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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 17, 2013
The Boston Marathon bombing story no longer has a monopoly on the news agenda. On a very busy day, the Senate voted to block gun control; mysterious mail may have tried to poison President Obama and a senator; an arrest was made in the assassination of a pair of Texas prosecutors; and progress was made in the investigation of the Boston bombing. Sure enough, Boston was still Story of the Day and the lead on both ABC and NBC -- but it now accounts for only 41% of the three-network newshole, and was bumped as CBS' lead by the gun-control vote. As for the Iron Lady of Great Britain, all that pomp and circumstance for her funeral in St Paul's Cathedral did not attract the attention of a single correspondent on the three newscasts. She merited just short video clips, narrated in passing.
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HEAVY NEWS FORCES BOSTON TO CEDE GROUND The Boston Marathon bombing story no longer has a monopoly on the news agenda. On a very busy day, the Senate voted to block gun control; mysterious mail may have tried to poison President Obama and a senator; an arrest was made in the assassination of a pair of Texas prosecutors; and progress was made in the investigation of the Boston bombing. Sure enough, Boston was still Story of the Day and the lead on both ABC and NBC -- but it now accounts for only 41% of the three-network newshole, and was bumped as CBS' lead by the gun-control vote. As for the Iron Lady of Great Britain, all that pomp and circumstance for her funeral in St Paul's Cathedral did not attract the attention of a single correspondent on the three newscasts. She merited just short video clips, narrated in passing.
The two main advances in the Boston Marathon story were visual and forensic.
ABC's Brian Ross and CBS' Bob Orr concentrated on the visual: the possible image of a man dropping off a bomb recorded by the surveillance video cameras of Lord & Taylor department store. ABC's Ross offered free publicity to the facial recognition system developed by Indiana's Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Laboratory.
NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Elaine Quijano focused on the forensic: fragments of the bomb's batteries, its wiring, its circuit board, its shrapnel, and its pressure-cooker container recovered from the debris field. The pressure cooker lid was recovered from the rooftop of a nearby building.
All three newscasts turned to in-house experts: CBS to John Miller, its former FBI man; NBC to analyst Michael Leiter, a former counterterrorism bureaucrat; ABC to consultant Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council staffer. By the way, no arrest has yet been made. None of the newscasts dignified CNN's afternoon error to the contrary by name. "Incorrect news reports," was the closest, from NBC's Williams.
NBC followed up on the Boston story in most detail, with Anne Thompson on the dead and the wounded, and Kerry Sanders on the Lutheran therapy dogs Making a Difference at Tufts Medical Center. The hounds had been shipped across New England from Connecticut, where they offered similar support after December's grade school massacre in Newtown. And the big sloppy wet kiss to Beantown that NBC's Thompson planted on Tuesday was matched by ABC's corny vox pop closer.
WEDNESDAY’S WORDS There were actually more votes in the Senate, 54, to extend background checks for would-be gun-show-and-online purchasers of firearms than there were votes against, 46. Yet because of the ground rules for debate, would-be checkers did not reach the 60-vote supermajority required. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Chip Reid covered gun control from Capitol Hill; ABC's Jonathan Karl and CBS' Major Garrett brought us President Barack Obama's reaction from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. ABC's Karl confusingly taunted that the measure "could not even get passed in the Democratic-controled Senate," as if the decisive votes blocking the supermajority were not Republican.
Also addressing both ends of that avenue were the Memphis-postmarked letters to Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Barack Obama (Democrat) that were intercepted at post office sorting facilities in Maryland. "I am KC and I approved this message," was the sign-off. All three networks assigned a correspondent -- CBS' Wyatt Andrews, ABC's Jim Avila, NBC's Andrea Mitchell -- to investigate whether the envelopes contained ricin, the toxic extract of castor beans. Mitchell helpfully reminded us that Soviet spies in London had applied the poison to a sharpened umbrella tip in the 1970s in order to deliver a fatal jab to a Bulgarian dissident.
CBS has covered the case of the murdered Kaufman County prosecutors most heavily, so it was no surprise that it should send Manuel Bojorquez to the scene to cover the arrest of Kim Williams, the wife of a local Justice of the Peace who was targeted by those very prosecutors for theft of office equipment. ABC also had a correspondent on the case: Pierre Thomas filed remotely from the DC bureau, where he narrated his network's imaginary Virtual View computer-animated depiction of how the hit went down.
Good luck, for once, befell the public relations operation of American Airlines. On a day of normal breaking news, the embarrassment of having to ground the entire daily operation of 1,200 flights would have been magnified by coverage on all three newscasts. This time, only ABC relayed the bad news of the computer software snafu via a reporter: David Kerley from DC's National Airport.
Immaculee Ilibagiza rounded out the day's news. She had already been profiled seven years ago on 60 Minutes for her work on truth-&-reconciliation in her native land of Rwanda, having dodged the genocide there by hiding for three months in a church bathroom. Now CBS' Bob Simon files the follow-up of her leaving the verdant fields of Africa for America's fruited plain. See Immaculee be naturalized.
The two main advances in the Boston Marathon story were visual and forensic.
ABC's Brian Ross and CBS' Bob Orr concentrated on the visual: the possible image of a man dropping off a bomb recorded by the surveillance video cameras of Lord & Taylor department store. ABC's Ross offered free publicity to the facial recognition system developed by Indiana's Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Laboratory.
NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Elaine Quijano focused on the forensic: fragments of the bomb's batteries, its wiring, its circuit board, its shrapnel, and its pressure-cooker container recovered from the debris field. The pressure cooker lid was recovered from the rooftop of a nearby building.
All three newscasts turned to in-house experts: CBS to John Miller, its former FBI man; NBC to analyst Michael Leiter, a former counterterrorism bureaucrat; ABC to consultant Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council staffer. By the way, no arrest has yet been made. None of the newscasts dignified CNN's afternoon error to the contrary by name. "Incorrect news reports," was the closest, from NBC's Williams.
NBC followed up on the Boston story in most detail, with Anne Thompson on the dead and the wounded, and Kerry Sanders on the Lutheran therapy dogs Making a Difference at Tufts Medical Center. The hounds had been shipped across New England from Connecticut, where they offered similar support after December's grade school massacre in Newtown. And the big sloppy wet kiss to Beantown that NBC's Thompson planted on Tuesday was matched by ABC's corny vox pop closer.
WEDNESDAY’S WORDS There were actually more votes in the Senate, 54, to extend background checks for would-be gun-show-and-online purchasers of firearms than there were votes against, 46. Yet because of the ground rules for debate, would-be checkers did not reach the 60-vote supermajority required. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Chip Reid covered gun control from Capitol Hill; ABC's Jonathan Karl and CBS' Major Garrett brought us President Barack Obama's reaction from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. ABC's Karl confusingly taunted that the measure "could not even get passed in the Democratic-controled Senate," as if the decisive votes blocking the supermajority were not Republican.
Also addressing both ends of that avenue were the Memphis-postmarked letters to Roger Wicker (Republican of Mississippi) and Barack Obama (Democrat) that were intercepted at post office sorting facilities in Maryland. "I am KC and I approved this message," was the sign-off. All three networks assigned a correspondent -- CBS' Wyatt Andrews, ABC's Jim Avila, NBC's Andrea Mitchell -- to investigate whether the envelopes contained ricin, the toxic extract of castor beans. Mitchell helpfully reminded us that Soviet spies in London had applied the poison to a sharpened umbrella tip in the 1970s in order to deliver a fatal jab to a Bulgarian dissident.
CBS has covered the case of the murdered Kaufman County prosecutors most heavily, so it was no surprise that it should send Manuel Bojorquez to the scene to cover the arrest of Kim Williams, the wife of a local Justice of the Peace who was targeted by those very prosecutors for theft of office equipment. ABC also had a correspondent on the case: Pierre Thomas filed remotely from the DC bureau, where he narrated his network's imaginary Virtual View computer-animated depiction of how the hit went down.
Good luck, for once, befell the public relations operation of American Airlines. On a day of normal breaking news, the embarrassment of having to ground the entire daily operation of 1,200 flights would have been magnified by coverage on all three newscasts. This time, only ABC relayed the bad news of the computer software snafu via a reporter: David Kerley from DC's National Airport.
Immaculee Ilibagiza rounded out the day's news. She had already been profiled seven years ago on 60 Minutes for her work on truth-&-reconciliation in her native land of Rwanda, having dodged the genocide there by hiding for three months in a church bathroom. Now CBS' Bob Simon files the follow-up of her leaving the verdant fields of Africa for America's fruited plain. See Immaculee be naturalized.
