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NBC and CBS both treated the Constitutional questions about universal healthcare coverage mandates as a legal story, assigning the court challenge to Pete Williams and Jan Crawford respectively. ABC chose the political angle, with Jake Tapper at the White House. The legal eagles made the better call.
CBS cashed in on Lesley Stahl's lachrymose viral hit on 60 Minutes by having Nancy Cordes follow up with more weeping from the Speaker-to-be.
None of the three newscasts have paid a full amount of attention to the narcotrafficking wars in Mexico. Of the three, NBC has made the greatest effort over the past four years (27 reports v CBS 21, ABC 12), led by Mark Potter. Potter files once more in the War Next Door series by asking where the cartels get their firepower from. It is not south of the border. This is the fifth such package since the fall of 2006 on the guns angle, the third by Potter.
On the second anniversary of Bernard Madoff's exposure as a Ponzi Schemer, ABC's Brian Ross is back on the job: here on the bankruptcy trustees' lawsuit; here on Madoff Junior's suicide. If you once worked for Madoff your resume is irredeemably tainted, CBS' Anthony Mason warns.
Score one for The Chronicle of Higher Education and its cover story The Shadow Scholar. David Muir picked up on the Chronicle's profile of the anonymous ghostwriter who pens theses for cheating students for ABC News' Investigation. The auto-didact Ed Dante, his nom de plume, has not only earned a living for ten years but has given himself an education in the process.
When Linsey Davis covers cruise liner misadventures for ABC, should she not mention that her bosses at Disney are competitors with Carnival Royal Caribbean (my mistake), whose ill-fated Brilliance of the Seas almost foundered off Alexandria? By contrast, the silver-haired passengers on the Clelia II, rocked by a massive wave in the Antarctic Ocean last week, told CBS' Erin Moriarty that the Drake Passage storm added to their fun.
"Dadgunnit," was the best soundbite of the day, from a 73-year-old Texan gymrat in Steve Hartman's human interest series Assignment America on CBS.
ABC's John Berman giggled at the thought of what can be found under Isaiah Mustafa's loincloth but his year-in-review listicle was not actually funny. "I am a thespian, a method actor," Mr Old Spice insisted--which actually was.
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