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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 14, 2013
The Internal Revenue Service scandal was the unanimous choice for Story of the Day for the second straight day. The three newscasts each selected a different angle for its lead: NBC on the Treasury Department, CBS from Capitol Hill, and ABC from the White House. The other breaking development that attracted blanket coverage was an op-ed article published in The New York Times that morning. Its topic was Angelina Jolie's now-removed-and-reconstructed breasts and was written by the movie star herself.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 14, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
THE IRS SCANDAL SHOWS NO SIGNS OF SLOWING The Internal Revenue Service scandal was the unanimous choice for Story of the Day for the second straight day. The three newscasts each selected a different angle for its lead: NBC on the Treasury Department, CBS from Capitol Hill, and ABC from the White House. The other breaking development that attracted blanket coverage was an op-ed article published in The New York Times that morning. Its topic was Angelina Jolie's now-removed-and-reconstructed breasts and was written by the movie star herself.
Leaving the breasts aside for one moment, NBC had Lisa Myers walk us through the report of the Inspector General of the Treasury Department, which blamed the taxman's targeting of applications by Tea Party groups for tax-free social-welfare status on "ineffective management." On CBS, Nancy Cordes previewed the oversight of the House Ways & Means Committee, and the suspicion that Acting-Commissioner Steven Miller was lying when denied the existence of extra Tea Party scrutiny.
ABC's Jonathan Karl traced the growing political pressure on the White House arising from the scandal, as did Meet the Press anchor David Gregory on NBC. Karl showed not only the criticism of conservative media activists -- Rush Limbaugh and (an unidentified) Glenn Beck -- but also presented a montage to demonstrate how TV journalists, too, are turning the IRS into a cause celebre. Spot the odd man out among Karl's representatives of the political press corps: George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, Brett Baier on FOX News Channel, Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
As for the merits of the Tea Party applications for tax-exempt 501(c)4 status, Wyatt Andrews on CBS checked in on campaign finance reform maven Fred Wertheimer at the pressure group Democracy 21. First, Wertheimer minced no words in contradicting the applicants' claims of social welfare, not political activism. Second, he lashed out at the IRS for their focus on the small fry. The big 501(c)4 fish were Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA -- Political Action Committees in everything but name.
As for the luminous Jolie, NBC and CBS went through the motions of covering her decision to have her breasts cut off as a medical story. Both networks assigned the story to their in-house physicians, Nancy Snyderman and Jon LaPook. Snyderman offered a cost estimate of $3,000 for the test for the BRCA1 gene, whose presence raised the odds so high that the 37-year-old Jolie would develop cancer in her breasts that she decided to take such a drastic preventive measure. LaPook walked us through a diagram of the mastectomy surgery, which preserves the nipple, while removing the surrounding breast and replacing it with implants -- yet he could not resist the celebrity angle too, showing 60 Minutes file footage of the star's profile by correspondent Bob Simon.
ABC also had its in-house physician Jennifer Ashton on hand for a brief consultation (at the tail of the Faris videostream), but only after Paula Faris filed her report. Faris did not beat around the bush. The reason that Jolie is so newsworthy is because she is so ridiculously photogenic. In Faris' report, which lasts 133 seconds, she packed in 24 separate images of that beautiful face, plus a couple of movie clips.
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS Highways safety was covered by all three newscasts: NBC's Tom Costello and ABC's David Kerley publicized the recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board that blood-alcohol levels in states' drunk driving laws be made more strict. Kerley illustrated his report with a couple of terrifying dashboard videos; Costello delivered the underwhelming prediction that lower DUI limits would save only 800 of the 10,000 killed each year by drunk driving. On CBS, Ben Tracy gave free publicity to the It Can Wait public service advertising campaign by the cellular telephone industry. A consortium of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile is paying for PSAs against the driving-while-texting that accounts for 3,000 teenage deaths annually.
The important journalism story that NBC's Tom Costello covered Monday saw Bob Orr playing catch up on CBS: the clandestine decision by the Justice Department to inspect two months' worth of telephone logs from 100 reporters at the Associated Press for evidence of leaks of classified espionage secrets. NBC's Pete Williams cross-promoted discussion of the controversy on Morning Joe on NBC's sibling cable news channel MSNBC. Williams also replayed a clip from his own NBC Nightly News report from a year ago on the underlying story, the infiltration of a CIA spy into a Yemeni bombmaking cell, preventing the sabotage of a transAtlantic flight. The modest Williams, however, used the introduction to his story by anchor Brian Williams, not his own reporting.
The accusation by Russia that 29-year-old Ryan Fogle, an American diplomat at the Moscow Embassy, is a spy was all the pretext that NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Martha Raddatz needed to lard up their reporting with extraneous details. Mitchell dropped John Le Carre's name and offered free publicity to DC's Spy Museum. From Raddatz, we heard about Maxwell Smart, James Bond, and Anna Chapman -- you remember her, from the summer of 2010.
Meet Um Majed, the veiled so-called marriage broker, who sells teenage virgin girls to rich old Arab men. They are called brides but turn out to be little more than prostitutes. CBS' Clarissa Ward tells about the depravity from Amman, where the penury of Syrian refugees is blamed for the dishonor.
As the name suggests, the idea behind ABC's Made in America series is to publicize goods produced by domestic manufacturers for sale either here or abroad. David Muir lost the plot as he stretched last week's visit to Mexico City to cover imports that actually were Made in America. Part two concerned the growing Hispanic population in the United States, which is being served by Mexican exporters like the Grupo Bimbo bakery and Takis Chips snack food. You know: Hecho en Mexico.
NBC's Mike Taibbi shoehorned Prince Harry into his coverage of the military paralympic Warrior Games on Monday. Now his colleague Stephanie Gosk, and ABC's Bob Woodruff, file a Harry-Sandy combo as the British royal tours a storm-ravaged resort on the Jersey Shore. See reporter Gosk take a shortcut and put words in the mouth of her child interviewee in order to get the fairytale soundbite she was looking for.
How do blind people go birdwatching? CBS' Dean Reynolds tells us.
Leaving the breasts aside for one moment, NBC had Lisa Myers walk us through the report of the Inspector General of the Treasury Department, which blamed the taxman's targeting of applications by Tea Party groups for tax-free social-welfare status on "ineffective management." On CBS, Nancy Cordes previewed the oversight of the House Ways & Means Committee, and the suspicion that Acting-Commissioner Steven Miller was lying when denied the existence of extra Tea Party scrutiny.
ABC's Jonathan Karl traced the growing political pressure on the White House arising from the scandal, as did Meet the Press anchor David Gregory on NBC. Karl showed not only the criticism of conservative media activists -- Rush Limbaugh and (an unidentified) Glenn Beck -- but also presented a montage to demonstrate how TV journalists, too, are turning the IRS into a cause celebre. Spot the odd man out among Karl's representatives of the political press corps: George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, Brett Baier on FOX News Channel, Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
As for the merits of the Tea Party applications for tax-exempt 501(c)4 status, Wyatt Andrews on CBS checked in on campaign finance reform maven Fred Wertheimer at the pressure group Democracy 21. First, Wertheimer minced no words in contradicting the applicants' claims of social welfare, not political activism. Second, he lashed out at the IRS for their focus on the small fry. The big 501(c)4 fish were Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA -- Political Action Committees in everything but name.
As for the luminous Jolie, NBC and CBS went through the motions of covering her decision to have her breasts cut off as a medical story. Both networks assigned the story to their in-house physicians, Nancy Snyderman and Jon LaPook. Snyderman offered a cost estimate of $3,000 for the test for the BRCA1 gene, whose presence raised the odds so high that the 37-year-old Jolie would develop cancer in her breasts that she decided to take such a drastic preventive measure. LaPook walked us through a diagram of the mastectomy surgery, which preserves the nipple, while removing the surrounding breast and replacing it with implants -- yet he could not resist the celebrity angle too, showing 60 Minutes file footage of the star's profile by correspondent Bob Simon.
ABC also had its in-house physician Jennifer Ashton on hand for a brief consultation (at the tail of the Faris videostream), but only after Paula Faris filed her report. Faris did not beat around the bush. The reason that Jolie is so newsworthy is because she is so ridiculously photogenic. In Faris' report, which lasts 133 seconds, she packed in 24 separate images of that beautiful face, plus a couple of movie clips.
TUESDAY’S TIDBITS Highways safety was covered by all three newscasts: NBC's Tom Costello and ABC's David Kerley publicized the recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board that blood-alcohol levels in states' drunk driving laws be made more strict. Kerley illustrated his report with a couple of terrifying dashboard videos; Costello delivered the underwhelming prediction that lower DUI limits would save only 800 of the 10,000 killed each year by drunk driving. On CBS, Ben Tracy gave free publicity to the It Can Wait public service advertising campaign by the cellular telephone industry. A consortium of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile is paying for PSAs against the driving-while-texting that accounts for 3,000 teenage deaths annually.
The important journalism story that NBC's Tom Costello covered Monday saw Bob Orr playing catch up on CBS: the clandestine decision by the Justice Department to inspect two months' worth of telephone logs from 100 reporters at the Associated Press for evidence of leaks of classified espionage secrets. NBC's Pete Williams cross-promoted discussion of the controversy on Morning Joe on NBC's sibling cable news channel MSNBC. Williams also replayed a clip from his own NBC Nightly News report from a year ago on the underlying story, the infiltration of a CIA spy into a Yemeni bombmaking cell, preventing the sabotage of a transAtlantic flight. The modest Williams, however, used the introduction to his story by anchor Brian Williams, not his own reporting.
The accusation by Russia that 29-year-old Ryan Fogle, an American diplomat at the Moscow Embassy, is a spy was all the pretext that NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Martha Raddatz needed to lard up their reporting with extraneous details. Mitchell dropped John Le Carre's name and offered free publicity to DC's Spy Museum. From Raddatz, we heard about Maxwell Smart, James Bond, and Anna Chapman -- you remember her, from the summer of 2010.
Meet Um Majed, the veiled so-called marriage broker, who sells teenage virgin girls to rich old Arab men. They are called brides but turn out to be little more than prostitutes. CBS' Clarissa Ward tells about the depravity from Amman, where the penury of Syrian refugees is blamed for the dishonor.
As the name suggests, the idea behind ABC's Made in America series is to publicize goods produced by domestic manufacturers for sale either here or abroad. David Muir lost the plot as he stretched last week's visit to Mexico City to cover imports that actually were Made in America. Part two concerned the growing Hispanic population in the United States, which is being served by Mexican exporters like the Grupo Bimbo bakery and Takis Chips snack food. You know: Hecho en Mexico.
NBC's Mike Taibbi shoehorned Prince Harry into his coverage of the military paralympic Warrior Games on Monday. Now his colleague Stephanie Gosk, and ABC's Bob Woodruff, file a Harry-Sandy combo as the British royal tours a storm-ravaged resort on the Jersey Shore. See reporter Gosk take a shortcut and put words in the mouth of her child interviewee in order to get the fairytale soundbite she was looking for.
How do blind people go birdwatching? CBS' Dean Reynolds tells us.
