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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 25, 2013
It is a sign of a light news day when no other development can supplant yet more routine coverage of winter weather as Story of the Day. True to form for the month of March, CBS treated the midwestern snowstorm as a non-event, mentioning it only in passing. So far this month, CBS has assigned a correspondent to the winter weather only twice. By contrast, both ABC and NBC led their newscasts with the storm, making them the month's sixth and seventh such package respectively. For its part, CBS led with the advertising blitz in 13 states, funded by New York City's billionaire mayor, to lobby swing-vote senators to pass gun control legislation requiring background checks for all would-be purchasers.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 25, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CBS IS NOT SO STUCK ON SNOW It is a sign of a light news day when no other development can supplant yet more routine coverage of winter weather as Story of the Day. True to form for the month of March, CBS treated the midwestern snowstorm as a non-event, mentioning it only in passing. So far this month, CBS has assigned a correspondent to the winter weather only twice. By contrast, both ABC and NBC led their newscasts with the storm, making them the month's sixth and seventh such package respectively. For its part, CBS led with the advertising blitz in 13 states, funded by New York City's billionaire mayor, to lobby swing-vote senators to pass gun control legislation requiring background checks for all would-be purchasers.
Just as it came as no surprise that CBS should skip coverage of the weather, it was no surprise that ABC should skip the firearms debate. So far this year, ABC reporters have filed only six gun control packages (CBS 27, NBC 14). As for John Miller's report on CBS and Ron Mott's on NBC, kudos goes to NBC's Sunday morning talkshow Meet The Press for setting the news agenda to start the week. It would seem merely self-serving if NBC's Mott were the only correspondent to file an MtP soundbite, but when CBS does so too, and in its lead, no less, then David Gregory's sitdown with Mayor Mike and Wayne LaPierre, his archfoe from the National Rifle Association, surely hit the mark.
As for that snowstorm coverage, NBC, as it often does, relied on its sibling network The Weather Channel: Mike Seidel filed from New Jersey. ABC, too, used a weatherman, Sam Champion from Good Morning America but its lead consisted of a rubbernecking trip, checking the skids and spills round the interstate highways of Indiana, with Gio Benitez of ABC's eXtreme Weather Team (Champion's forecast is at the tail of the Benitez videostream).
MONDAY’S MUSINGS NBC's Andrea Mitchell ended up in Kabul on a diplomatic assignment, following Secretary John Kerry from Jerusalem to Amman to Baghdad and back to Amman and then to Kabul. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer was in Kabul to cover the military, in the surprisingly green countryside of Afghanistan's eastern springtime. What is Pentagon bureaucratese for peace? "War termination," was the term a special operations major general offered.
Ahmed Warsame, the confessed courier ferrying secrets between al-Shabaab guerrillas in Somalia and AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in Yemen, may now be undergoing criminal prosecution in the federal court system. Yet, CBS' Bob Orr pointed out, two months elapsed between his capture on the high seas in the Gulf of Aden and his entry into the criminal justice system, during which time his interrogation was not bound by such constraints.
Friday's Story of the Day featured speculation on all three newscasts that the white supremacist 2-11 prison gang may have ordered the assassination of Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado state prison system. Now, even as ABC's Dan Harris repeats that theory, he offers no further insight into 2-11. So instead he runs video from a documentary by National Geographic on a larger, unrelated, white supremacist prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood.
There has only been one instance of a vial of noxious germs going missing from one of the 13 biohazard laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control since 2004, yet that single missing test-tube of hemorrhagic fever virus was the scary headline that ABC's David Kerley extracted from a GAO report on quality control at the labs.
Last week, neither CNBC's Sue Herera for NBC nor Anthony Mason for CBS could land the assignment of a trip to Cyprus to cover the banking crisis there first hand. Now Holly Williams lands the plum, strolling along the boat dock in the Mediterranean sunshine.
With the help of AARP's jobs expert Kerry Hannon, Chris Jansing tried to be upbeat about the prospects for unemployed babyboomers for turning their prospects around on NBC's Road to Retirement. Everyone is getting older, she suggested, so why not make money helping out those that are even more aged than you?
I could not tell whether the statistic that 400 people drown each year trapped in cars submerged in water was a high or a low number. ABC's Lisa Stark showed us videotape of escape drills by the sheriff's department in Collier County Fla and she played us panicky 911 audiotape of emergency calls by those trapped. They certainly gave the impression that we are all at risk of becoming one of those dead four hundred. How many times do cars drive into water? And why? And how often is that water deep enough to drown in? Stark did not tell.
David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, has made it a specialty to sit down one-on-one with severely disabled veterans. See why Cpl Tony Porta decided to put a halt to the seemingly interminable series of surgeries -- 128 of them -- to treat the burns that had disfigured him.
It is one thing for Steve Osunami to reward himself with a little pat on the back for helping wannabe-warbler Kayla Slone, the Walmart checkout clerk, land herself a gig at the Grand Ole Opry. When his coverage of the gig has the Opry audience watching his original report on ABC last month before getting a chance to hear Slone sing, then the little pat on the back turns into self-aggrandizing ostentation.
Just as it came as no surprise that CBS should skip coverage of the weather, it was no surprise that ABC should skip the firearms debate. So far this year, ABC reporters have filed only six gun control packages (CBS 27, NBC 14). As for John Miller's report on CBS and Ron Mott's on NBC, kudos goes to NBC's Sunday morning talkshow Meet The Press for setting the news agenda to start the week. It would seem merely self-serving if NBC's Mott were the only correspondent to file an MtP soundbite, but when CBS does so too, and in its lead, no less, then David Gregory's sitdown with Mayor Mike and Wayne LaPierre, his archfoe from the National Rifle Association, surely hit the mark.
As for that snowstorm coverage, NBC, as it often does, relied on its sibling network The Weather Channel: Mike Seidel filed from New Jersey. ABC, too, used a weatherman, Sam Champion from Good Morning America but its lead consisted of a rubbernecking trip, checking the skids and spills round the interstate highways of Indiana, with Gio Benitez of ABC's eXtreme Weather Team (Champion's forecast is at the tail of the Benitez videostream).
MONDAY’S MUSINGS NBC's Andrea Mitchell ended up in Kabul on a diplomatic assignment, following Secretary John Kerry from Jerusalem to Amman to Baghdad and back to Amman and then to Kabul. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer was in Kabul to cover the military, in the surprisingly green countryside of Afghanistan's eastern springtime. What is Pentagon bureaucratese for peace? "War termination," was the term a special operations major general offered.
Ahmed Warsame, the confessed courier ferrying secrets between al-Shabaab guerrillas in Somalia and AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in Yemen, may now be undergoing criminal prosecution in the federal court system. Yet, CBS' Bob Orr pointed out, two months elapsed between his capture on the high seas in the Gulf of Aden and his entry into the criminal justice system, during which time his interrogation was not bound by such constraints.
Friday's Story of the Day featured speculation on all three newscasts that the white supremacist 2-11 prison gang may have ordered the assassination of Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado state prison system. Now, even as ABC's Dan Harris repeats that theory, he offers no further insight into 2-11. So instead he runs video from a documentary by National Geographic on a larger, unrelated, white supremacist prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood.
There has only been one instance of a vial of noxious germs going missing from one of the 13 biohazard laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control since 2004, yet that single missing test-tube of hemorrhagic fever virus was the scary headline that ABC's David Kerley extracted from a GAO report on quality control at the labs.
Last week, neither CNBC's Sue Herera for NBC nor Anthony Mason for CBS could land the assignment of a trip to Cyprus to cover the banking crisis there first hand. Now Holly Williams lands the plum, strolling along the boat dock in the Mediterranean sunshine.
With the help of AARP's jobs expert Kerry Hannon, Chris Jansing tried to be upbeat about the prospects for unemployed babyboomers for turning their prospects around on NBC's Road to Retirement. Everyone is getting older, she suggested, so why not make money helping out those that are even more aged than you?
I could not tell whether the statistic that 400 people drown each year trapped in cars submerged in water was a high or a low number. ABC's Lisa Stark showed us videotape of escape drills by the sheriff's department in Collier County Fla and she played us panicky 911 audiotape of emergency calls by those trapped. They certainly gave the impression that we are all at risk of becoming one of those dead four hundred. How many times do cars drive into water? And why? And how often is that water deep enough to drown in? Stark did not tell.
David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, has made it a specialty to sit down one-on-one with severely disabled veterans. See why Cpl Tony Porta decided to put a halt to the seemingly interminable series of surgeries -- 128 of them -- to treat the burns that had disfigured him.
It is one thing for Steve Osunami to reward himself with a little pat on the back for helping wannabe-warbler Kayla Slone, the Walmart checkout clerk, land herself a gig at the Grand Ole Opry. When his coverage of the gig has the Opry audience watching his original report on ABC last month before getting a chance to hear Slone sing, then the little pat on the back turns into self-aggrandizing ostentation.
