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All three newscasts rounded out inaugural coverage with women's political stories. ABC's Martha Raddatz followed Hillary Rodham Clinton on Inauguration Day as she prepares for her final testimony on Capitol Hill as Secretary of State. CBS' Nancy Cordes filed her version of Diane Sawyer's women-of-the-Senate Exclusive earlier this month: the Granite State breaks the Glass Ceiling. On NBC, Andrea Mitchell marked the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe-vs-Wade decision with an interview with the pro-choice lawyer who argued the case. Guess which cable TV show Sarah Weddington appeared on to provide Mitchell with her abortion rights soundbite (hint: that would be the sixth such cross-promotional clip in the past seven weeks).
Amid light-hearted winter weather stunts -- CBS' Dean Reynolds mugging as a bank robber, ABC's Sam Champion showing us video of a frozen-stiff T-shirt; NBC's Kevin Tibbles offering Lake Wobegon-quality north-country accents -- CBS did manage to find a serious angle in the frigid cold. Reynolds searched Minneapolis' Skid Row under the I-394 overpass for frozen street people.
NBC's lead by Janet Shamlian from the Lone Star Community College may have been about almost nothing -- mostly about an atmosphere of fear, panic, anxiety rather than the underlying crime. On CBS, Bob Orr showed us a massacre at George Mason University that was entirely fictional. His colleague Wyatt Andrews had already told us about the Active Shooter Response training given to police, when he covered last month's Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. Orr now repeats Andrews, but uses a role-playing exercise rather than an actual emergency.
CBS kept up its commitment to the civil war in Syria, sending Clarissa Ward back once more, this time to the Atma refugee camp near the border with Turkey, where 90 toilets service 12,000 homeless. Elizabeth Palmer, also from CBS, became the second nightly news correspondent, after NBC's Rohit Kachroo, to reach wartorn Mali. NBC aired footage from Afghanistan, even though Keir Simmons was based in London to perform the voiceover -- and it was not even NBC's own footage, but that of a British television crew embedded with Prince Harry, the helicopter warrior.
And there was a food story, so, as usual, ABC covered it, and, as usual, Jim Avila got the assignment: watch out for extra virgin olive oil and pomegranate juice and saffron and teabags in the grocery aisle. They may be fake -- just like Beyonce's bombs bursting in air.
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