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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM JUNE 17, 2013
Heads of state assembled in Ireland for the G8 Summit and all three White House correspondents followed President Barack Obama's entourage. The summit -- sort of -- was Story of the Day, courtesy of Edward Snowden, the IT guy who exposed National Security Agency secrets. Snowden revealed that spies bug summits: specifically that the NSA had bugged phone calls by the President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia at the G20 Summit in London four years ago. NBC and ABC, with substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos, led with Spies at the Summit. CBS kicked off from the Supreme Court.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR JUNE 17, 2013: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
SPIES AT THE SUMMIT Heads of state assembled in Ireland for the G8 Summit and all three White House correspondents followed President Barack Obama's entourage. The summit -- sort of -- was Story of the Day, courtesy of Edward Snowden, the IT guy who exposed National Security Agency secrets. Snowden revealed that spies bug summits: specifically that the NSA had bugged phone calls by the President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia at the G20 Summit in London four years ago. NBC and ABC, with substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos, led with Spies at the Summit. CBS kicked off from the Supreme Court.
Sometimes Andrea Mitchell on NBC is more like a media correspondent than a political one. Her report on Snowden, the confessed leaker, consisted almost entirely of snippets from other reports about Snowden, the confessed leaker. See a soundbite from NBC's Meet the Press, two soundbites from FOX News Channel, a preview of a Charlie Rose interview on PBS, a quote from an online q-&-a session at The Guardian, a reporter from The New York Times quoted on Mitchell's own lunchtime Reports program on MSNBC -- and a clip of Mitchell herself covering a previous example of Spies at the Summit on NBC Nightly News in 1995.
ABC's Brian Ross relied on his network's in-house national security consultant Richard Clarke for a series of insults against the "no good" Snowden. If ABC is going to include ad hominem insults by someone on its payroll against a newsmaker in its reporting then it should at least identify the affiliation. Instead the ABC consultant was labeled, blandly, as a former official. Ross duly reported Snowden's assurance that he had not leaked any secrets to China, but only after Clarke had blasted Snowden as "the equivalent of a Chinese spy" before adding a weasely "if" to water down his insult.
On CBS, Bob Orr gave Snowden a somewhat fairer hearing, quoting from his 100-minute online q-&-a session at The Guardian. In Orr's summary, Snowden complains that he could not receive a fair trial in the United States; he chastises Director James Clapper for "baldly lying" to Congress; he reassures the Pentagon that his leaks had not compromised any military operations; and he denies he is a spy for the People's Republic of China.
As for the G8 diplomacy, ABC gave Jonathan Karl only a brief stand-up, in which he had to touch on both the serious and the flippant: the talks on Syria between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, and the Irish genealogy of the First Family Obama. On CBS, Major Garrett held out hope that the war in Syria may yet be resolved at a peace conference in Geneva, which is supported by both Obama and Putin, despite their mutual "awkward and indifferent" body language. NBC's Chuck Todd noticed the waning support for Obama among the Europeans at G8. The President is under fire for his policies on espionage, Guantanamo Bay, Syria, and climate change.
President Putin was also the topic of a light-hearted closer on NBC, in which Stephanie Gosk offered a tip of the hat to the New York Post for its investigation into Putin's ring, the one that marks him as a winner of the 2005 Super Bowl. Gosk's report included topless pix of Vladimir himself, plus her chance to get up-close-and-personal with David Diehl, another ring wearer. Diehl was a two-time-champion lineman for the NFL's New York Giants.
The Supreme Court story, striking down Arizona's voter identification law, was covered in full by CBS' Jan Crawford, in a brief stand-up by NBC's Pete Williams, and mentioned only in passing on ABC.
MONDAY’S MENTIONS Compared with four years ago, the election in Iran hardly matters. In 2009, all three newscasts offered extensive coverage, even before massive green street protests against ballot rigging erupted. This time the run up to the election of Hasan Rouhani attracted not a single report. The vote itself was covered by NBC's Teheran-based producer Ali Arouzi, by Elizabeth Palmer from CBS' London bureau, and mentioned only in passing by ABC.
Elsewhere in the region, NBC's Richard Engel had to use his gas mask again to cover the crackdown on Taksim Square protestors in Istanbul. CBS sent Clarissa Ward to Amman where Operation Eager Lion sees the Pentagon deploy F-16 fighter jets, Patriot missile batteries, and a unit from the Marine Corps in the landlocked Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
ABC turned labor rights activist. Rebecca Jarvis covered the bust of 14 7-11 outlets in Long Island and Virginia. The convenience stores are accused of the abuse of immigrant Pakistanis, here without legal working papers. Using the threat of reporting them for deportation, the stores stand accused of forcing them into indentured servitude, with 100-hour workweeks. Meanwhile, Bob Woodruff traveled to the coal mines of northeastern India for his Woodruff Explores series on Nightline. It was back in 1952 that child labor was banned in India, yet Woodruff still found a twelve-year-old working the mine's tiny tunnels in order to afford to put his brother through school.
I complain doggedly about weather porn: the instinct to capitalize on the thrilling, compelling, stimulating sight of Mother Nature, wild and out of control, to air the video just for the sake of allowing us to gawk at it for our own private satisfaction, without any public purpose (I am talking about you on ABC, Ginger Zee). Well, thank you Barry Petersen on CBS, for following up on the Black Forest wildfire near Colorado Springs with the public policy question: why have zoning laws permitted homes for 250,000 residents to be constructed in Colorado's fire-prone wilderness in the last 20 years? Unfortunately, Petersen's quality journalism only goes so far. He poses the question, yet offers no answers.
When it comes to worrying about tumors in your breasts, NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman leads the way. Her latest, on the Cleveland Clinic's SDIORT lumpectomy technique (Single Dose Intra Operative Radiation Therapy), is her fifth breast cancer story so far this year: only three have been filed this year by all others combined.
Back in February, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer lavished English celebrity chef Nigella Lawson with excruciating publicity, turning her into the network's Person of the Week as she launched her book Nigellissima. Having established Lawson as someone worthy of attention, ABC decided to dignify the London gossip -- did Charles Saatchi, her husband, try to strangle the self-styled domestic goddess in a restaurant? -- with a report by David Wright. Why would ABC do that? In order to recycle clips from ABC News' Candid Camera-style situational ethics primetime show What Would You Do? from three years ago. That's why.
CBS went to its primetime magazine archive from 2008 to dig out Steve Kroft's sitdown on 60 Minutes with John Martorano, the confessed hit man for Boston's Winter Hill Gang. Why would CBS do that? Because CBS is the only one of the three newscasts to have committed itself to the trial of James Bulger since his arrest in Santa Monica two years ago. That's why. Martorano testified at Bulger's trial and Elaine Quijano covered it.
The latest example of a quirky ABC specialty came courtesy of Gio Benitez: alarming mid-flight events aboard jetliners that turn out to be inconsequential. Benitez even made the effort to get his network's in-house computer animators to imagine a Virtual View of a harmless, distraught midair passenger en route via United Airlines from Hong Kong to Newark. Just three weeks ago David Kerley told us about the Alaskan Airlines emergency exit door that could not be opened in midflight; a week before that Nick Schifrin offered the British Airways flight that landed safely after an engine fire; and Steve Osunsami came up with the China Airlines cargo jet that lost a piece of its wing, harming nobody as the debris fell to the ground.
Do you want to read a steamy romance on the beach this summer? CBS' Anthony Mason recommends Falling Into You for your Kindle. It's the twentieth in the genre of foreclosure-prevention fiction from obsessive scribblers Jack and Jasinda Wilder. All 20 e-books have been written within the last six months.
There are two types of shark stories: Jaws-style scares in coastal waters, and Jacques-Cousteau-style explorations of the mysteries of the deep. ABC leads in both categories (8 out of 11 on the former playlist, 5 out of 8 on the latter). This time Matt Gutman finds video of a 50Klb whale shark and 19-year-old swimmer Chris Kreis. If it is Jaws, it is Jaws very, very light.
Sometimes Andrea Mitchell on NBC is more like a media correspondent than a political one. Her report on Snowden, the confessed leaker, consisted almost entirely of snippets from other reports about Snowden, the confessed leaker. See a soundbite from NBC's Meet the Press, two soundbites from FOX News Channel, a preview of a Charlie Rose interview on PBS, a quote from an online q-&-a session at The Guardian, a reporter from The New York Times quoted on Mitchell's own lunchtime Reports program on MSNBC -- and a clip of Mitchell herself covering a previous example of Spies at the Summit on NBC Nightly News in 1995.
ABC's Brian Ross relied on his network's in-house national security consultant Richard Clarke for a series of insults against the "no good" Snowden. If ABC is going to include ad hominem insults by someone on its payroll against a newsmaker in its reporting then it should at least identify the affiliation. Instead the ABC consultant was labeled, blandly, as a former official. Ross duly reported Snowden's assurance that he had not leaked any secrets to China, but only after Clarke had blasted Snowden as "the equivalent of a Chinese spy" before adding a weasely "if" to water down his insult.
On CBS, Bob Orr gave Snowden a somewhat fairer hearing, quoting from his 100-minute online q-&-a session at The Guardian. In Orr's summary, Snowden complains that he could not receive a fair trial in the United States; he chastises Director James Clapper for "baldly lying" to Congress; he reassures the Pentagon that his leaks had not compromised any military operations; and he denies he is a spy for the People's Republic of China.
As for the G8 diplomacy, ABC gave Jonathan Karl only a brief stand-up, in which he had to touch on both the serious and the flippant: the talks on Syria between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, and the Irish genealogy of the First Family Obama. On CBS, Major Garrett held out hope that the war in Syria may yet be resolved at a peace conference in Geneva, which is supported by both Obama and Putin, despite their mutual "awkward and indifferent" body language. NBC's Chuck Todd noticed the waning support for Obama among the Europeans at G8. The President is under fire for his policies on espionage, Guantanamo Bay, Syria, and climate change.
President Putin was also the topic of a light-hearted closer on NBC, in which Stephanie Gosk offered a tip of the hat to the New York Post for its investigation into Putin's ring, the one that marks him as a winner of the 2005 Super Bowl. Gosk's report included topless pix of Vladimir himself, plus her chance to get up-close-and-personal with David Diehl, another ring wearer. Diehl was a two-time-champion lineman for the NFL's New York Giants.
The Supreme Court story, striking down Arizona's voter identification law, was covered in full by CBS' Jan Crawford, in a brief stand-up by NBC's Pete Williams, and mentioned only in passing on ABC.
MONDAY’S MENTIONS Compared with four years ago, the election in Iran hardly matters. In 2009, all three newscasts offered extensive coverage, even before massive green street protests against ballot rigging erupted. This time the run up to the election of Hasan Rouhani attracted not a single report. The vote itself was covered by NBC's Teheran-based producer Ali Arouzi, by Elizabeth Palmer from CBS' London bureau, and mentioned only in passing by ABC.
Elsewhere in the region, NBC's Richard Engel had to use his gas mask again to cover the crackdown on Taksim Square protestors in Istanbul. CBS sent Clarissa Ward to Amman where Operation Eager Lion sees the Pentagon deploy F-16 fighter jets, Patriot missile batteries, and a unit from the Marine Corps in the landlocked Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
ABC turned labor rights activist. Rebecca Jarvis covered the bust of 14 7-11 outlets in Long Island and Virginia. The convenience stores are accused of the abuse of immigrant Pakistanis, here without legal working papers. Using the threat of reporting them for deportation, the stores stand accused of forcing them into indentured servitude, with 100-hour workweeks. Meanwhile, Bob Woodruff traveled to the coal mines of northeastern India for his Woodruff Explores series on Nightline. It was back in 1952 that child labor was banned in India, yet Woodruff still found a twelve-year-old working the mine's tiny tunnels in order to afford to put his brother through school.
I complain doggedly about weather porn: the instinct to capitalize on the thrilling, compelling, stimulating sight of Mother Nature, wild and out of control, to air the video just for the sake of allowing us to gawk at it for our own private satisfaction, without any public purpose (I am talking about you on ABC, Ginger Zee). Well, thank you Barry Petersen on CBS, for following up on the Black Forest wildfire near Colorado Springs with the public policy question: why have zoning laws permitted homes for 250,000 residents to be constructed in Colorado's fire-prone wilderness in the last 20 years? Unfortunately, Petersen's quality journalism only goes so far. He poses the question, yet offers no answers.
When it comes to worrying about tumors in your breasts, NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman leads the way. Her latest, on the Cleveland Clinic's SDIORT lumpectomy technique (Single Dose Intra Operative Radiation Therapy), is her fifth breast cancer story so far this year: only three have been filed this year by all others combined.
Back in February, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer lavished English celebrity chef Nigella Lawson with excruciating publicity, turning her into the network's Person of the Week as she launched her book Nigellissima. Having established Lawson as someone worthy of attention, ABC decided to dignify the London gossip -- did Charles Saatchi, her husband, try to strangle the self-styled domestic goddess in a restaurant? -- with a report by David Wright. Why would ABC do that? In order to recycle clips from ABC News' Candid Camera-style situational ethics primetime show What Would You Do? from three years ago. That's why.
CBS went to its primetime magazine archive from 2008 to dig out Steve Kroft's sitdown on 60 Minutes with John Martorano, the confessed hit man for Boston's Winter Hill Gang. Why would CBS do that? Because CBS is the only one of the three newscasts to have committed itself to the trial of James Bulger since his arrest in Santa Monica two years ago. That's why. Martorano testified at Bulger's trial and Elaine Quijano covered it.
The latest example of a quirky ABC specialty came courtesy of Gio Benitez: alarming mid-flight events aboard jetliners that turn out to be inconsequential. Benitez even made the effort to get his network's in-house computer animators to imagine a Virtual View of a harmless, distraught midair passenger en route via United Airlines from Hong Kong to Newark. Just three weeks ago David Kerley told us about the Alaskan Airlines emergency exit door that could not be opened in midflight; a week before that Nick Schifrin offered the British Airways flight that landed safely after an engine fire; and Steve Osunsami came up with the China Airlines cargo jet that lost a piece of its wing, harming nobody as the debris fell to the ground.
Do you want to read a steamy romance on the beach this summer? CBS' Anthony Mason recommends Falling Into You for your Kindle. It's the twentieth in the genre of foreclosure-prevention fiction from obsessive scribblers Jack and Jasinda Wilder. All 20 e-books have been written within the last six months.
There are two types of shark stories: Jaws-style scares in coastal waters, and Jacques-Cousteau-style explorations of the mysteries of the deep. ABC leads in both categories (8 out of 11 on the former playlist, 5 out of 8 on the latter). This time Matt Gutman finds video of a 50Klb whale shark and 19-year-old swimmer Chris Kreis. If it is Jaws, it is Jaws very, very light.
