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Barack Obama's executive order rescinding an eight-year-old ban on federal funding for certain biotech research was Story of the Day. His predecessor had prohibited the National Institutes of Health from backing research on stem cells derived from newly-destroyed human embryos. All three newscasts led from the White House, so one might assume that all three networks led with stem cells. ABC and CBS did; NBC deviated. Maybe corporate cross-promotion infected NBC's news judgment. It chose criticism of Obama's economic leadership by financier Warren Buffett. Where did Buffett vent his critique? In an exclusive interview on NBC's sibling network CNBC.

ABC's Jake Tapper picked up on the President's order to his Office of Science & Technology to restore "scientific integrity to policymaking" when he lifted the stem cell funding ban. NBC's science correspondent Robert Bazell heard Obama make it clear that "his administration would have a new attitude toward all science," making decisions "based on facts not ideology." If these were veiled insults at George Bush's supposed aversion to science, CBS' Chip Reid pointed out that it was not opposition to science that had led to the ban but moral principle. Bush decided "it was unethical to destroy human embryos to do medical research."

As for the biotech, CBS' Sandra Hughes pointed out that research on stem cells from human embryos has gone ahead in Britain, Singapore, Japan, China and California. Geron, a biotech firm, has FDA permission to perform trials to generate new nerve cells in spinal cords of paralyzed humans after some success with paralyzed rats. ABC's Lisa Stark (at the tail of the Tapper videostream) found that Parkinson's Disease and Diabetes Type I show the most promise: "Cells might be able to replace cells in the patient's body which have malfunctioned." On CBS, CNN's medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta (at the tail of the Hughes videostream) too singled out organs with "discrete problems"--insulin from the pancreas, dopamine from the brain--rather than a disease like Alzheimer's. "Because it is so global in the brain it might be less responsive."


Andrew Tyndall 3/16/09 4:51:07 pm

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