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The public holiday for President's Day saw a light day for the news agenda after last week's heavy load: the Pope leaving office, the State of the Union speech, the LAPD manhunt, Triumph the crippled cruise liner, the Russian meteor. Now there is zero unanimity about the day's headlines. NBC kicked off with Tom Costello on inflation at the gasoline pump. CBS chose the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, a story it has followed more closely than its rivals since the New Year: Bob Orr told us that Adam Lanza was a Anders Breivlik wannabe (he came up 50 corpses short). ABC chose an Inside Syria feature, as the regime of Bashar al-Assad invited Terry Moran's crew to Damascus to obtain a hearing for its side of the civil war. None of these three stories attracted enough coverage to qualify as Story of the Day. That honor went to Oscar Pistorius as he prepares for a hearing on murder charges. All three networks had a reporter file from South Africa, the only story to warrant coverage by a correspondent on every newscast.

The extra taste of video candy that pushed Pistorius into the top spot was the appearance of Reeva Steenkamp on Tropika Island on South African television: that is the reality show on which the leggy model had appeared before she was allegedly killed by the legless sprinter. Both ABC's Bazi Kanani and NBC's Michelle Kosinski aired posthumous clips of the blonde beauty. On CBS, Emma Hurd confined herself to Pistorius' prospects of being released on bail.

There were a couple of other celebrity sports stories rounding out the day. NBC's Andrea Mitchell gave props to Tim Rosaforte of the Golf Channel, a sibling network of NBC, for landing the scoop that Barack Obama had played a round of golf with Tiger Woods. Mitchell quoted Ed Henry, representing political rather than sporting White House correspondents, as complaining that his beat had been excluded. On ABC, NASCAR's Danica Patrick was thrust into the spotlight. Paula Faris told us that now Patrick has pole position her odds of winning the Daytona 500 are 18-1.
Andrew Tyndall 2/19/13 7:24:14 pm

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