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President Barack Obama followed in the footsteps of Monday's bipartisan group of senators as he traveled to Las Vegas to deliver a speech to outline his, similar, proposals for immigration legislation. He suggested that he would only submit his bill if Congress failed to act independently, so his speech may have been moot. None of the three newscasts treated his talking points as important enough to warrant the lead position -- but it did qualify as Story of the Day, with White House coverage by NBC's Peter Alexander and ABC's Reena Ninan, and a background feature from Bill Whitaker in Los Angeles on CBS. Whitaker described how a single immigrant family may include members with three different types of legal status: undocumented, dreamer and citizen.

So what did each newscast select as its lead item instead?

NBC's decision was lame, assigning Mike Seidel of its sibling network, The Weather Channel, to tell us that storms are coming. ABC, too, found the weather newsworthy, assigning Good Morning America's Sam Champion to forecasting duties. CBS gave it a pass.

ABC's decision was an outlier: neither of the other two newscasts considered David Muir's statistic that home sale prices rose an average of 5.5% in 2012 to be worthy of note. I am inclined to agree with NBC and CBS. It does not sound like a big deal.

CBS had the inside track on its lead item, since the hero of the tale, Sgt Brendan Marrocco, had been profiled by its Pentagon correspondent David Martin in May of 2010. Check out this playlist of Martin's coverage of mutilated and disabled military veterans and you will see that Marrocco was no aberration. Both Martin and Jim Miklaszewski, his Pentagon counterpart at NBC, covered the news conference at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where the sergeant, who had both arms and both legs blown off while fighting in Iraq, displayed two newly transplanted arms. CBS found the surgery so interesting that in-house physician Jon LaPook followed up with a quick how-to guide.


Andrew Tyndall 1/30/13 7:58:23 pm

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