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Lest we forget that this is a national holiday in its own right, not just Inauguration Eve, the new White House correspondents at CBS and ABC followed Barack Obama's lead and made his volunteer service their angle. Both ABC's Jake Tapper and CBS' Chip Reid followed the President-elect to a District of Columbia homeless shelter for teenage boys where he joined in the painting. "I do hope they are watching my technique," he bragged with his roller. "It is outstanding."
NBC's Martin Luther King Day contribution saw anchor Brian Williams sit down with John Lewis, the Civil-Rights-era activist turned Georgia Congressman. He recalled that in 1961, the year Obama was born, he was a Freedom Rider: "Blacks and whites could not board a Greyhound bus together and travel from Virginia through North Carolina, South Carolina--and Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi--without the possibility of being arrested, jailed or beaten."
ABC added a pair of race-related features. Pierre Thomas took A Closer Look at the "severe chronic problems" that cause disproportionate harm to the African-American population. He ticked off an "ugly list"--death by homicide, rates of incarceration, school dropouts, infection with HIV/AIDS and poverty. The question for the new African-American President, suggested Thomas, who happens to be African-American too, was whether he "would or should pay special attention to the black community."
ABC's closer, by David Wright, walked us along the Washington Mall to suggest that "the entire landscape of the inauguration is haunted by slavery--and haunted is the right word: there are no markers here, not so much as a plaque laid by the historical society." Slaves built the US Capitol and the White House: "The men who laid the foundations…had life, but not liberty, and little hope for happiness as they baked the bricks, lugged the granite and raised those massive columns…" Wright reminded us that 12 of the 42 Presidents of the United States have been slave owners.
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