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NBC anchor Brian Williams filed from the Louisiana coast for a second day as the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster continued relentlessly to dominate the news agenda. It has now been Story of the Day for the last 17 weekdays, every night since May 11th. ABC led with the looming threat to the tourist beaches of the Florida Panhandle. CBS took us ten miles off the Louisiana shore to find floating globs of crude. NBC started with the effort to saw through a broken pipe to create a neat enough aperture to fit a cap to siphon the oil off to the surface.

NBC's Anne Thompson was clear about the confusion on the seabed a mile beneath the surface. "There are conflicting reports tonight," she told us, about BP's so-called Cut & Cap procedure. Her anchor Brian Williams joked about "almost cartoonish easy-to-remember names." The difficulty of the procedure belied the simplicity of the nomenclature. ABC's Matt Gutman called it "a day of deepwater setbacks." A giant robotic diamond-studded saw that is supposed to create a smooth surface in the 21-inch diameter pipeline out of which the crude oil is gushing has jammed. Gutman offered a show-&-tell, standing next to one of the 8,000lb, $6m robot submarines. "My goodness. They are so much bigger than I imagined," exclaimed his anchor Diane Sawyer.

Andrew Tyndall 6/8/10 3:44:14 pm

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