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Day Two of the London road trip by all three network anchors brought a very heavy news day. All three newscasts led with Barack Obama's busy day of diplomacy, meeting with world leaders in preparation for the G20 Financial Summit. All three assigned a correspondent to the anti-capitalist protests in the City of London, its financial hub. All three closed with a soft G20 feature. In total, G20 accounted for 43% of the three-network newshole (25 min out of 58). Curiously the three anchors also conducted taped interviews with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner--each remarkably unnewsworthy, yet each afforded a prominent placement--for another nine minutes of total airtime.

"A diplomatic decathlon," was how NBC's Chuck Todd described the President's day, "packing in a week's worth of international diplomacy into twelve hours." Obama held talks with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and scheduled summit visits to Beijing with President Wu Jintao and to Moscow with President Dmitri Medvedev. "Though this is an economic summit," ABC's Jake Tapper reckoned that the Medvedev meeting was the headlinegrabber. He heard some heralding "a major breakthrough in US-Russia relations" in their greenlighting of a renewal of the START nuclear treaty that was first signed in 1991. CBS' Chip Reid picked up on the joint statement: "We committed our two countries to achieving a nuclear-free world."

CBS' Reid heard "veiled criticism" of the way the two leaders' predecessors, Vladimir Putin and George Bush, conducted their diplomacy. ABC's Jim Sciutto went further: "Those relations reached a crisis point over the last year over Russia's war in Georgia and United States plans for missile defense in Eastern Europe." The decision to renew START talks, Sciutto reckoned, "goes beyond the normal diplomatic speak, setting out a very specific work plan for negotiators leading up to the summit in July."


Andrew Tyndall 4/2/09 11:22:02 pm

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