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A pair of venerable national institutions made headlines. All three newscasts covered both the Boy Scouts of America and the United States Postal Service. ABC's reports, by Ron Claiborne and Ceclia Vega, both signified just how venerable by splicing nostalgic black-and-white film footage of each into their full-color video. The BSA made news by deciding not to do anything: its national board postponed a vote on the future of its ban on participation by gay people. The USPS made news by announcing what it will no longer do, namely deliver letters on Saturday. NBC and CBS both kicked off with the mail, with Tom Costello at a Maryland mailbox and Nancy Cordes in the halls of Congress. ABC led with Martha Raddatz following up on Tuesday's NBC Exclusive from Michael Isikoff -- on the use of missiles from unmanned CIA drones to assassinate suspected terrorists.

ABC's Raddatz filed her report from Occupied Palestine about a secret CIA drone base in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that foments resentment in Yemen. Meanwhile in Pakistan, drones have killed 300-or-so non-terrorist civilians along with their 2,500-or-so intended targets. They hover overhead "like a distant muted chainsaw." NBC's follow-up to Isikoff yesterday was from John Yang in Chicago today. Domestic drone surveillance -- combining cameras, facial recognition technology and eavesdropping -- is already being used by 17 separate law enforcement departments, Yang told us, as well as by farmers, biologists, realtors, and Hollywood. Thus the pretext for a 007-clip from Skyfall.

CBS skipped the drones in favor of an alternate hi-tech conflict: Bob Orr returned once more to the threat of cyberwarfare. Of the 25 stories in our database about hack-attacks, CBS has filed 15 of them, and of those 15, Orr alone accounts for eight. Mostly he worries about China sabotaging our infrastructure. The hackers that ABC's Pierre Thomas told us about are activists not saboteurs. He played clips from the Occupy-movement-inflected propaganda video by Anonymous after it infiltrated systems at the Federal Reserve.

And from the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin offered an early hint of the propaganda push we can expect against the looming fiscal sequestration: no Persian Gulf duty for the USS Truman…future furloughs for the DoD's civilian workforce…a skimpier pay cut for those in uniform.
Andrew Tyndall 2/7/13 11:58:30 pm

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