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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 30, 2013
The ricin-laced letter that was mailed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg was ABC's lead on Wednesday from Pierre Thomas. Now the news that three such anti-gun-control letters have been mailed from an address in Shreveport attracts the lead spot on NBC and CBS, who had Maurice DuBois sit in as substitute anchor. Ricin qualified as a highly-dubious Story of the Day: ABC's Brian Ross said the poison was of "amateurish toxicity" while CBS' Bob Orr dismissed it as "low-level." ABC reverted to Tornado Alley for its lead item, with its own stormchaser Ginger Zee filing from Oklahoma.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 30, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
RICIN: A HIGHLY-DUBIOUS STORY SELECTION The ricin-laced letter that was mailed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg was ABC's lead on Wednesday from Pierre Thomas. Now the news that three such anti-gun-control letters have been mailed from an address in Shreveport attracts the lead spot on NBC and CBS, who had Maurice DuBois sit in as substitute anchor. Ricin qualified as a highly-dubious Story of the Day: ABC's Brian Ross said the poison was of "amateurish toxicity" while CBS' Bob Orr dismissed it as "low-level." ABC reverted to Tornado Alley for its lead item, with its own stormchaser Ginger Zee filing from Oklahoma.
CBS' in-house former FBI honcho John Miller came thisclose to reprimanding DuBois, the substitute anchor, for elevating the ricin scare to a seriousness it did not deserve. The letters contained no spores, Miller noted, just harmless mashed-up castor beans. Whoever sent the letters was craving attention and publicity -- just what the news media was granting. Of all the correspondents covering the ricin story, only NBC's Pete Williams did not stipulate just how ineffectual this poison was, calling it a biological weapon instead. He quoted Dr Cathleen Clancy's worries about damage to one's lungs and guts. ABC's Ross is not immune from criticism on this front, with his alarmist leaps from the Shreveport letters to KGB assassination and al-Qaeda plotting.
The Weather Channel's stormchaser Mike Bettes was on the case in Oklahoma for NBC along with ABC's Ginger Zee. Zee uncharacteristically veered towards a public-policy angle in her coverage, questioning the wisdom of zoning residential subdivisions in tornado-prone suburban Oklahoma City -- but, nah! Ginger is really a weather pornographer at heart. CBS, wisely, aired a brief clip of a funnel cloud in passing but did not bother to assign a correspondent to the storms. NBC, unwisely, went all in, and followed up stormchaser Bettes with Janet Shamlian's human interest from that fatal, ruined elementary school in Moore.
Education proper was on the minds of all three newscasts. NBC filed its annual compilation of celebrity highlights from college commencement addresses, a similar highlight reel to the one ABC aired on Monday. In all NBC used clips of nine famous people (plus self-congratulatory clips of two of its own -- anchor Brian Williams and correspondent Richard Engel). ABC on Monday used clips of seven (plus one piece of self-congratulation for correspondent Martha Raddatz).
What do Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Julie Andrews, and Stephen Colbert have in common? They were the four consensus picks, newsworthy enough to appear in both ABC's compilations and NBC's.
Anchor Diane Sawyer filed her own education feature for ABC's Hidden America feature series on poverty (previous installments have included Sawyer on teenage gang violence, Clayton Sandell on teenage prostitution, Cecilia Vega on abuses of the mentally ill, and Chris Cuomo on substandard pediatric dental care). Sawyer took us to Strawberry Mansion High School in inner-city Philadelphia for its cafeteria fights, its bullied students, its inattentive parents, its budget cuts, its CCTV surveillance.
Oh yes, this was a Sawyer report, so religiosity was part of the mix. Tuesday she brought us America Strong prisoners-of-war saying their prayers. Now we see Hidden America security guards saying theirs.
On CBS there were two education stories, one from college, one from school. Chip Reid joined in graduation season at College Park to survey the state of the job market for University of Maryland graduates. Dean Reynolds, who was praising charter schools in Cleveland Wednesday, now previews the closing of public schools in Chicago, repeating what he and NBC's Rehema Ellis told us in March. The city has a shortage of schoolchildren: 145,000 fewer than in 2000.
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS The only international news was about Syria. Margaret Brennan filed from the State Department for CBS on the likely collapse of the Geneva Peace Conference. Richard Engel filed for NBC from beneath the citadel of Tripoli, on the coast of Lebanon, where Syria's sectarian conflict is spreading. Engel gave us the color code: yellow is for Shiite, black is for Sunni.
From the White House, CBS' Major Garrett told us why James Comey has bona fides as the next FBI Director, even though he was an official in George W Bush's Justice Department. Garrett replayed clips from Senate hearings in 2007, in which Comey was praised for defying that White House over warrantless wiretaps.
I do not know why Matthew Perry's boozing is newsworthy but ABC's Cecilia Vega was awarded a slot to cover it. So we watched a couple of laughlines from Friends and heard a joke about alcoholism, rather than learn information about the drug court system for which he is now an addiction activist.
On CBS, the publicity boost went to Rick Beyer's documentary movie Ghost Army, on the rubber decoys that fooled the Nazis. Jim Axelrod sat down with the docu's 88-year-old central character Jack Masey, who really is quite a character.
ABC's Real Money series likes to tout Websites that help consumers find savings online. So when Paula Faris introduced us to five-year-old Red Sox fan Max Rodriguez, whose family wanted to spend less on a trip to the ballpark, she suggested techniques for saving at the concession stand, at the parking lot, at the box office.
If I were taking a five-year-old to the ballpark, I would go to a minor league game, not Fenway Park. If I were saving money on traveling to Fenway, I would not book a discount car park, I'd take mass transit. If I were looking for cheap seats, I'd sit in the bleachers, not the $130 section immediately behind first base. But no, if Paula had suggested any of those, she could not have offered free publicity to a Website. The lucky winner was Jack Groetzinger's SeatGeek.
CBS' in-house former FBI honcho John Miller came thisclose to reprimanding DuBois, the substitute anchor, for elevating the ricin scare to a seriousness it did not deserve. The letters contained no spores, Miller noted, just harmless mashed-up castor beans. Whoever sent the letters was craving attention and publicity -- just what the news media was granting. Of all the correspondents covering the ricin story, only NBC's Pete Williams did not stipulate just how ineffectual this poison was, calling it a biological weapon instead. He quoted Dr Cathleen Clancy's worries about damage to one's lungs and guts. ABC's Ross is not immune from criticism on this front, with his alarmist leaps from the Shreveport letters to KGB assassination and al-Qaeda plotting.
The Weather Channel's stormchaser Mike Bettes was on the case in Oklahoma for NBC along with ABC's Ginger Zee. Zee uncharacteristically veered towards a public-policy angle in her coverage, questioning the wisdom of zoning residential subdivisions in tornado-prone suburban Oklahoma City -- but, nah! Ginger is really a weather pornographer at heart. CBS, wisely, aired a brief clip of a funnel cloud in passing but did not bother to assign a correspondent to the storms. NBC, unwisely, went all in, and followed up stormchaser Bettes with Janet Shamlian's human interest from that fatal, ruined elementary school in Moore.
Education proper was on the minds of all three newscasts. NBC filed its annual compilation of celebrity highlights from college commencement addresses, a similar highlight reel to the one ABC aired on Monday. In all NBC used clips of nine famous people (plus self-congratulatory clips of two of its own -- anchor Brian Williams and correspondent Richard Engel). ABC on Monday used clips of seven (plus one piece of self-congratulation for correspondent Martha Raddatz).
What do Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Julie Andrews, and Stephen Colbert have in common? They were the four consensus picks, newsworthy enough to appear in both ABC's compilations and NBC's.
Anchor Diane Sawyer filed her own education feature for ABC's Hidden America feature series on poverty (previous installments have included Sawyer on teenage gang violence, Clayton Sandell on teenage prostitution, Cecilia Vega on abuses of the mentally ill, and Chris Cuomo on substandard pediatric dental care). Sawyer took us to Strawberry Mansion High School in inner-city Philadelphia for its cafeteria fights, its bullied students, its inattentive parents, its budget cuts, its CCTV surveillance.
Oh yes, this was a Sawyer report, so religiosity was part of the mix. Tuesday she brought us America Strong prisoners-of-war saying their prayers. Now we see Hidden America security guards saying theirs.
On CBS there were two education stories, one from college, one from school. Chip Reid joined in graduation season at College Park to survey the state of the job market for University of Maryland graduates. Dean Reynolds, who was praising charter schools in Cleveland Wednesday, now previews the closing of public schools in Chicago, repeating what he and NBC's Rehema Ellis told us in March. The city has a shortage of schoolchildren: 145,000 fewer than in 2000.
THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS The only international news was about Syria. Margaret Brennan filed from the State Department for CBS on the likely collapse of the Geneva Peace Conference. Richard Engel filed for NBC from beneath the citadel of Tripoli, on the coast of Lebanon, where Syria's sectarian conflict is spreading. Engel gave us the color code: yellow is for Shiite, black is for Sunni.
From the White House, CBS' Major Garrett told us why James Comey has bona fides as the next FBI Director, even though he was an official in George W Bush's Justice Department. Garrett replayed clips from Senate hearings in 2007, in which Comey was praised for defying that White House over warrantless wiretaps.
I do not know why Matthew Perry's boozing is newsworthy but ABC's Cecilia Vega was awarded a slot to cover it. So we watched a couple of laughlines from Friends and heard a joke about alcoholism, rather than learn information about the drug court system for which he is now an addiction activist.
On CBS, the publicity boost went to Rick Beyer's documentary movie Ghost Army, on the rubber decoys that fooled the Nazis. Jim Axelrod sat down with the docu's 88-year-old central character Jack Masey, who really is quite a character.
ABC's Real Money series likes to tout Websites that help consumers find savings online. So when Paula Faris introduced us to five-year-old Red Sox fan Max Rodriguez, whose family wanted to spend less on a trip to the ballpark, she suggested techniques for saving at the concession stand, at the parking lot, at the box office.
If I were taking a five-year-old to the ballpark, I would go to a minor league game, not Fenway Park. If I were saving money on traveling to Fenway, I would not book a discount car park, I'd take mass transit. If I were looking for cheap seats, I'd sit in the bleachers, not the $130 section immediately behind first base. But no, if Paula had suggested any of those, she could not have offered free publicity to a Website. The lucky winner was Jack Groetzinger's SeatGeek.
