The news out of Turkey and Syria grows grimmer by the hour following the devastating earthquakes and aftershocks of earlier this week.
The disaster is now one of the deadliest of this century. The death toll has passed 5,800 in Turkey and 1,800 in Syria. Those numbers could grow by the thousands in the days ahead as more victims are found in the rubble.
Here are more of the heartbreaking images and videos from the region from The New York Times, including a woman searching for her son in a collapsed building and survivors huddled in a tent, while others are left exposed in harsh winter weather with no homes left to go to.
But there also are moments of inspiration, such as a young girl being pulled alive from the rubble.
And there are stories of heartbreak and inspiration at the same time. The BBC’s David Gritten reported a newborn baby was pulled alive from a collapsed building in northwestern Syria. The mother, however, died from her injuries. So did the father, four of the baby’s siblings and an aunt. The baby’s uncle, Khalil al-Suwadi, said relatives went to the building after learning of the collapse. He told AFP, “We heard a voice while we were digging. We cleared the dust and found the baby with the umbilical cord (intact), so we cut it and my cousin took her to hospital.”
The baby is reported to be in stable condition.
Meanwhile, it’s nearly unfathomable to look at the destruction and not fear how high the death toll is going to increase. Here’s an overhead video from Reuters that shows the overwhelming damage done in just one neighborhood.
CNN’s Zeena Saifi and Becky Anderson report: “Hopes wither amid bitter cold as rescuers race to find earthquake survivors in Turkey.” One man, Alptekin Talanci, told CNN that he had a friend trapped somewhere among the mangled wreckage.
“Conditions are so bad that even if he could survive (the collapse), because of the cold, the hypothermia … I can’t believe he can make it,” Talanci said. “We are just praying and that’s all that I can say.”
CNN’s story talked about the survivors, saying, “A sense of hopelessness is etched on their faces amid the bitter cold.” The story added, “Grief is everywhere.”
Here are more stories on the latest from Turkey and Syria:
- The New York Times’ Natasha Frost and Raja Abdulrahim with “The only border crossing for U.N. aid from Turkey to Syria is hobbled.”
- The Washington Post’s Sarah Dadouch with “I saw death’: Rescuers in rebel-held Syria plead for help after quake.”
- Also in The Washington Post, Leo Sands with “Did animals in Turkey, Syria sense the quake early? Here’s the science.”
- The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Niiler and Nidhi Subbaraman with “How the Earthquake Occurred: Behind the Science of the Catastrophe in Turkey and Syria.”
Thought of the day
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma tweeted a lovely song of comfort dedicated to the people of Turkey and Syria following the devastating earthquakes there earlier this week.
State of the Union
President Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address Tuesday night. I’ll have more of the reaction and analysis in Thursday’s newsletter.
Hold up
CNN’s Don Lemon, shown here last December. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
“CNN This Morning” co-host Kaitlan Collins had a strong interview on Tuesday with House Oversight Chair James Comer, the Republican from Kentucky. Some on social media complained she didn’t push back hard enough on some of Comer’s claims, but I thought she did fine in terms of fact-checking him in real time.
For example, Collins pushed back enough to get Comer to admit he had “no evidence” of an earlier claim that the Chinese spy balloon could have contained “bioweapons.”
Mediaite’s Zachary Leeman wrote about another part of the interview: “During a back and forth about upcoming House investigations into Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop and suggestions from the Twitter Files that the FBI targeted stories related to Biden for suppression, Comer mentioned the (New York) Post, which initially ran the Biden laptop story. Comer accused the FBI of pushing to ban the New York Post and others, calling the paper a ‘credible outlet’ and the ‘fourth biggest newspaper in America.’”
When the interview was over, it was up to “CNN This Morning” co-host Don Lemon to take it to commercial break. But he had something to say about the interview first.
An annoyed Lemon said, “That’s the time that we’re in, where facts are sort of flexible and you just throw things out there — citing uncredible sources, like citing the New York Post as a credible source and saying that facts are — it’s just, I can’t believe that we’re here.”
As music began to play to send the broadcast to commercial, Lemon jumped in and said, “Hold on please with the music.”
Lemon wasn’t done talking about Comer. Lemon said, “American people are going to have to suffer through all of this stuff from election deniers to people who don’t believe in facts, we don’t have a shared reality. And now it has taken center stage.”
Later in the show, Lemon said, “As I was watching that very good interview by Kaitlan Collins with Comer, and I had to come out and say something because he is citing sources as credible that are not credible, he is talking about facts of something that’s kind of flexible, and maybe you believe one thing or maybe another, facts are facts.”
The future of TV
Here’s an intriguing question posed by CNBC’s Alex Sherman and Lillian Rizzo: “What will TV look like in three years?”
With streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu and HBO Max and on and on growing more popular, does that mean regular old cable TV is on its way out?
Many are predicting doom and gloom. Peter Chernin, CEO of content studio The North Road Company, said, “It will continue to be in decline. It will be crappier. Budgets will get cut. More scripted programming will migrate away to streaming. There will be more repeats.”
But, Chernin said, cable TV won’t go away completely.
I think Bill Simmons, founder of The Ringer, put it best: “Three years feels way too short to me. I think it’s going to play out like it has with terrestrial radio and digital audio. Five years ago, you could have said radio would absolutely be dead soon, and nobody would have challenged you. But it’s still limping along even with much heavier competition from podcasts, streaming, TikTok and everyone else. Even with ad markets dwindling and the advertising being much more localized, it’s not close to being dead yet. It’s like when Michael Corleone says how Hyman Roth has been dying of the same heart attack for the last 20 years. That’s radio. And linear TV will be the same way. It will have a Hyman Roth death, not a Sonny Corleone death.”
Byron Allen, Entertainment Studios founder and CEO, said, “I think linear TV will exist for a very, very long time. I believe that all of these various platforms — they’re not instead of, they’re additive.”
Many more experts — including IAC Chairman Barry Diller and former CNN president Jeff Zucker — weighed in for an interesting conversation.
My take? In simplest terms, much will depend on two things that regular TV thrives upon: sports and news. As long as major sports leagues, especially the NFL, continue to stay in business with major networks, cable TV will hold on. Same when it comes to networks such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. When it comes to news, people still turn first to cable, as CNN+ found out the hard way last year.
Remembering an infamous accident
Harry Whittington, shown here in 2006 outside the Texas hospital where he was treated for gunshot wounds suffered in a hunting accident. (AP Photo/Paul Iverson, File)
Do you remember Harry Whittington? No?
OK, what if I asked if you remember the time former Vice President Dick Cheney shot a guy? Whittington was the one who was accidentally shot during a hunting trip in 2006. He died last weekend at the age of 95.
Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote, “Whittington’s reluctance to talk about his one moment of planetary fame was a mark of graciousness and gentlemanly propriety. Whittington, who died Saturday at 95, never blamed Cheney for nearly killing him, nor the White House for distorting the events of that late afternoon in 2006. After emerging from a Texas hospital, Whittington even seemed to blame himself.”
That’s true. Upon his release, Whittington said, “My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week.”
This from the guy who was actually shot.
Fahri interviewed Whittington in 2010 about what happened the day he was shot. It ended with this fascinating passage:
After talking for nearly 10 hours, I had one last question. Had Cheney ever apologized?
Whittington leveled his gaze at me.
“I’m not going to get into that,” he said after a short pause.
His face was set. I could sense his discomfort.
Harry Whittington wouldn’t lie. He was too gracious for that.
It’s game day, not bring-your-kids-to-work day
If you follow sports closely, you occasionally see athletes and coaches accompanied to press conferences by their kids. Almost always after a victory, kids join their famous parent and, quite often, become more of the focus than their star athlete mom or dad. We saw it a week ago when Philadelphia Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni brought his three kids to the podium.
Well, CBS Sports Radio’s Maggie Gray has seen enough.
“All professional athletes, your kids are cute. They’re all cute,” Gray said to her co-host, Andrew Perloff. “We both have kids, they’re cute. Kids are naturally cute. We can see your kids down on the field with confetti, I’m not saying kids shouldn’t be part of this. But to be up there in the press conference after a game. No. These are reporters trying to do their job, No. 1. And two, we have plenty of time to see your kids. They shouldn’t be up there.”
As a former sportswriter, I must say I agree 100% with Gray. There’s a place for kids to join their parents, but this isn’t one of them. Postgame press conferences are part of the job — job, as in work. Coaches and athletes can spare being away from their kids for 10 minutes while the media does its job.
Tuning in
I found these to be interesting numbers from a survey conducted by the Siena College Research Institute and St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication.
For starters, 75% of those surveyed plan on watching this Sunday’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. In addition, 53% say the game is an important part of their life, and 29% consider the Super Bowl to be a national holiday. (The survey also has other numbers worth checking out, including questions about the commercials, preferred game snacks and attending the game in person.)
This year’s game, on Fox, should once again have a viewership of more than 100 million people in the U.S.
Media tidbits
- The Information’s Erin Woo with “Musk’s Twitter Has Just 180,000 U.S. Subscribers, Two Months After Launch.”
- In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn with “Don’t Blame Karine Jean-Pierre. She didn’t give us the documents scandal. Joe Biden and Merrick Garland did.”
- The New York Times’ Adam Satariano and Paul Mozur write about deepfake videos in “The People Onscreen Are Fake. The Disinformation Is Real.”
- Axios’ Sara Fischer with “America’s print tabloid era is over.”
- My Poynter colleague Roy Peter Clark with an interesting story and some helpful writing tips in “One brash request, 7 books, and 34 bits of advice for writers.”
- Speaking of Poynter, it has added five new members to its National Advisory Board. They are NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, Dallas Morning News executive editor Katrice Hardy, Tampa Bay Times executive editor Mark Katches, Politico standards editor Anita Kumar and Street Sense Media editor-in-chief Will Schick. Poynter’s Mel Grau has more.
Hot type
- NPR with a sensational display and important story: “Climate ripples and the rise of the right.”
- Tennis star Jessica Pegula writes compellingly about the health troubles of her mother in “I Want to Talk to You About My Mom.”
- The Ringer’s Nora Princiotti with “The Uncomfortable, Messy Truth of Watching This NFL Season.” Here’s the subhead of this story: “The enduring stories of the NFL 2022 season center on the health of Damar Hamlin and Tua Tagovailoa and the misbehavior of Deshaun Watson and Dan Snyder. Yet on the cusp of the Super Bowl, the NFL seems nowhere near an existential crisis. If those ugly headlines won’t force a moral reckoning, what will?”
More resources for journalists
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- Essential Skills for Rising Newsroom Leaders (Seminar) — Apply by Feb. 27.
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