Early Show

This week:

• An illegal immigrant was arrested in the bus fire which killed elderly Hurricane Rita. evacuees a few weeks back.
• The Bush Administration announced a renewed focus on deporting illegal immigrants
• Four men investigated in the Baltimore tunnel bombing scare face deportation.

And thus far, this week, none of these stories received so much as even a brief anchor read on the CBS Early Show.

So a preacher, a comedian, and a scientist walk into a bar...

Okay, I'll spare you that joke, but all of the above comprised Harry Smith's theological roundtable in the second half hour of today's Early Show. The question for Jerry Falwell, Andy Borowitz, and Bill Nye "the Science Guy," was, "Is God mad at us," given all the natural disasters---tsunami, hurricanes, earthquakes, mudslides---that have beset the planet since last December.

It's an odd theological panel to have, and a relatively unserious segment given the makeup of the panel. If Smith's intent were to have a theological discussion, he'd have been better served by having perhaps a Catholic priest, Falwell, a Jewish rabbi, and an Islamic imam to showcase theological opinions from those four faiths. Instead the audience was served an odd mishmash of Falwell expounding on Christian doctrine, Bill Nye plugging global warming, and Andy Borowitz jokingly blaming Paris Hilton for flooding in the Northeast.

CBSNews.com's blog, Public Eye, has a post today on their Early Show viewer demographics, broken down by half-hour block. They show that two-thirds of the audience are women throughout all four half-hour blocks of the show, but that the first half-hour is younger and has more male viewership.

As such, CBSNews officials admit, they tend to stick the hard news in the first half hour, with features dominating the later half hour blocks, but feel they still leave enough hard news scraps to go around in the news briefings in the other half hours:

The first hour is geared more towards the transitional audience, and the second hour includes programming designed for people who are sticking around.

That doesn't mean people who stay at home only want soft features, says Katie Boyle, a senior producer with the CBS "Early Show." She points out that the "Early Show" runs newsblocks on the hour and half-hour, and says that there is a mix of stories so the same topics aren't covered over and over. "In a two hour morning show you want some variety," she says. And the fact that the proportion of women is slightly higher in the second half of the program, she adds, doesn't mean they don't care about hard news. "Women are watching morning television, period, at the beginning and at the end, when there's hard news and soft features," she says. "They want it all."

The Early Show's Rene Syler introducing a guest in the 7:30 a.m. half hour of today's program: "Last year, Ashley Smith became front page news when an accused killer took her hostage..."

Um, actually, Rene, that happened THIS year, in March.

Of course, with the 24/7 news cycle it feels like it was five years ago, sometimes looking back on it. At any rate, I'm sure I'm the only one of the show's seven-person audience who noticed, Rene, so don't feel too bad.

Rene Syler delivered this little blurb at 8:01 today on the Early Show:

In upstate New York, a plea deal in a teacher sex case. Beth Geisel, a former Catholic school teacher, will be sentenced in November for having sex with a 16-year old student. The 42-year old mother of four will serve six months in jail.

Maybe I'm missing something, but why is Geisel's status as a "mother of four" included? The woman is a self-confessed rapist, having had sex with a minor, and what's more a minor under her care and responsibility as a school teacher. But with the news item delivered as it was, it sounds almost like we should feel sorry her for her being kept from her kids from the next six months just because she had a tryst with some guy.

The General Assembly has been debating what are called U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which attempt to mandate that each industrialized nation give 0.7 percent of its Gross National Product to foreign aid. The media have used the event to misrepresent U.S. foreign aid and to highlight celebrities like actress Angelia Jolie, an outspoken supporter of increased taxpayer-funded aid.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” interviewed Jolie September 13, along with with Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N. Millennium Project. Sachs is author of “The End of Poverty,” in which he indicted the United States for supposedly lagging behind other countries in aid for the poor. The two have produced a documentary about a trip to Kenya that is being shown on MTV on September 14.

Gloria Borger's Early Show recap of yesterday's confirmation hearings for Judge John Roberts was dominated by exchanges with liberal senators pressing the Chief Justice nominee from the Left on abortion, but Borger closed off her report noting that conservatives are concerned about Roberts's views on overturning Roe v. Wade: "Conservatives are listening very closely to what Judge Roberts has to say about Roe versus Wade."

Although it is obvious from her own reporting that there is an equal if not stronger liberal obsession with preserving Roe at all costs from future reversal or weakening, Borger doesn't impute any political motivations to Roberts's critics, presenting the issue, rather, as one of whether the "precedent of Roe versus Wade so strong that Roberts would not vote to overturn it," as if long-held "strong" precedents in Court history somehow innoculate themselves from reversal on constitutional grounds when a future Court decides the reasoning of the precedent was grievously flawed (as the Court did in Brown v. Board of Education in reversing Plessy v. Ferguson).

Early Show co-host Julie Chen interviewed CBS's resident homeland security expert, Randy Larsen, about FEMA director Mike Brown's resignation. Larsen offered perhaps the most balanced analysis of all the Hurricane Katrina coverage on CBS, noting that FEMA's scope and mission are not all-encompassing, and that local and state officials are supposed to remain in charge of disaster recovery, rescue, and cleanup efforts, with FEMA in a secondary role. This of course, cuts against the bias CBS News has had on hurricane relief. CBS has failed to ask New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin nor Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco on where they failed before and after the hurricane struck and what they are doing, if anything, to take responsibility.

Below is the transcript of the Larsen interview.

Yesterday marked the complete withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the Gaza Strip, which has been returned to full Palestinian control in the hopes of moving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process along. As part of the handover of control, Israeli soldiers shuttered or destroyed the empty buildings once occupied by Jewish settlers. Among these, the synagogues were left standing, emptied of all their sacred artifacts and Torahs and the like, but tagged as holy places which should not be desecrated. Of course, this courtesy was not afforded of the Jewish houses of worship as masses of Palestinian militants have desecrated the synagogues in the hours since, burning them to the ground, an act exhibiting violence and hatred towards the Jewish faith of their Israeli neighbors.

Of the three broadcast network morning shows, only CBS's The Early Show completely ignored the story, although CBS, like its competitors widely reported the since-disproven allegations of Koran desecration which made the pages of Newsweek months ago.

     Misinformation continues to flow about supposed “record high” gas prices. Over the holiday weekend, the national average for gas rose to a little more than $3, still below the inflation-adjusted record of $3.11 set nearly 20 years ago.

     That didn’t stop “The Early Show” on CBS from claiming a record-high $3.20 national average for regular unleaded gasoline. On the September 6 broadcast, both Julie Chen and Hannah Storm made the same incorrect claim.

     According to Chen, “The huge hit Hurricane Katrina put on the area helped send gas prices shooting up 75 cents to an average of $3.20 a gallon.” Storm went even further claiming that the numbers she was citing came from AAA. “Since the storm hit, almost 70 percent of normal oil production has been shut down. And that, of course, has had a dramatic effect on gas prices. According to AAA, gas has gone up 75 cents. That puts the average cost of regular unleaded at $3.20 a gallon,” explained Storm.

What follows below are the interview questions with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin from today's Early Show. You will notice Nagin was not asked about any area where his leadership may have failed his constituents, particularly his controversial decision last week to put tourists who had been holed up in a Hyatt priority on evacuation over New Orleans residents who had waited out the storm and the flooding in horrendous living conditions in the Superdome.

@ 0711 EDT

Harry Smith from Canal Street, New Orleans: Just moments ago we had the opportunity to talk with the mayor here, Mayor Ray Nagin, and I asked him what does he need most now?

[Ray Nagin]

Smith: "You've said that you are concerned that there may be as many as how many dead here in New Orleans?"

Smith: "In the end, as we look back, the people have been evacuated from the Superdome, from the convention center, by and large the evacuation is complete. Who bears the shame for what happened here last week?"

Smith: "Here's uh, the question I'm curious to hear about, your people are now dispersed all over the United States, you have a quarter ofa million in Texas alone. Do they come back, does this city come back? Does this city, I was sitting here this morning saying, you know, I'd really would like to go down and get a cafe au lait and a beignet and I want to hear the sounds, and I want to smell the food, I want to experience what it used to be like here. Will that happen again?"

Smith: "I want to go back to something we were talking about just a second ago, because I heard you on the radio crying last week, I heard you swearing, uh, maybe it's not time for the blame game, but something broke down."

Smith: "Off the top of your head, streets clear of water, when the electricity is on, what's your best estimate?"

Smith: "Alright, Mayor, thank you so much for your time this morning."

### @ 0714 EDT ###

The Early Show on CBS treated FEMA Director Mike Brown and Governor Kathleen Blanco (D-LA) to tough questioning, although Brown was seared by co-host Hannah Storm while Harry Smith, reporting from New Orleans, only slightly singed the state's chief executive, and mostly on relief efforts underway now, not on what the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans could have done before the hurricane.

Below are the questions to Brown and Blanco respectively as I transcribed them.:

Harry Smith, interviewing Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on the Early Show today, started off by asking him where all the relief aid was, where the workers were. Smith said he was relaying this as the frequent complaint of Gulf Coast survivors of Hurricane Katrina that he'd been talking to. After Barbour replied that things were being tirelessly coordinated and set in order to get relief to needy residents as soon as possible, Smith prompted Barbour to give the viewers at home a glimmer of hope about the efforts underway:

Yeah, you know, I hear that loud and clear. I guess, you know, as we're out here with the people that have been directly affected by it, it's hard not to have an emotional response to the pain that they're experiencing on an ongoing basis. And I'm just feeling like maybe we're just going to be a little bit of a conduit back to you so you know what's going on down here. Is it, usually in a hurricane, after a day or two, there's a little light on the horizon, there's a little hope on the horizon, what, can you give us any good news today?

It's good and wholly appropriate for Smith to seek to present a balanced picture of the setbacks and progress of the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, if only indirectly at Barbour's prompting. Now if only Smith and his colleagues at CBS would apply that template to coverage of Iraq, and balance out their consistently bleak picture with concurrent good news.