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Scott Pelley lays down a marker on his first appearance as anchor of CBS Evening News. On the day when tabloid politics inside-the-Beltway was at its most salacious and inconsequential, CBS deliberately avoided choosing Anthony Weiner confessed sexcapades as its lead. Instead, Pelley's newscast, whose promotion has promised a nightly version of 60 Minutes, kicked off with Mandy Clark's embedded coverage of the 101st Airborne Division's skirmishes in Paktika Province along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The rear of Pelley's set featured a global map and his sign-off came from "all of us at CBS News all around the world."

Not to be upstaged in the seriousness department, ABC, too, decided not to lead with Weiner's wiener--even though 20/20 had paid Meagan Broussard, one of the six young women with whom the 46-year-old Weiner had a masturbatory cyber-flirtation, for her pictures of the topless Solon and her own underwear-clad cleavage. "I do not think he is a bad guy. I just thing he has issues, just like everyone else," the gum-chewing 26-year-old Broussard told 20/20 anchor Chris Cuomo. ABC News paid Broussard after being introduced to her by Andrew Breitbart, the online right-wing provocateur.

No, ABC World News chose the same tack as CBS' Pelley. Not only did it lead with the war in Afghanistan, it turned over its newscast to a special report Mission: Afghanistan, with anchor Diane Sawyer filing a trio of reports from Kabul and introducing Mike Boettcher's own version of being embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Paktika Province. Sawyer's packages consisted of a sitdown with Gen David Petraeus and Secretary Robert Gates; a second, solo sitdown with Gates; and a street meeting with Kabul schoolboys.

Sawyer's scoops included the prediction that the United States and the Taliban would draw up a negotiated peace treaty by the end of the year, and Secretary Gates' acknowledgement of excessive certitude in his early years in charge of the Pentagon. Sawyer concluded that it is proper that Gates should retire, now he has become more skeptical and more cautious: "Genius is knowing when to stop."

NBC, even though it did not have 20/20's inside scoop, led with Kelly O'Donnell on Capitol Hill with the tabloid Weiner story anyway. CBS under Katie Couric, Pelley's predecessor, was often split between personality-driven news and a serious-minded agenda. That split was exemplified in Couric's valedictory of her five years behind the anchor desk, in which the stories she highlighted were a mismatch with the agenda she oversaw. Here is the guest column I wrote about that miscasting for The Hollywood Reporter last week.

Andrew Tyndall 6/7/11 5:09:09 pm

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