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ABC's Ron Claiborne watched the love and support of the bedside vigil surrounding Rep Gabrielle Giffords and was inspired to report on how friends and family aid a patient's recovery from injury and the convalescence from illness. His report was one part research-based, one part anecdotal. For research he went to the Archives of Internal Medicine for a Duke University study into the role of social support in surviving heart disease. For the anecdote, Claiborne turned to his own colleague Bob Woodruff, who swears that his family's presence at his bedside enabled him to recover from his own traumatic brain damage, suffered while reporting from the warzone in Iraq.
If you think that this use of an anecdote concerning the personal life of an ABC News anchor as a source for an ABC news story has a whiff of narcissism, this is nothing compared with Andrea Canning's obituary for a star of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on Wednesday. You would think that the central fact of David Nelson's life was the regard in which he was held by a certain Good Morning America anchor.
By the way, Canning referred to the days of Ozzie and Harriet as "a simpler time in this country." What, pray tell, was simpler about Jim Crow…the Cold War…systematic shaming of homosexuals and unmarried mothers…the military draft…lack of workplace opportunity for women…McCarthyism…the absence of guaranteed healthcare for the elderly?
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