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Porkbarrel spending on Capitol Hill is normally a specialty of CBS (13 reports in the past four years v ABC 8, NBC 4) and NBC's Kelly O'Donnell proved that she really does not have Sharyl Attkisson's Follow the Money feel for populist outrage. O'Donnell started off publicizing the righteous indignation of John McCain as the Senate debated an additional $1.1tr in spending but then she ran out of steam. The four earmark examples she cited--beavers, weeds, peanuts, wine--were for paltry amounts; overall, the additions amounted to $8bn, less than 1% of the total. O'Donnell's intention was apparently to make McCain look like a people's anti-pork champion; her math turned him into a blowhard--but she buried that lead.
One has to admire David Martin's bedside manner when covering the maimed, disfigured and amputated casualties of war. Here is a playlist of eight such reports over the past 30 months by the CBS Pentagon correspondent. In striking a tone that is stoic rather than maudlin, Martin does himself proud and bestows honor on the wounded. His latest from Bethesda Naval Hospital looks at the legion of legs blown off during Marine Corps foot patrols in Afghanistan.
The news of the death of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, aged 69, arrived too late for the east coast feed of the nightly newscasts on Monday. Tuesday saw catch-up: NBC anchor Brian Williams filed the most comprehensive formal obituary. ABC and CBS folded their coverage of Holbrooke into their reporting on the National Security Council review of the strategy for Afghanistan. CBS' Chip Reid suggested that Holbrooke's hectic Afghanistan-Pakistan diplomacy was to blame for his ruptured artery. ABC's Martha Raddatz called the Kabul-Islamabad shuttle "perhaps the most difficult job of all."
If the media management strategy at the State Department in the face of WikiLeaks.org's looming data dump of secret cables is to try to change the subject then it has succeeded in spades. The story is now Julian Assange's legal jeopardy not the global diplomacy of the United States. All three newscasts covered Assange's bail hearing in London: CBS' Elizabeth Palmer, ABC's Jim Sciutto, NBC's Peter Alexander. ABC followed up with Brian Ross' Investigates feature on the rift between Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg, leading to Openleaks, a WikiLeaks spinoff. There was not a single mention in all four reports on the content of any fresh secrets leaking out of the State Department.
How good is Chris Cuomo as a pill smurf? That is the nickname for fake patients paid to visit pain clinics with imaginary bad backs to wangle illicit prescriptions for narcotic relief. The 20/20 anchor dressed up as a homeless person in Houston on ABC for an Investigation to see what scrip he could score. Cuomo is a bad smurf. All he could land was a little Loriset.
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