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A light day of news saw a split vote by the networks on how to kick off their newscasts. NBC had Brian Williams anchor from Philadelphia where he will moderate a debate by the Democratic Presidential field: his lead amounted to a promo for MSNBC's coverage in primetime. ABC watched the increase in the global cost of crude oil prices and translated it into the prospects for prices at the pump. CBS led with a spat on Capitol Hill over the future of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The dispute was the only news deemed important enough to warrant coverage by a reporter on all through newscasts--and so it qualified as Story of the Day.

At stake was a proposal to expand the powers and budget of the CPSC to ensure the safety of consumer products. "There is wide agreement," asserted NBC's Tom Costello--rerunning the now-famous clip of Bob the Tester dropping toys down an office wall--that the commission "is overstretched." ABC's Lisa Stark called the CPSC "a shell of its former self." And CBS' Chip Reid conceded that Nancy Nord, its acting chairwoman, "agrees the agency is badly in need of more resources to modernize testing labs." However, Nord rejected aspects of the proposed expansion, including a plan to empower the attorney general of each state to file lawsuits to enforce federal consumer protection laws, collecting fines as high as $100m per violation. "I would rather be hiring scientists and safety inspectors than lawyers," Nord declared to NBC's Costello. Nord's opposition led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call for her resignation.

The storm broke at just the right time for ABC, which aired part two of its Made in China series on the safety of goods imported from Chinese factories. David Kerley documented a guided tour he was given of a toy factory that "has never had a recall" and a "state of the art" shrimp farm--"but we only saw what they wanted us to see." He found People's Republic bureaucrats "happy to show off their labs, which test food and toys" and then offered the caveat that those labs check "only a fraction of the $300bn of goods" exported to the United States.

Andrew Tyndall 10/31/07 11:41:09 pm

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