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Yet again, all three networks found funds in their budget to file from South Africa. That makes four weekdays out of four this week. ABC's Bazi Kanani delivered soundbites from mutual friends of the fatal couple: the slain Reeva Steenkamp and the accused Oscar Pistorius. NBC's Michelle Kosinski and CBS' Emma Hurd concentrated on the revelation that the lead police detective investigating the killing had himself been charged with attempted murder. So, the murder defense of a celebrity athlete focuses on discrediting the detective in charge: Hilton Botha meet Mark Fuhrman!
NBC's Michael Isikoff filed an Investigation into a white-supremacist gun plot in Ohio that turned out to be neat complement to Chip Reid's expose last month of the antediluvian methods at the BATF Tracing Center in Martinsburg WVa. Reid had told us how the BATF was forbidden to use computers to trace firearms used in crimes; Isikoff introduced us to Richard Schmidt, an ex-con neo-Nazi with a formidable arsenal, untraceable precisely because of that non-computerization.
NBC's was the newscast that harped on, more than either of its rivals, all through this winter's 'flu season, about how it important it was for us all to get our shots. Now Robert Bazell brings us the conclusions from the Centers of Disease Control about the vaccine's efficacy: 9% success among those aged 65 and older.
CBS did what it does: dramatize a general societal problem with a prolonged anecdotal profile of an illustrative individual. Meet 61-year-old Jack Walerius, a long-term-unemployed advertising salesman, just laid off once again from his temporary holiday job at Costco. Walerius was a member of a group of jobless assembled to be profiled by anchor Scott Pelley 18 months ago. Ben Tracy told us that the long-term unemployed, on average, accept a wage cut of 17% when they are eventually hired.
ABC's Real Answers series delved into the burning question of whether the calorie counters on gyms' running treadmills are properly calibrated. This is apparently a bugaboo for Linsey Davis: she ran a couple of miles to find out, making this the third fitness feature she has filed in the past couple of years, an ABC specialty.
NBC and CBS both closed on history. CBS' Seth Doane profiled Tom Clark, a high school history teacher in Saint John Ind: his curriculum teaches the disasters of war by assigning students to collect oral histories from the bereaved families of fellow Hoosiers killed in combat overseas. NBC had Mike Taibbi preview this weekend's Academy Awards ceremonies by examining the veracity of three Oscar contenders in their treatment of historical fact. No, Taibbi did not mention the treatment of slavery in Django Unchained. Instead he focused on the 1980 Teheran hostage crisis, the CIA manhunt for Osama bin Laden, and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. This is how the network newscasts last year showcased Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln.
Unusually for a network newscast, Taibbi straightforwardly used the T-word to describe the historical fact of the CIA's abuse of prisoners.
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