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The newscasts divided on which inside-the-Beltway development was most newsworthy: tourism, a dinner date, or cloture…
NBC chose Capitol Hill where Kelly O'Donnell told us about Sen Rand Paul's drone-defying all-talking honest-to-goodness filibuster.
CBS checked out the Jefferson Hotel, where President Barack Obama was about to dine with Republican senators, from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: Nancy Cordes at the Capitol and Major Garrett at the White House.
ABC went to Jonathan Karl at the White House on the decision by the Secret Service to save money by discontinuing guided tours. ABC really has to calibrate its fiscal outrage properly: Karl was outraged at the insignificance of the savings, which he calculated at a weekly $18K; yet only on Monday David Kerley's Washington Watchdog was equally outraged at the frittering away of only slightly more, $22.5K, on a painted portrait of a Cabinet member.
Matt Gutman filed the more complete Hugo Chavez obituary from Miami on Tuesday. Now ABC has jetted him over the Caribbean to bring us dynamic visuals from a grief-stricken Caracas.
CBS is trying to find something interesting each day on the jockeying before the Conclave of Cardinals: Monday, Mark Phillips on their eminences' arrivals; Tuesday, Allen Pizzey on the Sistine Chapel's art history; now, Phillips again, on the Dirty Dozen princes of the Roman church, those targeted as most directly implicated in the sex abuse scandal.
After Tuesday's report by John Miller on CBS that mental patients make up fully 64% of the population of the nation's jails, Miller's colleague Anna Werner had a righteous follow-up: of all civilian suspects killed in police shootings, the proportion that happens to be mentally ill may be as high as 40%.
A pair of in-house physicians publicized the fears from the Centers for Disease Control that CRE, the untreatable intestinal bacteria, might spread from hospitals into the population at large. NBC's Dr Nancy told us that CRE is found in 18% of the nation's long-term-stay hospitals; ABC's Dr Rich told us it was to be found in 200 facilities nationwide. Yet both Snyderman and Besser ended up at the same medical center in The Bronx. Kudos to the public relations team at Montefiore -- and the mustachioed Dr Brian Currie.
Of the 29 reports in our database since the start of 2007 looking at the efficacy of the federal No Child Left Behind public education reform, Rehema Ellis alone has accounted for ten of them. Her latest, for NBC's Education Nation series, explains that black and Hispanic students in many states are held to lower standards of achievement than their white classmates.
ABC's David Kerley filed essentially the same story on the unmanned drone aircraft that flew into JFK Airport's airspace that NBC's Ron Mott filed on Tuesday -- except that Kerley showed us a $700 Phantom brand drone, which can climb to 1000 feet. Kerley's toy was nifty.
Anderson Cooper visits CBS from CNN in order to cross-promote his 60 Minutes Sports feature on Showtime, profiling extreme surfer Garrett McNamara. McNamara grabbed the attention of ABC's Nick Watt in January, when he broke the wall-of-water record in Portugal. Cooper now offers a yet more nerve-jangling teaser.
Journalists are not supposed to use Hollywood-produced clips of fictional narratives as actuality footage to illustrate real news stories. ABC's Moscow-based Kirit Radia tried to use the timeworn life imitating art excuse for intercutting a clip from The Black Swan in his report on the acid-throwing and backstabbing at the Bolshoi Ballet that CBS' Charlie d'Agata covered in January. But Radia's rationale will not wash: real life was the inspiration for the movie, not vice versa.
Well done, Leo Villareal in attracting attention for his Bay Bridge light sculpture project: John Blackstone on CBS for Tuesday's closing feature; now Gabe Gutierrez on NBC for Wednesday's.
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