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The inevitable is happening already. A week before the event, the royal wedding in London has already qualified as the Story of the Day. Thus a very slow week of news culminated with trivia dominating a very slow day of hard news. At least NBC led with a real story: the brutal crackdown by the ruling Baath regime, using live gunfire, against opposition protestors in Syria. CBS chose a Nancy Cordes recess feature about popular dissatisfaction with Congress for the second straight day, following Jan Crawford with an opinion poll on the same theme; ABC opted for the Nissan Leaf, a hi-tech angle on that old chestnut of rising gasoline prices.

There was no breaking royal news, just a trio of weekending features. NBC survived with dignity intact, avoiding next week's wedding altogether--a short-lived badge of honor, one suspects. CBS called its build-up series The Royal Wedding, unimaginative yet informative, surely better than ABC's A Modern Fairytale, whose entry by Sharyn Alfonsi on Wednesday was insufferable.

In case you happen to be interested, you can see David Muir designating Prince William as ABC's Person of the Week. You can see CBS' Early Show anchor Erica Hill go on a guided tour of Westminster Abbey. And you can hear Mark Phillips' wry calculation on CBS about the harm that Britain's Gross Domestic Product will suffer as a result of the public holiday for all those royalist parties. At least the British can look forward to an eleven-day spring holiday; here, we have the prospect of incessant television coverage without compensatory vacation time.

Andrew Tyndall 4/26/11 4:00:54 pm

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