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Both returning anchors filed week-ending features (Katie Couric's on CBS here, Brian Williams' on NBC here) summarizing the narrative arc of the story so far. The remaining celebrity journalist in the broadcast ranks, Christiane Amanpour of ABC's This Week, recently arrived from CNN, cashed in her years of experience in the region when she parlayed a scheduled on-camera interview with Vice President Omar Suleiman at the Presidential Palace in Cairo into an impromptu q-&-a with Mubarak himself.
"I have been in public service for 62 years and now I am fed up and I want to retire but if I resign now there will be chaos," was how ABC's Amanpour quoted Mubarak. All her quotes were indirect since she was unable to use her video camera (still photos only) or her microphone to document her scoop. Nevertheless, it established ABC's leadership in Egypt coverage despite the absence of anchor Diane Sawyer from the scene--and despite the fact that on two days last week ABC actually decided that the winter weather deserved to be its lead story instead. In all, last week, ABC (54 v NBC 73, CBS 68) found the Egyptian story least newsworthy. When CBS' Couric, in her perch above strife-torn Tahrir Square, reported on Amanpour's headline quote from Mubarak, she commented sarcastically: "There is chaos already."
The 195 minutes that the three broadcast networks spent on the Egyptian story last week accounted for fully 67% of the three-network newshole: thisclose to the 200 minute threshold, which, believe it or not, has been surpassed in a single week on only 21 occasions in the 23 years of the Tyndall Report database. The last time the 200-minute mark was reached was in the spring of 2007, when a massacre on the campus at Virginia Tech left 33 dead. Before that, New Orleans was inundated because its levees failed to withstand Hurricane Katrina's storm surge.
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