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The build-up to Inauguration Day offers a clear example of NBC's more old-fashioned approach to covering the major events of the day. Peter Alexander offers a straightforward hard-news round-up of developments in the capital city. A more modern view is that news has become a mere commodity, that the major events are already generally known, that added value comes from an illuminating background feature: hence CBS' John Miller goes behind-the-scenes on inaugural security and ABC's Lisa Stark offers crowd calculations on the radius of a 'flu sneeze to spread droplets of virus -- plus an Aretha Franklin closer in tribute to the First Family.
The development inside-the-Beltway that was actually newsworthy came too late for a fully reported story. ABC did not mention at all the decision by House Republicans not to impose conditions on raising the federal budget Debt Ceiling after all, at least for a three-month rollover. NBC anchor Brian Williams mentioned the story in passing; CBS found time for Nancy Cordes to file a brief live q-&-a from Capitol Hill.
NBC and CBS offered contrasting features on the food supply. CBS' Seth Doane chose an environmental angle: warming waters in the north Atlantic are ruining the habitat of the catch for Maine shrimpers. NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman took an economic angle, filing a Making a Difference paean to the produce harvesters of California's Coachella Valley. Vegetables that would otherwise rot in the field are distributed free to food banks for the elderly.
The program is sponsored by Bill Clinton's Health Matters Initiative -- which seems like unnecessarily generous extra free publicity to the onetime (and maybe future) First Family, given that the former President's own daughter is on the NBC payroll, precisely to file Making a Difference reports just like this one.
There were loose ends on the week's two big sports stories to tidy up. All three newscasts examined the wording that Lance Armstrong used to confess to cheating in the Tour de France in his cable-TV OWN interview with Oprah Winfrey. ABC's Neal Karlinsky picked up on Armstrong's careful observance of the statute of limitations. NBC's Anne Thompson emphasized Winfrey's strict yes-or-no interviewing style. Jim Axelrod looked forward to the deluge of lawsuits that will soon rain down on the millionaire peddler, yet CBS decided not to post his report online.
CBS, also, decided not to follow-up on the convoluted love life of Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame linebacker. John Yang, in South Bend for NBC, suggested that Te'o had been hooked by a catfisher, people who "create false identities and lure others into a relationship, many of them serious and longlasting." On ABC, Dan Harris used the Te'o newshook to offer free publicity, complete with his clips of lovers with alter egos, to Rel Schulman, executive producer of the Catfish, the MTV reality show.
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