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Stock market investments are on the verge of recovering all of the losses that they suffered since the fall of 2007. This near-milestone inspired three different packages on the three different newscasts. NBC's lead by John Yang focused on the prospects for the overall economy, specifically the real estate and employment sectors. ABC's David Muir looked at the straitened expectations of the babyboom generation as it heads for retirement. CBS sent Anthony Mason to Switzerland to hang out with plutocrats at the World Economic Forum in Davos: he led the newscast with a brief stand-up on the stock market, featuring the optimism of the CEOs of Merck and JP Morgan and Coca-Cola, before returning later with a sitdown with Bill Gates, the philanthropic billionaire. ABC's lead was filed by in-house physician Richard Besser on the stomach 'flu. Yet there was not a single story that was deemed newsworthy enough to attract coverage by a correspondent on more than one newscast. The ignominious Story of the Day, by default, was the cold winter weather.

Steve Osunsami became the fourth reporter assigned by ABC to file a How Cold Is It? story in the five weekdays this week. NBC (two reports) and CBS (one) found the concept of cold weather in winter less newsworthy. After Sam Champion's frozen T-shirt and Gio Benitez' banana hammer and Alex Perez' frozen egg, Osunsami's failed apartment plumbing was ho-hum.

A more interesting weather story was filed from Salt Lake City by NBC's Miguel Almaguer. You might think that the voters of Utah, being true-red Republicans, might have no truck with environmental regulation. You might think that, being mostly Mormons, they would run no risk of cigarette-smoking-style lung problems. Almaguer corrected us. He showed us the atmospheric inversion that traps smog in the Salt Lake Valley. Breathing is like smoking a pack-a-day. The proposed solution? Restrictions on driving, free mass transit, and a ban on aerosols.

Check out XVIVO.net, a source of flashy medical video for ABC's Richard Besser. NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman was more prosaic, less hi-tech. "Just wash your hands," she instructed, as if that was newsworthy.

Andrew Tyndall 1/28/13 6:40:55 pm

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