CONTAINING LINKS TO 1280 STORIES FROM THE NETWORKS' NIGHTLY NEWSCASTS
     COMMENTS: Clouded Judgment in North Carolina

All three networks had a collective brain cramp, turning a local disciplinary hearing for a discredited North Carolina prosecutor into the Story of the Day. Maybe CBS and NBC had the excuse that their regular anchors were taking a long weekend. The relative inexperience of Russ Mitchell and Lester Holt might have clouded each's news judgment. But ABC's Charles Gibson decided to make the aftermath of the Duke lacrosse team fiasco his lead too. This is now nothing but a local story, hardly worthy of any mention on a national network newscast, let alone leading its agenda.

The drama that should have been Story of the Day was playing out in orbit 200 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. The computers on board had crashed. They are "essential," CBS' Daniel Sieberg explained, because "they fire on-board thrusters, occasionally needed, to maintain the Station's position in space and keep its solar panels pointed towards the sun." The ten people on board have been instructed "to move as little as possible to avoid jarring the Station," ABC's Charles Gibson (subscription required) told us. "They will even have to minimize exercise and limit toilet flushes."

Perhaps the networks downplayed the story's prominence because of the "international" part. The "frustration after frustration" felt by mission control as it tried to reboot the computers was felt by Russians not by NASA, ABC's Gibson reminded us. Only ABC had a reporter on the scene: Jim Sciutto told Gibson that the Russian technicians, "some of them former cosmonauts," told him they had never faced "a problem as difficult and as intractable as this one." NBC's Washington-based Tom Costello traced the problem back to the NASA astronauts' connecting "a new solar unit to the Station. Russian engineers believe a power surge crippled their computers." By the end of the day, faulty switches had been circumvented and only two of the six computers were still dead.

Meanwhile ABC's Ned Potter showed us a spacewalk by astronaut Danny Olivas to fix a six-inch-long rip in the insulating fabric of Space Shuttle Atlantis, which is docked at the Space Station. Potter showed us the spacewalker's eye view from Olivas' helmetcam. "He used a surgical staple gun and some pins…looking a little like a contractor on someone's roof."

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