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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM FEBRUARY 8, 2013
Blanket coverage of the blizzard heading for New England was the obvious choice for Story of the Day. Correspondents were dotted all over the northeast: ABC's Ginger Zee and CBS' Terrell Brown in Boston; NBC's Ron Mott in Providence; ABC's Gio Benitez in Connecticut; CBS' Seth Doane and ABC's Ron Claiborne along the Sandy-ravaged Atlantic seaboard; NBC's Rehema Ellis outside a closed LaGuardia Airport; CBS' Jim Axelrod with New York City's Strongest as they prepared to plow. ABC's Benitez reported on the instruction that cars get off the highway from the inside of a car traveling towards the storm. NBC's Mott told us that so much liquor was leaving Rhode Island's package stores that this weekend was Christmas in February for them. Such coverage was all very well for local viewers in the storm zone. Yet these are national newscasts. It is not clear that the looming storm was important for the rest of the country.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR FEBRUARY 8, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
BLIZZARD WILL HIT OVERNIGHT -- OR DURING THE OVERNIGHT HOUR Blanket coverage of the blizzard heading for New England was the obvious choice for Story of the Day. Correspondents were dotted all over the northeast: ABC's Ginger Zee and CBS' Terrell Brown in Boston; NBC's Ron Mott in Providence; ABC's Gio Benitez in Connecticut; CBS' Seth Doane and ABC's Ron Claiborne along the Sandy-ravaged Atlantic seaboard; NBC's Rehema Ellis outside a closed LaGuardia Airport; CBS' Jim Axelrod with New York City's Strongest as they prepared to plow. ABC's Benitez reported on the instruction that cars get off the highway from the inside of a car traveling towards the storm. NBC's Mott told us that so much liquor was leaving Rhode Island's package stores that this weekend was Christmas in February for them. Such coverage was all very well for local viewers in the storm zone. Yet these are national newscasts. It is not clear that the looming storm was important for the rest of the country.
There was an entire gaggle of meteorologists deployed, too. NBC made use of its sibling network The Weather Channel to showcase Jim Cantore and Mike Seidel. ABC and NBC used their morning show weathermen, Sam Champion (at the tail of the Claiborne videostream) and Al Roker. CBS consulted its affiliate system, WFOR-TV's David Bernard, the hurricane expert in Miami. ABC showed off Ginger Zee, the leader of its eXtreme Weather-Team.
What is this weird Wilson-Pickett-style TV-weather locution that three of them used? We know about The Midnight Hour but not…
"into the overnight" -- Ginger Zee
"during the overnight hour" -- David Bernard
"throughout the overnight hour" -- Sam Champion.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS All three newscasts followed-up on Thursday's Story of the Day, the LAPD's murder manhunt for one of its former officers. There was nothing new to report from the search for Christopher Dorner in the Big Bear Mountain ski resort, so mostly we heard recaps from ABC's David Wright and CBS' Ben Tracy. At CBS, John Miller, a recent member of the LAPD command, knows Big Bear well and gave us travel tips. ABC's Pierre Thomas showed us the scary size of the bullet that Dorner may be firing.
Only Miguel Almaguer, on NBC, mentioned the shocking story of a pair of newspaper delivery women, shot multiple times by six police officers falsely believing that they had tracked Dorner down.
The big crime story that started the week was the kidnapping of a five-year-old boy from a school bus in Alabama and his rescue after being held as a hostage in an underground bunker for six days. ABC's David Muir touted an Exclusive for the preview of his report on the boy, Ethan (last name not given) on ABC's 20/20 in primetime. Two problems: first, the exclusive content consisted of video footage of the boy after his rescue, yet Muir's three-minute report contained just 13 seconds of such video; second, Muir's colleague Gio Benitez had reported that Ethan was autistic, yet Muir told us that the boy loved to be hugged and tucked in by his mother -- the opposite of autistic behavior.
The actual insights that Holly Williams provided into the Maha Kumbh Mela in her CBS report from Prayag on the River Ganges were unremarkable. Her images of the Hindu pilgrimage, though, were unimaginable, worth the look.
Penn State University has received such terrible publicity over the last 15 months because of Coach Jerry Sandusky. The United States Postal Service received such a blow to its morale just this week. Steve Hartman goes On The Road to the State College campus for CBS to bring us Mailman Mike, a small consolation.
Welcome back Lisa Myers and her NBC stalwart The Fleecing of America. This time Myers gives Senator John McCain a stage to strut his stuff as a vigilante against waste-fraud-abuse. How bad is the seven-year, $1bn project that the Beltway contractor Computer Services Corporation delivered to the Pentagon? It is worse than a $600 toilet seat. How is CSC being punished? It is already working on four more Air Force projects.
Oddly, NBC has been blind to the mounting scourge of addiction to prescription painkillers. Over the past two years, ABC and CBS have covered pharmaceutical narcotics equally, with five packages each; NBC none at all. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook offers the latest entry as these RX opiates account for 16K deaths annually nationwide.
If you like fingernails on a chalkboard, you'll adore ABC's Person of the Week. Anchor Diane Sawyer donated free publicity to Nigella Lawson, the English celebrity chef and self-styled domestic goddess, to promote her latest book Nigellissima. Hearing Lawson's morbid history of a dead mother and a dead sister and a dead husband, you would think she was a Notre Dame linebacker. Sawyer's generosity was hardly altruistic: ABC has an interest in promoting Lawson's role on The Taste, its own cooking reality show. The self-serving anecdote Lawson tells about her courageous honesty when dealing with ABC's Hollywood publicists turns lack-of-vanity into the utmost in vanity.
There was an entire gaggle of meteorologists deployed, too. NBC made use of its sibling network The Weather Channel to showcase Jim Cantore and Mike Seidel. ABC and NBC used their morning show weathermen, Sam Champion (at the tail of the Claiborne videostream) and Al Roker. CBS consulted its affiliate system, WFOR-TV's David Bernard, the hurricane expert in Miami. ABC showed off Ginger Zee, the leader of its eXtreme Weather-Team.
What is this weird Wilson-Pickett-style TV-weather locution that three of them used? We know about The Midnight Hour but not…
"into the overnight" -- Ginger Zee
"during the overnight hour" -- David Bernard
"throughout the overnight hour" -- Sam Champion.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS All three newscasts followed-up on Thursday's Story of the Day, the LAPD's murder manhunt for one of its former officers. There was nothing new to report from the search for Christopher Dorner in the Big Bear Mountain ski resort, so mostly we heard recaps from ABC's David Wright and CBS' Ben Tracy. At CBS, John Miller, a recent member of the LAPD command, knows Big Bear well and gave us travel tips. ABC's Pierre Thomas showed us the scary size of the bullet that Dorner may be firing.
Only Miguel Almaguer, on NBC, mentioned the shocking story of a pair of newspaper delivery women, shot multiple times by six police officers falsely believing that they had tracked Dorner down.
The big crime story that started the week was the kidnapping of a five-year-old boy from a school bus in Alabama and his rescue after being held as a hostage in an underground bunker for six days. ABC's David Muir touted an Exclusive for the preview of his report on the boy, Ethan (last name not given) on ABC's 20/20 in primetime. Two problems: first, the exclusive content consisted of video footage of the boy after his rescue, yet Muir's three-minute report contained just 13 seconds of such video; second, Muir's colleague Gio Benitez had reported that Ethan was autistic, yet Muir told us that the boy loved to be hugged and tucked in by his mother -- the opposite of autistic behavior.
The actual insights that Holly Williams provided into the Maha Kumbh Mela in her CBS report from Prayag on the River Ganges were unremarkable. Her images of the Hindu pilgrimage, though, were unimaginable, worth the look.
Penn State University has received such terrible publicity over the last 15 months because of Coach Jerry Sandusky. The United States Postal Service received such a blow to its morale just this week. Steve Hartman goes On The Road to the State College campus for CBS to bring us Mailman Mike, a small consolation.
Welcome back Lisa Myers and her NBC stalwart The Fleecing of America. This time Myers gives Senator John McCain a stage to strut his stuff as a vigilante against waste-fraud-abuse. How bad is the seven-year, $1bn project that the Beltway contractor Computer Services Corporation delivered to the Pentagon? It is worse than a $600 toilet seat. How is CSC being punished? It is already working on four more Air Force projects.
Oddly, NBC has been blind to the mounting scourge of addiction to prescription painkillers. Over the past two years, ABC and CBS have covered pharmaceutical narcotics equally, with five packages each; NBC none at all. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook offers the latest entry as these RX opiates account for 16K deaths annually nationwide.
If you like fingernails on a chalkboard, you'll adore ABC's Person of the Week. Anchor Diane Sawyer donated free publicity to Nigella Lawson, the English celebrity chef and self-styled domestic goddess, to promote her latest book Nigellissima. Hearing Lawson's morbid history of a dead mother and a dead sister and a dead husband, you would think she was a Notre Dame linebacker. Sawyer's generosity was hardly altruistic: ABC has an interest in promoting Lawson's role on The Taste, its own cooking reality show. The self-serving anecdote Lawson tells about her courageous honesty when dealing with ABC's Hollywood publicists turns lack-of-vanity into the utmost in vanity.
