 |
         
|
Each of the newscasts tried a foreign policy story. From Cairo, ABC's Lama Hasan really explained very little about the politics of the street protests there. CBS, as usual, was committed to covering the rebellion in Syria: Clarissa Ward aired the State Department explanation for limiting its aid to humanitarian funds. From the State Department, Andrea Mitchell played highlights of her exit interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton: more on her health and on Campaign 2016 than on her actual tenure.
Last week both ABC's David Kerley and ABC's Pierre Thomas took advantage of CCTV security video of retail store burglaries to instill gritty realism into crime coverage. Now Jim Axelrod does the same. By the way, Axelrod of CBS filed from New Orleans where the Super Bowl will be aired by CBS. Yesterday and today, Mark Strassmann of CBS, too, filed from a New Orleans dateline. How many more times will CBS make New Orleans newsworthy before the big game?
Atlanta-based Steve Osunsami also filed a Super Bowl feature on ABC. He reminded us of the Hollywood biopic The Blind Side about Michael Oher, the poor black boy adopted by a white family who grew up playing football to win a scholarship to Ole Miss. Osunsami found Patrick Willis, another Ole Miss alumnus, also born into extreme poverty, also raised by a white family, also a football player. Willis and Oher are both playing on Sunday.
ABC did not have a correspondent based in Portugal to interview extreme surfer Garrett McNamara in person about his success in sliding down a hundred-foot wall of water. Nick Watt had to conduct his q-&-a by telephone while voicing-over images of the tiny daredevil surrounded by the enormous wave. The joke was that Watt decided that his end of the conversation should take place on a beach in Ventura -- wave height, five feet. You should have filed the story in a wetsuit, Nick.
It was odd that NBC should decide to cover research from Spain about the best time to eat lunch when on the Mediterranean Diet. Robert Bazell filed the sort of story that normally belongs on ABC's newscast.
The idea of Seth Meyers' Weekend Update satire on Saturday Night Live is to make fun of the foibles of the news agenda of the mainstream media. So it is journalistically nonsensical to quote a Meyers joke -- especially an unfunny one -- as evidence that the story being ridiculed was indeed actually newsworthy. Yet that is what Tom Costello resorted to in his closing feature on orangutans and iPads at the National Zoo. Oh wait! Meyers and Costello both work for NBC! This was not journalism after all, just cross-promotion.
CBS' closing feature was superior. Charlie d'Agata from Moscow on skullduggery at the Bolshoi Ballet.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
