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Sports news that airs on the nightly newscasts often fails to find itself posted online. So Seth Doane's report on the playing-field-induced brain damage that changed Seau's personality, and may have ended his life at the age of 43, is nowhere to be found on cbsnews.com. Presumably, CBS News is being punctilious about the National Football League's copyrighted match video.
This is not a trivial matter. In effect, the NFL is shielding itself from the public relations disaster of having its workplace exposed as a crippling killer, at least by online video journalism. If ever the rationale applies of invoking fair use in order to post copyrighted footage, it applies here. Video of Junior Seau bashing his brains in is clearly protected.
By the way, ABC's Jim Avila also covered the Seau autopsy and his report is posted online. Oddly enough, it carries an Exclusive label, where clearly it is no such thing.
What failure do Andrea Mitchell's report on the white men filling senior posts in the Obama Cabinet and Anne Thompson's report on the white killer whales filling a hole in Hudson Bay ice have in common? No, it is not that they both use two-decades-old footage from Tom Brokaw's NBC Nightly News as illustrations (Mitchell actually quotes herself). Their flaw is that they both use clips from fictional stories as actuality footage in a news report. Using Mad Men and Big Miracle as items of journalism is as bad as Dan Quayle using Murphy Brown in political debate.
All three White House correspondents were assigned to cover the National Rifle Association's meeting with Vice President Joe Biden's taskforce on firearms regulation. None made an outright prediction, but judging by their tone, I would say that NBC' Kristen Welker and CBS' Major Garrett gave the advantage to gun control initiatives; ABC's Jonathan Karl was still certain of the Cold Dead Hands lobbying clout of the NRA. Compare and contrast.
Ambien is too strong, especially for women, and the FDA has recommended that smaller doses be prescribed. NBC's Tom Costello and CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook both covered the sleeping pill. But Lisa Stark takes the cake on ABC, for having spotted the story early herself last August.
It is to be expected that ABC would decide to treat the Academy Awards nominations as newsworthy, since David Wright's report doubles as cross promotion for his network's coverage of the ceremonies themselves. NBC's Kristen Dahlgren found the better angle, though, in the Internet cafés of Kabul.
If you want a taste of the distinctive journalistic style of CBS' Evening News under the anchorship of Scott Pelley, you can go beyond story selection (although that was in evidence, again, as Mark Strassmann was the only correspondent assigned to the new rules on home mortgages, with the housing crisis being a CBS staple) and zero in on CBS' attraction to single, colorful, anecdotal individuals with a vivid soundbite to stand as proxies for an overall drama. Elaine Quijano meets Jimmy Kamaris.
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