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On Tuesday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell filed a report on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe-vs-Wade decision that was illustrated by theories about rape from pro-life politicians. Now CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook has an interesting follow-up from the American College of Obstetricians that should be picked up by ABC and NBC too. Unfortunately it was only covered on CBS as a brief q-&-a, not a full report, without explicitly connecting the public policy dots. Dr LaPook told us that many unwanted pregnancies are connected to domestic violence, rape and so-called "birth control sabotage." Check it out.
Score one for the National Rifle Association and its allies. In the debate about gun control legislation, activists have often claimed that it is access to videogames -- not to firearms -- that makes killing easy. Now a royal soldier agrees. Check out ABC's Lama Hasan with Prince Harry's soundbite in praise of PlayStation and XBOX for training his thumbs to be more lethal. Keir Simmons' coverage on the prince on NBC on Tuesday missed out on that gem.
For the second day in a row, all three newscasts tell us how cold it is. For the second day in a row, CBS chooses the more serious angle, with Elaine Quijano visiting the tent-dwelling homeless in Staten Island, dislocated by Superstorm Sandy. NBC's Kevin Tibbles and ABC' Gio Benitez both filed a standard How Cold Is It? round-up. Benitez wins with his Duluth bubbles-and-banana.
CBS in general gets high marks for its economic coverage, spending more time over the last couple of years on the housing crisis, on the jobs crisis, and on the plight of the poor. CBS gets low marks for its enthusiasm for sucking up to corporate CEOs, asking advice on how to fix the political economy. Captains of industry from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Honeywell and American Express do not tend to be disinterested observers in this regard. So Anthony Mason, in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, did not need to offer such deference to the CEO of JP Morgan Asset Management.
It is a rare day that the normally-serious CBS newscast decides to close with an animal feature. Anna Werner's chimpanzees represent such an exception.
ABC offered a pair of sports stories, Ron Claiborne to cross-promote the Australian Open tennis tournament (aired by Disney-owned ESPN-2), and Matt Gutman to cross-promote the daytime talkshow katie (syndicated by Disney).
What is the lesson we can all draw from Manti Te'o, ABC's Diane Sawyer asked her colleague Katie Couric, as a follow-up to the free publicity (at the tail of Gutman's videostream) for her exclusive sitdown with the Notre Dame linebacker. Te'o had carried on a remote, four-year platonic romance with a girlfriend who never existed, and won national sympathy for his bereavement over her non-existent death from leukemia. The story had been all over ESPN and Sports Illustrated. Yet for Couric, "the moral of the story is: be careful of who you are communicating with online, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
How about this? "Be careful when you hear inspirational, heart-string-tugging human-interest sports journalism, be skeptical, even cynical perhaps."
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