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NBC, with substitute anchor Lester Holt, led with the wildfires in the high Arizona desert and embarrassed itself with shameless self-promotion for NBC Sports. Holt aired a three-minute interview from Lausanne Switzerland with Mark Lazarus, the networks' sports honcho, allowing Lazarus to boast about his Comcast-controled success in securing rights to cover the Olympic Games over the long haul, through 2020, not just on television, but on all platforms, even those not yet invented.
Speaking of online platforms, NBC not only had Kelly O'Donnell cover Weiner's sexual texting, it also had Kevin Tibbles in Chicago on the coupon beat as Groupon prepares to cash in on Wall Street, and Lee Cowan in San Francisco where Wikipedia.org is working to keep Paul Revere's history free from Palinite revision.
As for ABC, anchor Diane Sawyer hosted her newscast from Washington DC, one day after reporting from Kabul. En route, she took a ride with Secretary Robert Gates in the Pentagon's Nightwatch, the so-called Doomsday Plane, a Cold-War-era jumbo jet, designed to keep flying indefinitely during any thermonuclear Armageddon, sending commands for retaliatory ICBM strikes to the navy's strategic submarine fleet. Our tax dollars at work, as the saying goes, although Sawyer did not tell us how many of them.
Sawyer's stop-off in Washington provided the pretext for a double-barreled inside-the-Beltway lead: Jonathan Karl on Weiner's woes was followed by Jake Tapper on ABC's in-house opinion polling, which showed Barack Obama's declining standing as the economic recovery slows to a crawl. In the horse race for 2012, Tapper reported that Obama is now being headed by the GOP frontrunner, Mitt Romney. ABC's third DC-based report was from Martha Raddatz, on the civil strike in Yemen. What made it a Washington story was that she was her concern for the American commandos and diplomats on the scene.
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