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At the start of the year it seemed likely that political debate inside-the-Beltway would be dominated by fiscal cliffs and budgetary deadlines. That is not what is happening. The politics of immigration was Story of the Day for the first two days this week (here and here). Now gun control takes over, Story of the Day for the third time this month (also here and here). All three newscasts covered the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, with CBS and NBC assigning the lead to their Capitol Hill correspondents, Nancy Cordes and Kelly O'Donnell respectively. ABC, instead, chose to lead with Steve Osunsami in northern Georgia, reporting on a pair of rare January tornadoes.

The maimed former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was the major player in the gun coverage, making a clear, halting, brain-damaged plea for the political bravery required to regulate firearms. ABC's Jonathan Karl was so captivated by Giffords' words (which she had previewed with his anchor Diane Sawyer three weeks ago) that he created the misleading impression that the hearings were before a House committee, "her former colleagues," rather than in the Senate.

CBS followed up with an eye-opening feature by Chip Reid on the BATF's gun tracing center in Martinsburg WVa, where bureaucratic inefficiency is not a bug. It's a feature.

NBC and CBS both rounded out their coverage with stories on actual gun crimes. CBS' Michelle Miller filed her network's fifth follow-up this month on the elementary school shooting in Newtown: see the bereaved mother Nicole Hockley beating herself up for being a standoffish neighbor. NBC's John Yang brought us a second bereaved mother, Shirley Chambers of Chicago. Believe it or not, her fourth child, 33-year-old Ronnie, is now murdered (Dean Reynolds covered the same tragedy on Monday but CBS decided not to post it online). Previously Jerome had been killed, aged 23 and Carlos, aged 18, and Latoya, aged 15.

"I felt sure that Ronnie was going to grow to be an old man. I really did. But God called him home."

Andrew Tyndall 1/31/13 7:14:54 pm

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