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All three network anchors traveled to the nation's capital to cover Inauguration Day. NBC extended its newscast to an hour (the first half-hour is monitored here) in a special edition The Second Inauguration of Barack Obama. ABC, too, called its newscast a special edition: Inauguration 2013. CBS spent least time on the inauguration proper (10 min v ABC 14, NBC 15) and most time on the key issues of the President's second term agenda: Nancy Cordes on the federal budget; Bill Whitaker on immigration control; and Elaine Quijano on gun control.

What is the main difference between the way NBC and CBS chose to sum up the highlights of Inauguration Day and the decisions made by ABC?

Both NBC and CBS assigned the task to their lead anchor, Brian Williams and Scott Pelley respectively. Williams filed the longer package, since he included extended highlights from the Second Inaugural Speech, a task CBS assigned to White House correspondent Major Garrett. ABC did not use Diane Sawyer to voiceover the highlights of the day, instead using her for a closing human interest feature with third-graders from Georgia at the Lincoln Memorial. The day's heavy lifting was assigned to David Muir, Sawyer's main substitute at ABC.

And what is the difference between Muir, and Williams or Pelley? Williams and Pelley talk in full sentences. Muir, disliking grammatical verbs, resorting to their present participles instead. (See what I did there?)

And what is it that ABC has against James Taylor? All three newscasts included musical clips from Beyonce and from Kelly Clarkson; NBC and CBS also offered an America the Beautiful clip with acoustic guitar. ABC not so much.

As for the speech itself. ABC's Muir focused on Barack Obama's collective theme, with his repetition of Together. CBS' Garrett ticked off its programatic, rather than thematic, aspects: preservation of Great Society entitlements, gay rights, climate change, immigration, and the All Our Children line about gun control. NBC's extended soundbites, via anchor Williams, preserved the rhetorical link that tied the policy goals together -- namely that fulfilling those goals is required to make the nation's Journey complete.

All three networks, too, brought in the anchors of their Sunday morning shows to provide analysis of the Second Inaugural Speech. David Gregory of Meet the Press called it a "robust defense of progressivism." George Stephanopoulos of This Week (at the tail of the Cecilia Vega videostream) offered a "meditation on freedom and equality." Ironically, Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation offered a complaint that could have been directed at his own network's coverage of the day's festivities, which was heavy on agenda items, light on ritual and rhetoric. Schieffer heard "no real memorable lines," more a "list of priorities."

It turned out that none of this analysis repeated what I thought was the most telling line of the speech, the one that combined both a progressive tradition of populist activism, and a equal rights tradition of individual liberties: "…while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing."

Andrew Tyndall 1/22/13 7:10:56 pm

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