 |           |
TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 31, 2013
Weather was the Story of the Day -- but only by default. There was so little other news being made on the eve of an early summer weekend. CBS anchor Scott Pelley has been away all week and Maurice DuBois substituted. A pair of stormchasers filed the lead for NBC and ABC from Oklahoma, looking forward to looming carnage: NBC went with the Weather Channel's Mike Bettes (no link), ABC with its in-house weather pornographer Ginger Zee. CBS and NBC's follow-up used general news correspondents Susan McGinnis and Janet Shamlian to recap the damage that had already happened in the previous 24 hours. Shamlian included soundbites from two separate Weather Channel meteorologists. David Bernard of WFOR-TV, CBS' local affiliate in Miami, filed a weekend forecast.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 31, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
STORMCHASERS GEAR UP IN OKLAHOMA Weather was the Story of the Day -- but only by default. There was so little other news being made on the eve of an early summer weekend. CBS anchor Scott Pelley has been away all week and Maurice DuBois substituted. A pair of stormchasers filed the lead for NBC and ABC from Oklahoma, looking forward to looming carnage: NBC went with the Weather Channel's Mike Bettes (no link), ABC with its in-house weather pornographer Ginger Zee. CBS and NBC's follow-up used general news correspondents Susan McGinnis and Janet Shamlian to recap the damage that had already happened in the previous 24 hours. Shamlian included soundbites from two separate Weather Channel meteorologists. David Bernard of WFOR-TV, CBS' local affiliate in Miami, filed a weekend forecast.
Apart from that, pickings were slim…
All three networks reported on a hotel fire in Houston that was essentially a local story. For CBS it was literally so, using a stand-up by Doug Miller of KHOU-TV, its local affiliate. ABC folded local coverage by Tom Abrahams of KTRK-TV into Ron Claiborne's narration from New York. On NBC, Anne Thompson handled all the chores remotely. No guests in the hotel were hurt; four firefighters were found dead in the smoky ruins.
ABC's Gio Benitez filed a follow-up on his Wednesday coverage of that mother of seven from Phoenix who was thrown in jail in Mexico after twelve pounds of marijuana were found under her bus seat. She was released after surveillance video of her boarding the bus showed her stashless.
CBS' Anna Werner followed up on the three letters that were laced with non-toxic castor bean paste, the raw ingredient for the poison ricin, if properly refined. Werner reported from the village of New Boston in Texas, where police told her that a wife had reported on her husband for sending the letters, to which the husband responded by blaming his wife.
The only political story of the day was filed by NBC's education correspondent, Rehema Ellis. NBC has made a habit in the last couple of years of covering the mounting post-graduation debt load from college loans taken out by students. So it was no surprise that when President Barack Obama staged a photo-op to urge Congress to keep the interest rates low for Stafford Loans, Ellis should be the lone reporter to grant him publicity.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS NBC and ABC both publicized primetime news magazine offerings.
For ABC, Pierre Thomas previewed Cat & Mouse, a 20/20 special on the Alabama hostage siege involving a five-year-old boy snatched from a school bus that ABC also covered most intently at the time in February. Thomas claimed an Exclusive for obtaining the on-board security audio record of Charles Poland, the bus driver, vainly resisting the boy's abduction. Poland was killed. Thomas also had his network's computer animators imagine a Virtual View of what the cabin of the bus looked like.
NBC anchor Brian Williams previewed his own Rock Center sit-down with a sextet of amputees: the women who lost legs to the shrapnel from the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. "I got my leg today, which is a huge step," dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis told him, literally. Movingly, Roseann Sdoia forces herself to look at her leglessness in the mirror each morning, to keep the phantom pain away.
It was not an explicit act of cross-promotion, but David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, did seem to use the initials NCIS more than necessary in his report on the alleged gang rape of a blacked-out midshipwoman by three college football players at the Naval Academy. The hungover woman was reprimanded for her drinking when she reported the attack, and later withdrew her complaint. The real NCIS, not the primetime drama of the same name (Tuesday nights on CBS), is still investigating.
Linzie Janis was her own one-woman Yelp on ABC, sitting down to chef Wally Weaver's ten-ounce sirloin steak at 3 Forty Grill in Hoboken, to illustrate her report on the rising price of beef.
CBS made it two Jet Propulsion Laboratory stories in three days. Wednesday, Bill Whitaker looked at the voyage of Voyager, 36 years after take-off. Now Ben Tracy imagines the giant $2bn Hefty Bag that astronauts might use to snare an approaching asteroid.
How many celebrities has ABC chosen as its Person of the Week in the last six weeks? Pop song writer Carole King, meet moviemaker JJ Abrams, pop singer Cyndi Lauper, and pop singer Neil Diamond. That's a vocal trio plus a director for the video.
What else? Mystery writer Cynthia Riggs from CBS' Steve Hartman, On The Road in romantic Martha's Vineyard. Sarah the 29-year-old asthmatic dolphin from NBC's Kerry Sanders on Key Largo. And the battleship Mary Rose, lost at war with France in the English Channel in 1545, courtesy of CBS' Mark Phillips.
Apart from that, pickings were slim…
All three networks reported on a hotel fire in Houston that was essentially a local story. For CBS it was literally so, using a stand-up by Doug Miller of KHOU-TV, its local affiliate. ABC folded local coverage by Tom Abrahams of KTRK-TV into Ron Claiborne's narration from New York. On NBC, Anne Thompson handled all the chores remotely. No guests in the hotel were hurt; four firefighters were found dead in the smoky ruins.
ABC's Gio Benitez filed a follow-up on his Wednesday coverage of that mother of seven from Phoenix who was thrown in jail in Mexico after twelve pounds of marijuana were found under her bus seat. She was released after surveillance video of her boarding the bus showed her stashless.
CBS' Anna Werner followed up on the three letters that were laced with non-toxic castor bean paste, the raw ingredient for the poison ricin, if properly refined. Werner reported from the village of New Boston in Texas, where police told her that a wife had reported on her husband for sending the letters, to which the husband responded by blaming his wife.
The only political story of the day was filed by NBC's education correspondent, Rehema Ellis. NBC has made a habit in the last couple of years of covering the mounting post-graduation debt load from college loans taken out by students. So it was no surprise that when President Barack Obama staged a photo-op to urge Congress to keep the interest rates low for Stafford Loans, Ellis should be the lone reporter to grant him publicity.
FRIDAY’S FINDINGS NBC and ABC both publicized primetime news magazine offerings.
For ABC, Pierre Thomas previewed Cat & Mouse, a 20/20 special on the Alabama hostage siege involving a five-year-old boy snatched from a school bus that ABC also covered most intently at the time in February. Thomas claimed an Exclusive for obtaining the on-board security audio record of Charles Poland, the bus driver, vainly resisting the boy's abduction. Poland was killed. Thomas also had his network's computer animators imagine a Virtual View of what the cabin of the bus looked like.
NBC anchor Brian Williams previewed his own Rock Center sit-down with a sextet of amputees: the women who lost legs to the shrapnel from the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. "I got my leg today, which is a huge step," dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis told him, literally. Movingly, Roseann Sdoia forces herself to look at her leglessness in the mirror each morning, to keep the phantom pain away.
It was not an explicit act of cross-promotion, but David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, did seem to use the initials NCIS more than necessary in his report on the alleged gang rape of a blacked-out midshipwoman by three college football players at the Naval Academy. The hungover woman was reprimanded for her drinking when she reported the attack, and later withdrew her complaint. The real NCIS, not the primetime drama of the same name (Tuesday nights on CBS), is still investigating.
Linzie Janis was her own one-woman Yelp on ABC, sitting down to chef Wally Weaver's ten-ounce sirloin steak at 3 Forty Grill in Hoboken, to illustrate her report on the rising price of beef.
CBS made it two Jet Propulsion Laboratory stories in three days. Wednesday, Bill Whitaker looked at the voyage of Voyager, 36 years after take-off. Now Ben Tracy imagines the giant $2bn Hefty Bag that astronauts might use to snare an approaching asteroid.
How many celebrities has ABC chosen as its Person of the Week in the last six weeks? Pop song writer Carole King, meet moviemaker JJ Abrams, pop singer Cyndi Lauper, and pop singer Neil Diamond. That's a vocal trio plus a director for the video.
What else? Mystery writer Cynthia Riggs from CBS' Steve Hartman, On The Road in romantic Martha's Vineyard. Sarah the 29-year-old asthmatic dolphin from NBC's Kerry Sanders on Key Largo. And the battleship Mary Rose, lost at war with France in the English Channel in 1545, courtesy of CBS' Mark Phillips.
