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George Stephanopoulos, now at Good Morning America, took advantage of his substitute stint as World News anchor at ABC, to return to the political beat. He traveled to Washington to claim an Exclusive interview with President Barack Obama and kicked off ABC's newscast with an eight-minute segment on gasoline prices, the federal budget deficit, his own birth certificate and the prospects for Campaign 2012. The other two newscasts chose to lead with a follow-up to Wednesday's Story of the Day: the silence at the air-traffic-control tower in Reno that greeted a nighttime emergence medevac flight; now Hank Krakowski, the head of the FAA's A-T-C operation, has resigned. This marks the third straight day that NBC has led with an air safety story. Yet the Story of the Day was none of the above: the continuing debate over the federal budget deficit attracted most overall attention.

Stephanopoulos was not the only anchor on the road. Katie Couric also went to Washington for CBS as the freshman class in the House of Representatives completed its first 100 Days in office. Here was her Congressional Voices feature back in January; her hundred-day follow-up was heavy on solons' soundbites, light on political analysis. Meanwhile, NBC anchor Brian Williams avoided politics altogether, traveling to Connecticut to the country home of pop singer Paul Simon in order to lavish free publicity on his new CD So Beautiful or So What. Williams told us almost nothing about the new album, opting to string together a montage of Simon's greatest hits instead.

As for the federal budget, NBC went to Kelly O'Donnell on Capitol Hill to cover the vote in the House to approve last week's formula to fund the government for the remainder of this year. Both political parties were divided on the vote with a minority of Democrats joining a majority of Republicans in favor of the continuing resolution. "Unusual agreement from both ends of the political spectrum," noted O'Donnell as Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Tea Party leader Michele Bachmann found unity in opposition. CBS' business correspondent Anthony Mason, like ABC's Stephanopoulos, traveled to Washington. While Stephanopoulos sat down with the President, Mason grabbed an interview with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Geithner's talking point was the need to expand the National Debt beyond its current $14.3tr limit.

For coverage of the FAA's air traffic control system, NBC and CBS both led from Reagan National Airport with Tom Costello and Wyatt Andrews respectively. CBS followed up with Armen Keteyian's collection of anecdotes about sleepiness on the job: not just controlers in the tower fighting fatigue, but security guards, train engineers, truck drivers, power plant operators, airline pilots.

Andrew Tyndall 4/20/11 12:11:50 pm

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