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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 25, 2013
The ceremonial weight of a joint appearance by fiving living Presidents of the United States was not enough to shake loose the hold that the Boston Marathon bombings have on the top of the news agenda. For the ninth straight weekday since they happened, the explosions in Boston were Story of the Day. All three newscasts led with a plan by the fugitive Brothers Tsarnaev to drive a carjacked SUV from Cambridge to New York City to explode Times Square. The bungling brothers' journey made it only as far as next-door Watertown. ABC, which sent anchor Diane Sawyer to Dallas to receive a guided tour of the Bush Library, used substitute David Muir to anchor its newscast.
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TIMES SQUARE WAS OUT OF THE TSARNAEV’S REACH The ceremonial weight of a joint appearance by fiving living Presidents of the United States was not enough to shake loose the hold that the Boston Marathon bombings have on the top of the news agenda. For the ninth straight weekday since they happened, the explosions in Boston were Story of the Day. All three newscasts led with a plan by the fugitive Brothers Tsarnaev to drive a carjacked SUV from Cambridge to New York City to explode Times Square. The bungling brothers' journey made it only as far as next-door Watertown. ABC, which sent anchor Diane Sawyer to Dallas to receive a guided tour of the Bush Library, used substitute David Muir to anchor its newscast.
Since each of the newscasts had decided to lead with the potential attack on Times Square, you would think that they had decided to take the threat of further terrorism seriously, until you listen to the words their reporters used to describe the so-called plan: "they came up with the idea" -- NBC's Pete Williams; "the decision was spur of the moment" -- ABC's Brian Ross; "disorganized bombers" -- CBS' John Miller. So it turns out that treating the incompetence of the brothers as a headline is either reassuring -- they were not such a threat to public safety after all -- or scaremongering -- even their impractical panic must be taken seriously.
Rounding out the Boston coverage was a couple of packages for CBS. From Dagestan, Charlie d'Agata relayed the "anguished and angry" complaint of Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the accused brothers, that America had failed in her expectation that it would keep her sons free from harm. And to close its newscast, CBS did what it so often does, honor photography. In this instance, Elaine Quijano paid tribute to Boston Globe photojournalist John Tlumacki.
ABC's current White House correspondent Jonathan Karl traveled to Dallas for the dedication of the Bush Library along with alumni of that beat from the other two networks: CBS' Jim Axelrod and David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press. The loyal Karl made sure to fold in a clip from his anchor's Wednesday Exclusive with the former President in which Diane Sawyer gushed over the Bush brushwork. As for Sawyer, she was escorted around the exhibit by Laura Bush, who mentioned one of the many controversial issues of her husband's tenure -- hanging chads -- that Sawyer had omitted in her Wednesday sitdown. As ABC's Karl pointed out, the dedication proceedings made no mention of the Iraq War. And still no mention of torture by anybody.
NBC also threw in a cross-promotion for Matt Lauer and Today by publicizing the soundbite he obtained from Barbara Bush, discouraging her son Jeb from running to be the third Bush President in 2016. And check out George W Bush himself, answering Lauer's question in David Gregory's package: he implicitly acknowledged that his exhibit will not succeed in persuading opponents that the Iraq War was a legitimate and just component of the Global War on Terrorism.
Besides Boston and the Bush Library, all three newscasts also covered clues that an attack using small amounts of Sarin nerve gas had taken place as part of the civil war in Syria. The official statement from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was larded with conditions -- "assesses with some degree of varying confidence"…"some uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemical was used, where it was used, who used it" -- which were faithfully reported by two Pentagon correspondents: NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, CBS' David Martin.
Inexplicably, ABC's Martha Raddatz skipped those two qualifying soundbites from Hagel, thus offering plausibility to the misleading graphic that ABC superimposed over her report: Proof Syria Has Used Chemical Weapons. Yet there is no proof. CBS followed up with Major Garrett from the White House telling us that there was not proof enough for the United States to launch military action. NBC had Andrea Mitchell add that there is not proof enough for Russia to change its United Nations vote in the Security Council.
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS The pharmaceutical industry came in for scrutiny from CBS and ABC. ABC's Paula Faris filed a show-&-tell of a focus group of toddlers, demonstrating that child-resistant tops on pill bottles were by no means child-proof. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook publicized the protest by oncologists in the journal Blood that prices are too high for many cancer medications. In LaPook's crosshairs was Gleevec, the $92K-a-year treatment for leukemia made by Novartis.
NBC has been remiss in its lack of coverage of the fertilizer explosion in the small town of West outside Waco. With 14 fatalities it was, after all, much more deadly than the Boston bombings, yet so far NBC has assigned only one package to a correspondent on its nightly newscast. CBS' Manuel Bojorquez updated us on the safety investigation as to why 540K lbs ammonium nitrate was being stored in the West facility, yet was not reported, as required, to federal authorities.
Tom Costello organized an anecdotal experiment with himself and three other NBC correspondents -- ABC's Matt Gutman did the same singlehandedly on Monday -- to check how widespread the delays might be to airline travel, now that furloughs of air traffic controlers are in effect. Diana Alvear and Gabe Gutierrez were unscathed (as Gutman had been); Costello himself was delayed by an hour or so; Stephanie Gosk got screwed -- heading for Newark and landing in Allentown. Costello suspected that the huffing and puffing about furloughs on Capitol Hill may be caused by a threat to the lawmakers' own homebound travel for recess.
As for NBC's Alvear, she was assigned to her network's new General-Electric-sponsored series The Big Idea. In this case it was EyeSpy 20/20, a videogame by Richard Tirendi, tailored to replace an old-fashioned eye chart as a children's ophthalmic diagnostic tool.
Since each of the newscasts had decided to lead with the potential attack on Times Square, you would think that they had decided to take the threat of further terrorism seriously, until you listen to the words their reporters used to describe the so-called plan: "they came up with the idea" -- NBC's Pete Williams; "the decision was spur of the moment" -- ABC's Brian Ross; "disorganized bombers" -- CBS' John Miller. So it turns out that treating the incompetence of the brothers as a headline is either reassuring -- they were not such a threat to public safety after all -- or scaremongering -- even their impractical panic must be taken seriously.
Rounding out the Boston coverage was a couple of packages for CBS. From Dagestan, Charlie d'Agata relayed the "anguished and angry" complaint of Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, the mother of the accused brothers, that America had failed in her expectation that it would keep her sons free from harm. And to close its newscast, CBS did what it so often does, honor photography. In this instance, Elaine Quijano paid tribute to Boston Globe photojournalist John Tlumacki.
ABC's current White House correspondent Jonathan Karl traveled to Dallas for the dedication of the Bush Library along with alumni of that beat from the other two networks: CBS' Jim Axelrod and David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press. The loyal Karl made sure to fold in a clip from his anchor's Wednesday Exclusive with the former President in which Diane Sawyer gushed over the Bush brushwork. As for Sawyer, she was escorted around the exhibit by Laura Bush, who mentioned one of the many controversial issues of her husband's tenure -- hanging chads -- that Sawyer had omitted in her Wednesday sitdown. As ABC's Karl pointed out, the dedication proceedings made no mention of the Iraq War. And still no mention of torture by anybody.
NBC also threw in a cross-promotion for Matt Lauer and Today by publicizing the soundbite he obtained from Barbara Bush, discouraging her son Jeb from running to be the third Bush President in 2016. And check out George W Bush himself, answering Lauer's question in David Gregory's package: he implicitly acknowledged that his exhibit will not succeed in persuading opponents that the Iraq War was a legitimate and just component of the Global War on Terrorism.
Besides Boston and the Bush Library, all three newscasts also covered clues that an attack using small amounts of Sarin nerve gas had taken place as part of the civil war in Syria. The official statement from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was larded with conditions -- "assesses with some degree of varying confidence"…"some uncertainties about what was used, what kind of chemical was used, where it was used, who used it" -- which were faithfully reported by two Pentagon correspondents: NBC's Jim Miklaszewski, CBS' David Martin.
Inexplicably, ABC's Martha Raddatz skipped those two qualifying soundbites from Hagel, thus offering plausibility to the misleading graphic that ABC superimposed over her report: Proof Syria Has Used Chemical Weapons. Yet there is no proof. CBS followed up with Major Garrett from the White House telling us that there was not proof enough for the United States to launch military action. NBC had Andrea Mitchell add that there is not proof enough for Russia to change its United Nations vote in the Security Council.
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS The pharmaceutical industry came in for scrutiny from CBS and ABC. ABC's Paula Faris filed a show-&-tell of a focus group of toddlers, demonstrating that child-resistant tops on pill bottles were by no means child-proof. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook publicized the protest by oncologists in the journal Blood that prices are too high for many cancer medications. In LaPook's crosshairs was Gleevec, the $92K-a-year treatment for leukemia made by Novartis.
NBC has been remiss in its lack of coverage of the fertilizer explosion in the small town of West outside Waco. With 14 fatalities it was, after all, much more deadly than the Boston bombings, yet so far NBC has assigned only one package to a correspondent on its nightly newscast. CBS' Manuel Bojorquez updated us on the safety investigation as to why 540K lbs ammonium nitrate was being stored in the West facility, yet was not reported, as required, to federal authorities.
Tom Costello organized an anecdotal experiment with himself and three other NBC correspondents -- ABC's Matt Gutman did the same singlehandedly on Monday -- to check how widespread the delays might be to airline travel, now that furloughs of air traffic controlers are in effect. Diana Alvear and Gabe Gutierrez were unscathed (as Gutman had been); Costello himself was delayed by an hour or so; Stephanie Gosk got screwed -- heading for Newark and landing in Allentown. Costello suspected that the huffing and puffing about furloughs on Capitol Hill may be caused by a threat to the lawmakers' own homebound travel for recess.
As for NBC's Alvear, she was assigned to her network's new General-Electric-sponsored series The Big Idea. In this case it was EyeSpy 20/20, a videogame by Richard Tirendi, tailored to replace an old-fashioned eye chart as a children's ophthalmic diagnostic tool.
