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The importance of the gun control debate continues to provoke disagreements between the networks. As it did on Wednesday, when it filed a lone report by Jonathan Karl, ABC continues to downplay it, this time ignoring it completely. CBS likewise stuck to its previous path, filing its 8th, 9th and 10th report on the topic this week alone: from Atlanta, Mark Strassmann addressed the question of whether the Centers for Disease Control should treat injuries and deaths from bullets as a public health concern. The National Rifle Association believes not. Both CBS and NBC conducted opinion poll research on guns. Chuck Todd walked us through NBC's numbers.
The housing market is starting to rebound. CBS, which has dominated this beat for the past two years, assigned Ben Tracy to report on the gradual return of so-called jumbo mortgages in the priciest major cities. His broker told him that even Bill Gates would have been turned down a couple of years ago -- I think Mr Gates would have paid cash. Meanwhile on ABC, Linsey Davis showed us NextGen homes, a trend that NBC's Nancy Snyderman told us about last month.
ABC's Dan Harris was the lone reporter on the nightly newscasts Wednesday to wonder about Manti Te'o's fake dead girlfriend. He thought an explanation might be found in the documentary Catfish. Now CBS and NBC send reporters Dean Reynolds and John Yang to the Notre Dame campus in South Bend to inquire whether the linebacker was hoaxer or hoaxee. On ABC, ESPN alumnus Josh Elliott showed us clips of his old network's interviews with Te'o, in which the false story was famously disseminated. Elliott implied that devout Mormonism was the explanation for why the unmarried Te'o should have had no physical knowledge of his so-called girlfriend. Elliott did not question his former colleagues about whether ESPN's in-house procedures require a fact-check of stories they publicize.
Sorry, but it is just lazy when journalists edit pre-produced fictional footage from Hollywood and such into video reports in order to illustrate real life events. The whole point about fiction is that it is made up; the whole point about news is that it actually happens. ABC's David Wright might argue that he is documenting the ubiquity of Dear Abby -- so ubiquitous that even Hollywood screenwriters include her advice column in the dialogue they invent. No! Wright does not have to dig up a clip from Dexter or The Great Muppet Caper to prove that millions have been reading Abigail van Buren for decades. CBS' Jim Axelrod and NBC's Rehema Ellis achieved the same by quoting non-fictional acknowledgements, from Ed Murrow and Ronald Reagan respectively. All three newscasts closed with Pauline Friedman Phillips' death, at age 94, quoting favorite van Buren quips. Wright, on her openmindedness about lesbian love as early as 1970, was particularly illuminating. Yet CBS anchor Scott Pelley reserved the best for himself: catch his intro to Axelrod's obit.
NBC's Miguel Almaguer has made quite a beachcombing beat for himself, touring Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest in search of debris washing ashore from the Fukushima tsunami. Now he generalizes about the risks that Japanese animal species -- specifically a voracious bottomfeeding starfish -- might be carried ashore by transPacific flotsam and jetsam. Exotic species stories are almost always fun to watch: here, from our database, are pythons, carp, lionfish, weevils, psyllids, prawns -- and the giant Brazilian salvinia weed.
By the way, with Mali in the news, it is one of the answers to a favorite general knowledge parlor game: name the ten countries in the world whose names, when written in English, have four letters. Hint, three of the countries also have a four-letter capital city -- Lima, Suva, Lome.
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