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Partisan maneuvering on Capitol Hill over the federal budget was the Story of the Day for the third straight day. For the third straight day CBS, which had Harry Smith as its substitute host, led with the negotiations over what spending would be cut in the package that funds government operations for the remainder of the fiscal year. NBC had a substitute host too, Ann Curry from Today; it decided to lead with a Richter 7.1 aftershock off the coast of Japan that, fortunately, failed to produce a tsunami. ABC, whose anchor Diane Sawyer was on a field trip to Chicago, yet again chose a quixotic lead story: this time Sharyn Alfonsi covered a small study published in Health Affairs; it found that hospitals make many more errors in patient care than they report, perhaps ten times as many.
In their quest for imaginative reporting on the looming government shutdown of inessential services, the Capitol Hill correspondents at both ABC and CBS went the extra mile. CBS' Nancy Cordes used a wheel of affiliate correspondents, spinning from a clinic in Philadelphia to the polluted waters of the Chesapeake Bay to a Minneapolis hospital. ABC's Jonathan Karl turned to his network's archive and the soundbite editing machine to show history repeating itself. NBC used a less creative Kelly O'Donnell.
All three White House correspondents got in on the budget act: ABC's Jake Tapper with a full report; NBC's Chuck Todd and CBS' Chip Reid with stand-up q-&-a's. Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer rounded out the coverage on CBS with a rebuke for the fingerpointing Solons: "a shameful episode."
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