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CBS' Dean Reynolds chose a positive angle on the winter storm that is whiting out the great plains. While ABC's John Schriffen and NBC's John Yang ran stock footage of traffic mayhem, Reynolds went down on the farm to check whether the precip relieves the drought.
TIME magazine received a fillip from ABC: Ron Claiborne showcased Bitter Pill, Stephen Brill's cover story on outrageous price mark-ups in hospital bills.
Anne Thompson became the third network correspondent to preview the Conclave of Cardinals this week. ABC's David Wright had given a thumbs-up to Sean O'Malley of Boston. CBS' Ben Tracy had warned of the taint from the priestly sex abuse scandal hanging over Roger Mahony of Los Angeles. Now NBC's Thompson warns that it clouds not just Mahony, but cardinals from Belgium and Ireland too.
Sequester time: CBS picked up on White House warnings about the grave consequences following automatic budget cuts, sending Ben Tracy to a Los Angeles poultry packer to warn about closings caused by the furlough of USDA inspectors. NBC did not treat the warnings as newsworthy enough for the attention of a correspondent. ABC's Jonathan Karl was actively dismissive when the Department of Transportation warned of calamity. Of course the DoT can cut $1bn from a $74bn annual budget, Karl argued.
Oddly enough, ABC has pulled back from covering breast cancer over the last couple of years (before 2011, ABC covered the disease more heavily than the either of the other two newscasts). In the entire year of 2012, there was not a single reported package on the disease on ABC's newscast. So it was no surprise that only NBC should assign a correspondent to the approval of Kadcyla medication by the FDA, its in-house physician Nancy Snyderman.
Also, ABC has not filed a single follow-up story on Superstorm Sandy since the New Year. Both NBC's Stephanie Gosk and CBS' Michelle Miller trekked to the Jersey Shore barrier island of Mantoloking, the final community to be reopened to residents. You will note that they are both female. Not only has ABC skipped the story but also, since the New Year, have the male correspondents at NBC.
It was hardly what they call a tough "get." ABC anchor Diane Sawyer used her newscast's Person of the Week slot to promote her 20/20 primetime special on the convalescence from a bone marrow transplant of Robin Roberts, her onetime Good Morning America colleague. "Nowhere is it written that we should not be happy," declared Roberts, demonstrating how little reading she managed to catch up on while on her sickbed.
NBC's Kate Snow also promoted her primetime reporting: a package for Rock Center on the Chengdu Research Base in China, which breeds giant pandas, the cutest of endangered species. Here is the playlist of previous, unremittingly cute, panda features on the networks' nightly newscasts. Hats off to Snow for allowing a naysayer to get a word in: nature reporter Chris Packham of the BBC.
And so it is Oscars time. ABC's Real Money feature worried about price increases for tickets and concessions at the movie theater, although Paula Faris' statistic of a 30% hike over the last ten years does not sound runaway, on an annual basis. NBC could not use its coverage to cross-promote the telecast of the ceremonies (the Academy Awards telecast rights belong to ABC) so Kristen Dahlgren promoted her corporation's theme park instead. Guess whose rides the teenage co-stars of Buzkashi Boys enjoyed as they visited Hollywood from Kabul.
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