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A trio of military stories appeared on the three newscasts, one on each network. NBC selected a hard news story as Pete Williams told us about the Supreme Court's decision to take the case of the Rev Fred Phelps and the bereaved family of USMC Cpl Matthew Snyder. Phelps' congregation pickets military funerals warning that war deaths are God's punishment for allowing homosexuals to serve. The Justices will decide whether Phelps' "utterly distasteful" speech--in the lower court's words--is Constitutionally protected.
Steve Hartman introduced us to 21-year-old Heinrich Soltow for his Assignment America feature on CBS. Hartman became Big Brother to Soltow's Little Brother when the boy was in the third grade and mentored him weekly for ten years. Soltow went on to college but dropped out. "A five-star underachiever," Hartman called his protege. Imagine Hartman's surprise at a visit to Camp Pendleton as Cpl Soltow headed off to Afghanistan: "This story is about how the Marines changed him."
ABC's military story was inspired by the year's best movie at the Academy Awards. Karen Russo, one of the network's young generation of single-person digital reporting crews, was sent to Afghanistan to show us a bomb squad at work--The Hurt Locker in real life. Russo recorded the videotape and collected the defusers' soundbites but ABC was still unwilling to put her front and center. Anchor Diane Sawyer took over the narrating chores and voiced-over Russo's work from New York. Russo would get her chance on Nightline, Sawyer promised.
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