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The arrival of Barack Obama for a televised primetime memorial tribute to those attacked in the weekend's shooting spree kept Tucson in the headlines one more day. It accounted for 56% (33 min out of 59) of the three-network newshole (46% on Tuesday, 89% on Monday). NBC, whose anchor Brian Williams remains on the scene, ran a Tragedy in Tucson special report for the third straight day. CBS sent anchor Katie Couric to Washington, where she surveyed the reaction of the colleagues of Gabrielle Giffords, the wounded congresswoman. CBS covered the story most heavily (13 min v NBC 12, ABC 8). NBC led with a preview of the President's speech. CBS led with the Capitol Hill tribute. ABC chose the mixture of mourning for the dead and vigils for the injured on the streets of Tucson.

"Just to console," was the advanced spin doled out by Obama's aides about the message of the speech to NBC's Savannah Guthrie. Her colleague Lester Holt (no link) told us that the memorial tribute, in the University of Arizona's 14,000-seat basketball arena, even has a slogan: Together We Thrive--Tucson & America. CBS' Chip Reid noted that thousands more are being diverted to the outdoors football stadium, where they will hear a feed of the President's remarks. On ABC, Dan Harris observed that the outpouring of emotions in Tucson was not subsiding with the passage of time--anything but. "Extraordinary," he called it, especially so outside the University Medical Center, where the injured are hospitalized. "It started small on the day of the shootings, with just a few flowers, cards and candles, but day after day, it has grown and grown, unfurling into a massive carpet of sympathy and support. The sheer scope of this is incredible."

ABC's White House correspondent Jake Tapper equated President Obama's task with that of Ronald Reagan after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and that of Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing. Tapper quoted his unidentified "official" sources telling him that their boss "wants to lift the nation up and not shrink the moment with politics…Obama will devote a significant portion of his speech to the memory of the victims and he will also reflect on how all of us can better honor their memories in our own lives."

Frankly, Tapper loses all sense of proportion when he attempts a comparison between Saturday's Safeway supermarket shooting and Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah Office Building. Granted, both were instances of violence against the federal government, its property and persons--but the former killed six, the latter 168. It diminishes the outrageousness of Timothy McVeigh's terrorism to put the two incidents into the same category.

Andrew Tyndall 1/15/11 6:22:08 pm

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