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Preview features for Sunday's big game made Super Bowl XLVII the Story of the Day. The culmination of a week's worth of New-Orleans-based coverage on CBS saw Scott Pelley anchor his newscast on location from Jackson Square. Pelley had James Brown of CBS Sports, which has purchased this year's broadcast rights, show him how to tackle safely -- in other words, without using the helmet as a brain-damaging weapon. ABC and NBC both closed their newscasts with baby animal features with a Super Bowl angle, foals and puppies respectively. None of this was hard news, of course, so did not qualify as a newscast's lead item. For that, each network chose the state of the economy.

NBC's Tom Costello offered a portmanteau of the day's economic data points -- January's unemployment statistics and a milestone at the New York Stock Exchange. Costello reckoned that the economy is growing fast enough to encourage investors to buy stocks but not fast enough to encourage employers to accelerate hiring.

On CBS, Anthony Mason chose to focus on the employment data; ABC did not even mention the jobs report, concentrating entirely on the stock market returning to six-year-old levels and replenished 401(k) retirement accounts -- even as David Muir conceded that 401(k)s do not cover half the population.

By the way, speaking as a member of the babyboom generation, ABC has developed the irritating tick of using the word babyboom as a euphemism for elderly. It is as if the newscast is embarrassed about the aging demographics of its audience. On Thursday, David Wright referred to nursing home residents as babyboomers in describing a Taco Bell commercial. Now Muir introduces Rosemary Lichtman as one of us. Yet Lichtman herself acknowledges that she was born in 1943, two years before the Baby Boom began.
Andrew Tyndall 2/2/13 9:09:10 pm

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