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Veterans Day was observed one day late because the eleventh of the eleventh fell on a Sunday. The public holiday made this a very light day of news. Not a single story was considered important enough to be covered by a correspondent from all three networks. The three networks split on what the day's lead should be. ABC led with feature footage from the fighting in Afghanistan, shot in collaboration with Vanity Fair magazine. NBC led with a preview of the crowded skies for Thanksgiving travel. CBS led with the lightly-covered Story of the Day, the continuing clean-up of last Wednesday's fuel oil spill in San Francisco Bay.

Both ABC's Brian Rooney (subscription required) and CBS' John Blackstone reported on the Coast Guard's progress in cleaning up the spill from the Chinese-owned container ship Cosco Busan as she left port in Oakland: of the 58,000 gallons that leaked into the bay after the ship crashed into a Bay Bridge pylon almost 20,000 has either evaporated or been collected. The only explanation why Blackstone claimed the opposite--that "the oil keeps spreading"--was to hype the retelling of a story he had already covered on Thursday. Rooney, by contrast, was relaxed about the situation, not even traveling to San Francisco but narrating videotape instead from Los Angeles. Rooney worried that the spill "threatens several sensitive species in the bay's mudflats and marshes." Blackstone introduced us the crabbers on Fisherman's Wharf whose pots are stacked idle on dry land because of the pollution.

No network sent a reporter to the Kerch Strait that joins the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea where storms with 18-foot waves killed three sailors and caused five vessels to founder. A tanker broke apart, spilling one million gallons of fuel oil.

Andrew Tyndall 11/13/07 11:40:01 pm

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