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The second Monday in October saw the second of ABC World News' four newscasts with limited commercial interruptions. Sponsorship by Pfizer's Chantix cigarette-quitting drug allowed ABC to have a one-fifth larger editorial newshole (24 min v CBS 19, NBC 19) than its rivals. Like last week, however, the extra time was freed up on a day when there was little news to fill it. The Story of the Day, and the lead on all three newscasts, was a late summer heatwave across the midwest. Apart from that, no other event attracted attention from all three networks' correspondents. Each network ran an Iraq story--but the topics were different. Each picked its own malady--arthritis, cancer, strokes--for a disease feature. Each closed with spectacular scenery--the granite cliffs of Yosemite, the swampland of the Mississippi Delta and the Great Wall of China.

Once it had been established that the weather was so unseasonably hot that high temperature records for the date had been broken from Indiana to Pennsylvania, there was little else of substance that we had to know about the day's lead. NBC's Lee Cowan quipped that the weather was so fiery that it deserved the nickname Red October and ABC's Chris Bury (subscription required) joked that this was opening day for ice skating at the rink in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza. The only notable disruption from the heat seemed to be that it put the kibosh on Sunday's running of the Chicago Marathon. The race had to be called off after three hours as runners succumbed to dehydration. CBS' Dean Reynolds called it "a foot race through a furnace."

Minneapolis, too, staged a marathon. An entrant happened to be Ben Tracy, a reporter at WCCO-TV, the CBS affiliate. Tracy collapsed and passed out at the 25th mile. He related to CBS' Reynolds how he ended up in hospital: "It was like the Runners' ER--every bed had a pair of tennis shoes sticking out the end of it."

The heatwave was a news hook to inspire a couple of marginally related features. From Atlanta, ABC had Steve Osunsami report on the impact of the prolonged drought in southeastern states. The city's water supply comes from two major reservoirs, Lake Lanier and Lake Allatoona. As Atlanta itself "is seeing runaway growth," the reservoirs are shrinking. Levels are already more than twelve feet below normal and are declining at the rate of a further foot each week. Water scientists "believe the unthinkable is now just a year away…this major metropolitan city could actually run out of water."

By contrast, an increase in liquid water was the topic of Mark Phillips' report on CBS. He filed from London but his story was from the Arctic, where ships no longer have to break through ice and can now "cruise the long-elusive Northwest Passage at six knots. Commercial shipping may be possible." With water now open along the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska, "an ironic race" is underway to exploit ocean bed petroleum reserves--"ironic" because they are "now becoming available because of the climate change the use of petroleum has caused."

Andrew Tyndall 10/9/07 8:28:15 pm

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