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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MAY 6, 2013
Israel may be starting a war with Syria. South Korea's new president is arriving for talks at the White House. The House has new questions about the deaths at the Benghazi Consulate. Mexico is a booming market for American exports. Suddenly, there is a surge in foreign news. Yet all three newscasts led with local domestic stories. ABC chose the complaint about late-night drunken groping in a Virginia parking lot that led to the arrest of an Air Force colonel. CBS had a follow up to the investigation of the Boston bombings, a profile of the widow Tsarnaev, who now goes by Katherine Russell. NBC led with a horrible accident on a bridge in the San Francisco Bay area. The stretch limousine fire was Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MAY 6, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
STRETCH LIMO SEASON TURNS DEADLY Israel may be starting a war with Syria. South Korea's new president is arriving for talks at the White House. The House has new questions about the deaths at the Benghazi Consulate. Mexico is a booming market for American exports. Suddenly, there is a surge in foreign news. Yet all three newscasts led with local domestic stories. ABC chose the complaint about late-night drunken groping in a Virginia parking lot that led to the arrest of an Air Force colonel. CBS had a follow up to the investigation of the Boston bombings, a profile of the widow Tsarnaev, who now goes by Katherine Russell. NBC led with a horrible accident on a bridge in the San Francisco Bay area. The stretch limousine fire was Story of the Day.
The hook that made the limousine so newsworthy was a seasonal one. This is the time of year for high school proms and college graduations and bridal showers. The nine women who were in the limousine in San Mateo were partying for a newlywed on Saturday night. The bride, Neriza Fojas, was one of the five trapped inside and burned to death. NBC's Miguel Almaguer and ABC's Cecilia Vega narrated the grisly details from bureaus in Los Angeles. Vega used her network's Virtual View computer animation to depict the burning limousine. CBS had Ben Tracy on the scene in front of the seven-mile bridge span, but his report has not been posted online.
It turns out that the choice by both CBS and ABC for their newscast's lead was outside the consensus. ABC's Brian Ross was given the case of Col Jeff Krusinski, whose groping arrest is only of national note because he happens to head the USAF unit in charge of preventing sexual assaults in the ranks. CBS' Pentagon correspondent David Martin focused on the ranks instead of the arrests, reporting on a 6% annual rise in the number of complaints of rape and sexual abuse, a notoriously underreported crime. ABC's Ross gave a nod to the documentary The Invisible War that NBC's Pentagon man Jim Miklaszewski publicized a year ago.
CBS stayed with the Boston story, but had no news. Don Dahler instead presented a profile of Russell, the doctor's daughter and onetime Suffolk University student from Rhode Island. Inspire, the online periodical published by al-Qaeda, was downloaded on her computer, said Dahler: he pointed out that it could have been downloaded by her late husband Tamerlan; he did not point out that even if she did it, it is her Constitutional right to do so. ABC, wisely, skipped the Boston story. NBC's Pete Williams mentioned that there is not a single cemetery in Massachusetts that will agree to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body. Williams did not seem exercised by this scandalous lack of common decency.
The prospects of a new front in the Syrian civil war, one involving Israel, should have been the Story of the Day. All three networks assigned a correspondent. NBC's Richard Engel was in Turkey, close to the Syrian border: he interpreted the airstrike as an attack on Lebanon-based Hezbollah not on Syria, yet he sees Hezbollah as increasing its influence in the rump Syrian state. CBS had Allen Pizzey file from Tel Aviv, where he heard little outrage against Israel across the region, even from its enemies. By contrast, Martha Raddatz, in ABC's DC bureau, warned of retaliation against Israel by Syria, Hezbollah and Iran.
MONDAY’S MUSINGS As for those other foreign stories…
NBC's Andrea Mitchell previewed the testimony of the State Department's Greg Hicks on the lack of response to the emergency at the Benghazi Consulate in Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his fellow diplomat died too quickly for any action to save them. So Hicks' focus is on Woods and Doherty, a pair of civilians, former USNavy SEAL commandos, who were killed while hiding in a separate CIA annex some seven hours later. Mitchell did not call the "security contractors" spies by name, but if they were, they surely would have expected less protection than that accorded to diplomats.
Until you saw Margaret Brennan's one-on-one on CBS with Park Geun-hye, the new President of South Korea, who knew that the leaders of both Koreas were children of dictators? Those who saw Bob Woodruff's report from Seoul last month on ABC, that's who. President Park, Brennan told us, is accused of being an uppity woman with a "venomous swish of her skirt."
See David Muir order fast food in Spanish at a Carl's Jr outlet in Mexico City for ABC's Made in America series. He looks more like a participant in a reality show than a journalist reporting a story. See his colleague Paula Faris scarfing a quick bite from her trolley in the grocery aisle before reaching the checkout. She looks more like a participant in a reality show than a journalist reporting a story. Faris, by the way, was lavishing free publicity on nutritionist Brian Wansink of Cornell University, Wansink of the eternally-refilling soup bowl and the oversized dinner plate.
In domestic news, ABC's Pierre Thomas publicized another obscure citizen's militia. In 2011, he introduced us to the Covert Group, a quartet of murder-minded codgers at a Waffle House in Georgia. Now, a bust at a mobile home in Minnesota has apparently thwarted Buford Rogers' one-man Black Snake Militia.
To illustrate the impact that the proposed new sales tax law will have on small business, CBS' John Blackstone visited a San Francisco online retail firm to collect a soundbite in opposition. Only one problem: Inspirare's women's apparel sales are too small to be subject to the new law.
Last week, CBS' Nancy Cordes told us nothing about the public policy issues at stake in the special election in the First Congressional District of South Carolina. The Republican is famous for his paramour in Buenos Aires and the Democrat is famous for her funny brother. Now ABC's Jeff Zeleny provides the same lack of information, recycling a 2008 Colbert Report clip with Sanford that pre-dated the adultery scandal and an ABC clip from Barbara Walters with Sanford's ex-wife from 2009.
Almost every year, a correspondent from either CBS or NBC (mostly Anne Thompson) files a worrying report on the mysterious deaths afflicting swarms of honey bees. Now it is Thompson's turn once again. ABC does not seem to worry about lack of cross-pollination.
For its closer, CBS did what it does so often: honor photography. This time Lee Cowan brings us Charlie Haughey, with his shoeboxes full of negatives from the battlefields of Vietnam.
For its closer, NBC's Making a Difference feature saw Kevin Tibbles getting cute first graders at an unidentified school in Terre Haute to say the darnedest things. Who does Tibbles think he is, Art Linkletter? It must be a Canadian thing.
The hook that made the limousine so newsworthy was a seasonal one. This is the time of year for high school proms and college graduations and bridal showers. The nine women who were in the limousine in San Mateo were partying for a newlywed on Saturday night. The bride, Neriza Fojas, was one of the five trapped inside and burned to death. NBC's Miguel Almaguer and ABC's Cecilia Vega narrated the grisly details from bureaus in Los Angeles. Vega used her network's Virtual View computer animation to depict the burning limousine. CBS had Ben Tracy on the scene in front of the seven-mile bridge span, but his report has not been posted online.
It turns out that the choice by both CBS and ABC for their newscast's lead was outside the consensus. ABC's Brian Ross was given the case of Col Jeff Krusinski, whose groping arrest is only of national note because he happens to head the USAF unit in charge of preventing sexual assaults in the ranks. CBS' Pentagon correspondent David Martin focused on the ranks instead of the arrests, reporting on a 6% annual rise in the number of complaints of rape and sexual abuse, a notoriously underreported crime. ABC's Ross gave a nod to the documentary The Invisible War that NBC's Pentagon man Jim Miklaszewski publicized a year ago.
CBS stayed with the Boston story, but had no news. Don Dahler instead presented a profile of Russell, the doctor's daughter and onetime Suffolk University student from Rhode Island. Inspire, the online periodical published by al-Qaeda, was downloaded on her computer, said Dahler: he pointed out that it could have been downloaded by her late husband Tamerlan; he did not point out that even if she did it, it is her Constitutional right to do so. ABC, wisely, skipped the Boston story. NBC's Pete Williams mentioned that there is not a single cemetery in Massachusetts that will agree to bury Tamerlan Tsarnaev's body. Williams did not seem exercised by this scandalous lack of common decency.
The prospects of a new front in the Syrian civil war, one involving Israel, should have been the Story of the Day. All three networks assigned a correspondent. NBC's Richard Engel was in Turkey, close to the Syrian border: he interpreted the airstrike as an attack on Lebanon-based Hezbollah not on Syria, yet he sees Hezbollah as increasing its influence in the rump Syrian state. CBS had Allen Pizzey file from Tel Aviv, where he heard little outrage against Israel across the region, even from its enemies. By contrast, Martha Raddatz, in ABC's DC bureau, warned of retaliation against Israel by Syria, Hezbollah and Iran.
MONDAY’S MUSINGS As for those other foreign stories…
NBC's Andrea Mitchell previewed the testimony of the State Department's Greg Hicks on the lack of response to the emergency at the Benghazi Consulate in Libya. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his fellow diplomat died too quickly for any action to save them. So Hicks' focus is on Woods and Doherty, a pair of civilians, former USNavy SEAL commandos, who were killed while hiding in a separate CIA annex some seven hours later. Mitchell did not call the "security contractors" spies by name, but if they were, they surely would have expected less protection than that accorded to diplomats.
Until you saw Margaret Brennan's one-on-one on CBS with Park Geun-hye, the new President of South Korea, who knew that the leaders of both Koreas were children of dictators? Those who saw Bob Woodruff's report from Seoul last month on ABC, that's who. President Park, Brennan told us, is accused of being an uppity woman with a "venomous swish of her skirt."
See David Muir order fast food in Spanish at a Carl's Jr outlet in Mexico City for ABC's Made in America series. He looks more like a participant in a reality show than a journalist reporting a story. See his colleague Paula Faris scarfing a quick bite from her trolley in the grocery aisle before reaching the checkout. She looks more like a participant in a reality show than a journalist reporting a story. Faris, by the way, was lavishing free publicity on nutritionist Brian Wansink of Cornell University, Wansink of the eternally-refilling soup bowl and the oversized dinner plate.
In domestic news, ABC's Pierre Thomas publicized another obscure citizen's militia. In 2011, he introduced us to the Covert Group, a quartet of murder-minded codgers at a Waffle House in Georgia. Now, a bust at a mobile home in Minnesota has apparently thwarted Buford Rogers' one-man Black Snake Militia.
To illustrate the impact that the proposed new sales tax law will have on small business, CBS' John Blackstone visited a San Francisco online retail firm to collect a soundbite in opposition. Only one problem: Inspirare's women's apparel sales are too small to be subject to the new law.
Last week, CBS' Nancy Cordes told us nothing about the public policy issues at stake in the special election in the First Congressional District of South Carolina. The Republican is famous for his paramour in Buenos Aires and the Democrat is famous for her funny brother. Now ABC's Jeff Zeleny provides the same lack of information, recycling a 2008 Colbert Report clip with Sanford that pre-dated the adultery scandal and an ABC clip from Barbara Walters with Sanford's ex-wife from 2009.
Almost every year, a correspondent from either CBS or NBC (mostly Anne Thompson) files a worrying report on the mysterious deaths afflicting swarms of honey bees. Now it is Thompson's turn once again. ABC does not seem to worry about lack of cross-pollination.
For its closer, CBS did what it does so often: honor photography. This time Lee Cowan brings us Charlie Haughey, with his shoeboxes full of negatives from the battlefields of Vietnam.
For its closer, NBC's Making a Difference feature saw Kevin Tibbles getting cute first graders at an unidentified school in Terre Haute to say the darnedest things. Who does Tibbles think he is, Art Linkletter? It must be a Canadian thing.
