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Kudos to NBC for dispatching a reporter to Barako on the Niger River. When a Sahara Desert militia attacked a BP natural gas plant at In Amenas, in eastern Algeria, Rohit Kachroo was already in place to fold his coverage of that hostage standoff into his wider reporting on the civil war in Mali, where the northern zone is controled by an Islamist faction and is under attack by France, the former colonial power. ABC and CBS were obliged to report on the Algerian stand-off from longer distance. At the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin gave us one nickname, The One Eyed Man, for the hostage-taking militia leader Moktar bel-Moktar. On ABC, Brian Ross was more colorful, dubbing him Mr Marlboro for his Saharan cigarettes-diamonds-firearms-narcotics contraband operation. Ross told us that Mr M had been expelled from al-Qaeda as a common criminal, thereby contradicting his own colleague Martha Raddatz (Ross is included at the tail of the Raddatz videostream), reporting from Rome, who believed that the Algerian operation was terroristic instead.
The risks of extreme levels of caffeine in energy drinks started to attract regular coverage last fall. Now researchers for the government's substance abuse and mental health DAWN Report have analyzed emergency room visits triggered by chugalugging Red Bull and Full Throttle and the like. ABC assigned Lisa Stark to find out what her brain looks like when buzzed. Stark tested herself on coffee rather than on actual energy drinks; her brain changed "a lot" but was still "within normal range" whatever that means; and energy drinks have less caffeine in them than coffee does anyway. In what way did Stark's brain-scan clarify anything?
The heart-rending specter of infant mortality hovered over both CBS' Jon LaPook and NBC's Robert Bazell. Bazell offered timely relief during influenza season from research in Norway (complete with an implied dig at the woeful state of public health in this country for its immunological recordkeeping): the 'flu vaccine not only helps pregnant women, at a time when their immune systems are compromised, but also has no adverse impact on babies at birth. Dr LaPook showed us a baby on an Arkansas Children's Hospital ventilator struggling for breath with a syncytial virus, too immature to be helped by its vaccine. It is a virus that kills more than 200 newborns annually nationwide. This time, Baby Jude, aged six weeks, survived.
Listening to Dan Harris on ABC telling us about Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame linebacker made famous for playing-while-bereaved, you would think that sports journalism was not in the slightest bit implicated in propagating the hoax that his dead girlfriend had ever existed. Harris explained the plausibility that Te'o was referring to a real person in his Heisman-Trophy-campaign interviews by invoking the movie documentary Catfish. He did not call his colleagues at ABC's sibling network ESPN to ask them why they found Te'o's tale credible.
Maybe NBC thinks its female correspondents offer a more compassionate tone than its men. Of the 32 stories it has aired about the devastating aftermath of Superstorm Sandy since November 5th, the week after landfall, every single one has been assigned to a woman. The latest, a schoolgirl-oriented Making a Difference feature from Chris Jansing in Jersey City, offers a big wet kiss of free publicity to Scholastic Publishing.
ABC's closing feature heard New-York-based John Schriffen voiceover helmetcam footage of housefires supplied by Scott Ziegler, a Michigan firefighter. Ziegler wore the helmetcam at work for a year in order to publicize the risks of his job and to campaign against municipal budget cuts targeted at fire departments. So he had an ax to grind and, obviously, additional reporting was in order. No such luck. Watch Schriffen's report: How many fires did Ziegler fight in that year? Which city's fire department does he work for? How many fires burned out of control because of a lack of firefighting resources? Does Ziegler's video accurately represent his work experience? Come on Schriffen, do some journalism.
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