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All three newscasts ran soundbites from Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot in the head to deter her from her activism in favor of girls' education. NBC's Keir Simmons covered her skull-repair surgery from England. CBS anchor Scott Pelley narrated the footage from New York. Yet Bob Woodruff, at ABC, was the one who slapped an Exclusive label on his report.
From Gun Country: ABC's Jonathan Karl exposed the deplorable state of the mental health registry that is supposed to provide background checks before sales of firearms. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and CBS' Anna Werner covered Chris Kyle, the former USNavy SEAL and author of American Sniper, nicknamed The Devil of Ramadi, whose rifle had killed 150 singlehandedly in Iraq. NBC's Miklaszewski told us that his assistance to fellow veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder consisted of so-called Exposure Therapy, taking them to a Texas shooting range to reacquaint them with their intimacy with gunfire. Nothing could possibly go wrong there.
I think Byron Pitts on CBS wanted to make us feel either outrage, at sloppy bureaucracy, or trepidation, at unregulated firearms, when he told us the story of the haunted, heavily-armed Chris Oberender, 17 years on from the death of his mother at his own, young hands. To me it sounded inconsolably sad.
What does ABC have against the hotel industry? Here were Elisabeth Leamy and Andrea Canning questioning its brochures. Here was Chris Cuomo on rude staff and here on harassing working conditions. Now, in ABC's regular Real Money feature, Amy Robach offers free publicity to iStopOver.com and airbnb.com, the Websites that undercut hotel room rates by organizing homeowners to take in paying houseguests.
There was only one reason that the bones dug up by medieval archeologists in England would be newsworthy on American newscasts: William Shakespeare. The identification of the remains of the last Plantagenet king allowed both NBC's Stephanie Gosk and CBS' Mark Phillips to play movie clips of Lord Larry chewing the scenery. Phillips called "A horse! A horse…" the one good line in the play. Gosk countered with McKellan and Spacey, hunchback backups for Olivier, with the opening line, which is yet more famous: "Now is the winter…"
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