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The nightly newscasts already milked the 40th anniversary of NASA's manned mission to the moon last Thursday, making space race nostalgia its Story of the Day. Here they come again, marking 40 years since the first actual moon walk. The recycled coverage had added impetus because of the weekend's obituaries for newsman Walter Cronkite, a major NASA booster at the time. At least today's newscasts maintained a shred of journalistic credibility by deciding not to lead with four-decades-old news. NBC and CBS started with the plight of Bowe Bergdahl, a 23-year-old army private from Idaho who is being held prisoner by Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan. ABC kicked off with self-generated headlines, reporting on its own opinion poll on the President's popularity.

CBS had Mandy Clark cover Bergdahl from Kabul. She reported that the soldier's own unit had launched a 3,000-strong taskforce to try to rescue their comrade. Bergdahl's identity had been kept secret since he went missing at the end of June. Then he was identified by his captors in an online videostream. CBS' Clark reckoned that the video showed the soldier "under duress" whereas Jere van Dyke, her network's in-house terrorism consultant, thought it showed "the appearance of good treatment." van Dyke explained the propaganda message directed at the United States: "We treat soldiers better than you do."

ABC's Laura Marquez and NBC's George Lewis took the yellow ribbon angle, showing the support for Bergdahl in Hailey, his small Idaho home town. "It is a measure of just how close-knit this community is that when people first learned that Bergdahl was the soldier captured in Afghanistan, they kept quiet about it out of concern for his safety," NBC's Lewis noted. He quoted his colleague Jim Miklaszewski's reporting from the Pentagon on the "mysterious circumstances" of the soldier's disappearance from his base in Zirak near the Pakistan border: "Bergdahl came off patrol; dropped off his weapon and body armor; then gathered up a couple of water bottles, a compass and a knife; and left the base alone apparently to meet some Afghans he had befriended."

Andrew Tyndall 7/21/09 8:45:00 pm

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