Act be amended to allow everybody with an individual insurance plan to renew it, without exception, as President Barack Obama had previously, erroneously, promised. CBS' White House correspondent Major Garrett was skeptical about the logistics of such renewal. The other two White House correspondents -- ABC's Jonathan Karl and NBC's Peter Alexander -- ran the Clinton soundbite with a credit to OZY.com.
ABC's Karl did what he likes to do in his White House reports -- show footage of himself questioning the press secretary at the daily briefing as he goes about his newsgathering. Jay Carney is in on the gimmick, remember: here he is sarcastically mimicking Karl's histrionic style.
Since the botched launch of the federal exchange Website at the start of October, CBS has made an extra effort to cover healthcare reform outside-the-Beltway. Don Dahler's files the latest, on the progress in statewide enrolment in Connecticut.
MINE’S BIGGER THAN YOURS IS File it under the category of reporters who leave the role of journalist and cast themselves instead as central character in their own reality TV show. This time ABC's Bob Woodruff poses as hardhat ironworker, taking his third trip in the last 18 months to the top of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. "Oh My God!" he exclaims from on high, as if he had never seen the view before.
The skyscraper story was the fabricated feud between Chicago and New York City over which city has the taller building. NBC did the right thing, assigning Katy Tur and Kevin Tibbles to treat the whole thing as a joke. ABC's Woodruff tried to be patriotic but bungled it. He sneered at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Makkah Royal in the Saudi Arabia for erecting tall structures for the wrong reasons: "Pride. Ego. Hubris." Then he asked Liberty Tower ironworkers what their motives were instead. Their answer turned out to be just the same as those pesky Arabs: to be "Proud."
FARIS TO THE RESCUE For the fifth month in a row, ABC's Paula Faris offers her Real Money tips. Here she was in October, September, August, and July. This is the format: she picks a routine household expense (this time, supermarket grocery shopping) and introduces her handpicked expert (ABC Tech Editor Joanna Stern is a favorite) to audit the budget of a typical nuclear family and to suggest a series of smartphone apps that promise cost-cutting ($160 out of each $500 spent).
Receiving Real Money free publicity this time:
Lozo.com
Grocery Store IQ
Retail Me Not
KitchMe
ibotta
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the Justice Department in August when it found antitrust problems with the proposed merger between American Airlines and USAirways. Now that the dispute has been resolved, only NBC had a reporter explain it. NBC's transportation man Tom Costello at the hub at Miami International folded in a soundbite from his legal-eagle colleague Pete Williams.
A new ambassador to the Imperial Court in Tokyo was sworn in. You would think that this would allow CBS' State Department correspondent Margaret Brennan to bring us up to date on the state of diplomatic, commercial and geostrategic relations with Japan. Nah -- let's just run more nostalgic footage of Caroline Kennedy's childhood in Camelot.
The controversy over the Keystone pipeline does not get as much coverage as it should. Anna Werner's package on CBS was just the seventh to be filed in the past two years on the three nightly newscasts. Of those seven, ABC accounts for zero. Werner's report was on the soon-to-be-operational southern portion of the Keystone. She gave credit to the good-government activists at Public Citizen for the tip on 125 inspections to check on possible leaks from rejected welds and dents from rocks.
ANIMAL HOUSE ABC ran a pair of animal stories but CBS closed with the most fascinating of the three. On ABC, David Wright included another clip from the CNN documentary Blackfish to illustrate SeaWorld's attempt to restore the glory days of Shamu to its killer whale shows. Wright's colleague Linsey Davis publicized Blackfish in June and July. Also on the animal beat was Alex Marquardt. He was in South Africa to publicize Loebies Guest Farm in Bela-Bela where tourists can hang out with lions and leopards, mongooses and meerkats.
See Marquardt do that thing where he leaves the role of journalist and casts himself as the central character in his own reality TV show, this time as a lion tamer. "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!" exclaims Alex as he tries to use a lion as a shawl.
A mystery bacterium is eating away at the orange-and-purple starfish of Monterey Bay. Check out the time-lapse video shown by CBS' Ben Tracy: one by one its five limbs fall off and in just seven hours the starfish dies.
On CBS, Seth Doane too was at Tacloban Airport, while his colleague Bill Whitaker filed an eyewitness report of the landfall from stormchaser Josh Morgerman, now safely returned to Los Angeles. On NBC, Angus Walker filed the relief story, surveying the lack of food, water, and shelter, while the network's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman worried about diarrhea, dysentery, diphtheria and typhoid fever, as she surveyed the rotting corpses, the raw sewage, the wrecked property, and the dead animals polluting the water supply.
POP MORE PILLS Because of her assignment to the typhoon, NBC's Dr Nancy was not on hand for the Big Pharma story that was covered by the in-house physicians at the other two newscasts, Richard Besser at ABC and Jon LaPook at CBS. On the agenda was the recommendation that many more patients -- even some of us with healthy levels of cholesterol in our bloodstream -- should take prescription statin pills every day for the rest of our lives. The guidelines, organized by Dr Neil Stone of Northwestern Memorial, suggested that fully one third of all adults should by hooked on statins: that means anyone with a 7.5% risk of suffering a heart attack at any time in the next decade.
NBC assigned the story to Stephanie Gosk, a non-specialist correspondent, before finding a back-up in-house physician for a quick q-&-a (at the tail of the Gosk videostream). Tanya Benenson is not a reporter; she is management, the Chief Medical Officer for the NBC-Universal corporation.
None of the packages told us how much these extra pills will cost the healthcare system, nor how many extra lives will likely be saved as a consequence. Dr Rich at ABC did warn us of the side effect that statin-poppers will have to give up grapefruit juice.
HEALTHCARE POLICY Former President Bill Clinton waded into the politics of healthcare with his suggestion that the Affordable Care Act be amended to allow everybody with an individual insurance plan to renew it, without exception, as President Barack Obama had previously, erroneously, promised. CBS' White House correspondent Major Garrett was skeptical about the logistics of such renewal. The other two White House correspondents -- ABC's Jonathan Karl and NBC's Peter Alexander -- ran the Clinton soundbite with a credit to OZY.com.
ABC's Karl did what he likes to do in his White House reports -- show footage of himself questioning the press secretary at the daily briefing as he goes about his newsgathering. Jay Carney is in on the gimmick, remember: here he is sarcastically mimicking Karl's histrionic style.
Since the botched launch of the federal exchange Website at the start of October, CBS has made an extra effort to cover healthcare reform outside-the-Beltway. Don Dahler's files the latest, on the progress in statewide enrolment in Connecticut.
MINE’S BIGGER THAN YOURS IS File it under the category of reporters who leave the role of journalist and cast themselves instead as central character in their own reality TV show. This time ABC's Bob Woodruff poses as hardhat ironworker, taking his third trip in the last 18 months to the top of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. "Oh My God!" he exclaims from on high, as if he had never seen the view before.
The skyscraper story was the fabricated feud between Chicago and New York City over which city has the taller building. NBC did the right thing, assigning Katy Tur and Kevin Tibbles to treat the whole thing as a joke. ABC's Woodruff tried to be patriotic but bungled it. He sneered at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Makkah Royal in the Saudi Arabia for erecting tall structures for the wrong reasons: "Pride. Ego. Hubris." Then he asked Liberty Tower ironworkers what their motives were instead. Their answer turned out to be just the same as those pesky Arabs: to be "Proud."
FARIS TO THE RESCUE For the fifth month in a row, ABC's Paula Faris offers her Real Money tips. Here she was in October, September, August, and July. This is the format: she picks a routine household expense (this time, supermarket grocery shopping) and introduces her handpicked expert (ABC Tech Editor Joanna Stern is a favorite) to audit the budget of a typical nuclear family and to suggest a series of smartphone apps that promise cost-cutting ($160 out of each $500 spent).
Receiving Real Money free publicity this time:
Lozo.com
Grocery Store IQ
Retail Me Not
KitchMe
ibotta
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to cover the Justice Department in August when it found antitrust problems with the proposed merger between American Airlines and USAirways. Now that the dispute has been resolved, only NBC had a reporter explain it. NBC's transportation man Tom Costello at the hub at Miami International folded in a soundbite from his legal-eagle colleague Pete Williams.
A new ambassador to the Imperial Court in Tokyo was sworn in. You would think that this would allow CBS' State Department correspondent Margaret Brennan to bring us up to date on the state of diplomatic, commercial and geostrategic relations with Japan. Nah -- let's just run more nostalgic footage of Caroline Kennedy's childhood in Camelot.
The controversy over the Keystone pipeline does not get as much coverage as it should. Anna Werner's package on CBS was just the seventh to be filed in the past two years on the three nightly newscasts. Of those seven, ABC accounts for zero. Werner's report was on the soon-to-be-operational southern portion of the Keystone. She gave credit to the good-government activists at Public Citizen for the tip on 125 inspections to check on possible leaks from rejected welds and dents from rocks.
ANIMAL HOUSE ABC ran a pair of animal stories but CBS closed with the most fascinating of the three. On ABC, David Wright included another clip from the CNN documentary Blackfish to illustrate SeaWorld's attempt to restore the glory days of Shamu to its killer whale shows. Wright's colleague Linsey Davis publicized Blackfish in June and July. Also on the animal beat was Alex Marquardt. He was in South Africa to publicize Loebies Guest Farm in Bela-Bela where tourists can hang out with lions and leopards, mongooses and meerkats.
See Marquardt do that thing where he leaves the role of journalist and casts himself as the central character in his own reality TV show, this time as a lion tamer. "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!" exclaims Alex as he tries to use a lion as a shawl.
A mystery bacterium is eating away at the orange-and-purple starfish of Monterey Bay. Check out the time-lapse video shown by CBS' Ben Tracy: one by one its five limbs fall off and in just seven hours the starfish dies.
