Up First from NPR - Baltimore Bridge Investigation, Gaza Aid Issues, NBC Drops McDaniel

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

At the site of Baltimore's Key Bridge, rescue efforts have turned to recovery. In Gaza, families are so desperate for food that 12 people drowned trying to retrieve airdropped aid boxes from the sea. And after a newsroom revolt at NBC, the network has ousted its newest contributor, former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Eric Westervelt, Mark Katkov, Pallavi Gogoi, Alice Woelfle and Ben Adler. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Ben Abrams and Milton Guevara. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

At the site of Baltimore's Key Bridge, rescue efforts have turned to recovery. Federal investigators are examining the bridge and the cargo ship that crashed into it. They'll look at the operator and they'll look at the operations. I'm Debbie Elliott with Layla Fadl and this is Up First from NPR News. in gaza families are so desperate for food that 12 people drowned trying to retrieve airdropped aid boxes from the sea are airdrops a viable alternative to food and supplies being trucked in by land and a newsroom revolt at nbc the fact that miss mcdaniel is on the payroll at nbc news to me that is inexplicable. Stars from Rachel Maddow to Chuck Todd slammed the hire of former GOP chair Ronna McDaniel. Now the network has canceled her contract.

Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. What began in the pre-dawn hours yesterday as a rescue mission has now become a recovery mission. Six people are presumed dead after a cargo ship struck Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge and it collapsed into the Patapsco River. Two survived and a major east coast transit route and a key shipping port are shut down. NPR's Andrew Limbung is in Baltimore covering this story. Hi, Andrew.

Hey, Leila. So why did the Coast Guard suspend rescue operations last night? Yeah, well, a couple of reasons. I mean, first, you know, just given the length of time since the bridge collapsed, you know, and secondly, you know, there's the temperature and the changing conditions of the water. It just wouldn't have been safe to continue diving operations, especially considering the forecast called for rain. So now officials say all they can do is recover the bodies, which will still be extremely difficult.

Here's Colonel Roland Butler of the Maryland State Police. If we look at how challenging it is at a simple motor vehicle crash to extract an individual, I'm sure we can all imagine how much harder it is to do it in climate weather, when it's cold, under the water, with very limited to no visibility. And he said he intended to give the families, you know, their best effort to help find as much closure as possible. These families waiting for the bodies of their loved ones. And now when the bridge collapsed, authorities had already shut it down after the ship's crew sent a Mayday signal. But the six people presumed dead were from a construction crew that didn't make it off that bridge. What do we know about them? So there were construction workers filling potholes, you know, it was by all means a regular day for them. A man named Jesus Ocampo spoke with member station WYPR who said these were his

co-workers, you know, and he said that these were all Hispanic, Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, and all of them between 30 and 45 years old. And there's been other reports that they lived in the Dundalk and Highland Town neighborhoods of Baltimore, which are on the east side of the town, pretty close to the base of the bridge. And Maryland Governor Wes Moore said he'd been in touch with the families. And what have we learned so far about the cargo ship? It's a Singaporean container ship known as the Dali.

It's nearly 1,000 feet long. And officials yesterday said it appears to have lost power right before it crashed into the bridge. The Maryland governor said the crew's Mayday signal prevented, you know, who knows how many more deaths by, you know, stopping cars from getting on the bridge. National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said that they are leading the investigation and have been in touch with Singaporean officials who are on their way to the U.S. to help figure out exactly what happened. I just want to add that at this time, Maryland officials believe it was an accident. There is no evidence of foul play.

Do we know much more about what went wrong on that ship and whether a crash like this should cause a bridge to just collapse like we saw? Not really. At the press conference yesterday, Hamidi said the NTSB couldn't confirm a lot of details, you know, including who exactly was on the ship, who was in the pilot house, and what went wrong there. The NTSB is also looking at the bridge itself. Here's Hamadi. Part of our investigation will be how was this bridge constructed? It will look at the structure itself. Should there be any sort of safety improvements? All that will be part of our investigation. I just want to say like it might be a bit before we get any answers. Hamadi pointed to a bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh in January 2022. And the NTSB pretty much just came out with its final report on that last month.

No, more than two years later. NPR's Andrew Limbaugh in Baltimore. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks, Leila. In Gaza, mass hunger is spreading and people living under bombardments are desperate for aid. But when that aid drops from the sky, it can be just as dangerous. Retrieving it can be deadly. This week, a crowd of people waded into the sea to try to get to boxes of aid floating after airdrops. Gaza authorities say 12 people drowned.

The United States calls it a tragedy, but says airdrops are still needed. And PR's Jane Araf joins me now from Beirut to talk about this. Good morning, Jane. Good morning, Lena. Jane, tell us why aid is being dropped into the sea from the sky when there are land routes into Gaza? Well, first, after almost six months of war between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas, there are still a lot of restrictions. Israel, with Egypt's cooperation, controls Gaza's main border crossing. And it's limited the number of aid trucks coming in. And we have to remember, Gaza has more than 2 million people.

Children are literally starving to death, according to the UN. So because so few trucks are allowed, the U.S. and other countries have resorted to dropping aid by plane. Some of these pallets with parachutes attached are deliberately dropped over the sea to drift ashore. Here's Deputy Pentagon Spokesperson Sabrina Singh. These humanitarian aid drops occur over water and the wind causes the bundles to drift over to land. In the event of a parachute malfunction, the bundles land in the water. So Singh said in an airdrop Monday, three of 80 packages dropped by U.S. cargo planes had malfunctioning parachutes, and those packages landed in the sea. In other cases, pallets have been dropped over

land and the wind has blown them offshore. Now, the airdrops, obviously not enough to feed Gaza's population. What does the U.S. want to happen going forward? Well, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters yesterday the airdrops were never meant to substitute for food going in by land. He said the U.S. was, as he put it, encouraging Israel to allow in more trucks. Israel says it needs to limit the flow of aid to check for smuggled weapons, But European Union and UN officials have accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Now, we know President Biden has also announced the U.S. will build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to send food by ship. How is that going? Well, that's going to take weeks. And again, it's not a substitute for Israel allowing in

aid trucks that can distribute food throughout Gaza. And further limiting that aid, Israel recently told the UN Agency for Refugees it's banning it from bringing food to the north of Gaza where there's the most urgent need. The U.S.-based organization World Food Kitchen has brought in barges of food by sea lately. And while that food could prevent some from starving, the amount and the speed of those deliveries barely makes a dent in the widespread famine that officials are predicting. And on top of that, we're seeing people die trying to get this life-saving aid dropped from the sky, as you've talked about today. And yesterday, or this week, wasn't the first time this has happened, right?

Sadly, no. This month, Gaza health officials said five people were killed and more injured when a parachute on an airdropped pallet failed to open and landed on a house. Regarding the drownings, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called them a tragedy amid the ongoing tragedy of the war itself. And Hamas yesterday called for an end to airdrop, saying the roads needed to be opened immediately to allow trucks into Gaza. While the U.S. says those shipments have increased recently to as many as 200 trucks a day, it's still much less, Leila, than the roughly 500 trucks of aid that aid officials say are desperately needed. A Jordanian official says

30,000 trucks are backed up at the main border crossing with Egypt, waiting for Israeli approval to enter. He says some of Jordan's own aid trucks have been waiting in line for two months there. NPR's Jane Araf in Beirut. Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. NBC News has dropped its newest contributor, former Republican National Committee Chief Ronna McDaniel, just days after announcing it had hired her. The decision came after a newsroom revolt at NBC and withering attacks on the air from the stars of its sister channel, MSNBC. Joining us to help unpack what happened, NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflik. Good morning, David. Good morning, Deb.

So it hasn't even been a week since NBC News announced it had hired Ronna McDaniel, and now she's out. Tell us what played out over the past few days. Well, what a brief and lustrous NBC career it was for Ronna McDaniel. The outrage was pretty immediate. You saw it play out on one of their marquee news shows, Meet the Press. If you recall, she went on to be interviewed by Kristen Welker. And instead of being an introduction, here's our newest star, there was a sense from Welker that she was taken by complete surprise. She said, I'm going to interview her as a source of news, not as a colleague. And she really did a kind of tough interview, immediately followed by Chuck Todd, the former host of Meet the Press on the

same program saying, you know, our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in that position. That kind of set the tone then. You saw some people tweeting about this. And then on Monday in particular, you saw the lineup on MSNBC, their liberal sister station going after him. You saw Joe Scarborough, Micah Brzezinski in the morning, Nicole Wallace in the afternoon,

and pretty much the entire primetime lineup going after it. Finally, last night at just after six o'clock, an internal email sent out to staffers by NBC, Universal News chairman Cesar Conde personally apologized to NBC's team members, he said, who felt we left them down. He said it was a consensus decision by much of the leadership of NBC News, and that they would find other ways to reflect conservative Republican voices from across the

spectrum. Quite the reversal. You had talked a little bit about the drama on Monday's program about, you know, just why she was so polarizing. What stands out now? her patron, then President Donald Trump, and never backing down from that. And the question of also playing a role in Michigan in Trump's propagation of lies about there being election fraud, trying to convince certain local election officials not to validate Joe Biden's clear win there. You know, it's common for TV networks to hire political figures who would help explain the Trump campaign and who have ties to the Trump campaign. Why wouldn't McDaniel be well-placed to do that? Well, I think networks should be able to present people from across the political spectrum, including people who favor or have worked with President Trump. But the question I have is why hire them at all? Why pay people money to do this?

I've been talking about this with colleagues in the days since this was announced. You know, with whom do their loyalties lie? Is it the audiences of NBC? Is it the newsroom of NBC? Is it the team that they used to work for? Is it perhaps the former President Trump or her own career aspirations? Should he get back into the White House this year? And the sad thing is, this whole thing backfired. The effect is to make Republicans trust the network less than if they'd done nothing with McDaniel to begin with. NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflik, thanks. You bet. And a final note on a story we previewed on yesterday's episode, the Supreme Court oral arguments in a case about abortion pills.

The case is widely seen as a threat not just to the increased accessibility to abortion pills, but to the FDA's entire structure of regulating pharmaceuticals. A majority of justices, both conservative and liberal, did not seem inclined to block the FDA's existing rules for prescribing and dispensing the abortion pill Mifepristone. And that's a first for Wednesday, March 27th. I'm Laila Faldin. And I'm Debbie Elliott. Your next listen is Consider This from NPR. They're taking a deeper look at some of the unanswered questions in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Questions about engineering, safety, and construction.

Experts are trying to understand what happened and why. Listen to Consider This. And today's episode of Up First was edited by Eric Westervelt, Mark Katkov, Alice Wolfley, and Ben Padler. It was produced by Ziad Butch, Ben Abrams, and Milton Gavada. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott, and our technical director is Nisha Hynes. Start your day here with us again tomorrow.