CONTAINING LINKS TO 1280 STORIES FROM THE NETWORKS' NIGHTLY NEWSCASTS
     COMMENTS: The Congresswoman’s Politics

Considering that the underlying event that made this shooting so newsworthy was that it was an assassination attempt on a congresswoman, there was remarkable little attention paid to Gabrielle Giffords herself. CBS anchor Katie Couric noted her recent outreach to a Republican friend: "We need to figure out how to tone our rhetoric and partisanship down." ABC's Dan Harris included a brief profile of Giffords as a "gun-owning Democrat who, in November, won her third election in a conservative district…Her positions were sometimes controversial with her constituents, but she pointedly refused to stop getting out and mixing with voters after her office was vandalized when she voted for health care reform."

ABC anchor Diane Sawyer and CBS' in-house physician Jennifer Ashton both visited the trauma unit at the University Medical Center where Giffords is in a coma, to report on the extent of her brain injuries. Sawyer tried to make a political point out of the routine neurological test in which an emergency physician asks a patient to show two fingers. Giffords "actually gave a peace victory sign," the anchor suggested. The doctors refused to play along with her attempt to uncover significance.

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