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An Exclusive interview on a rival cable news network was a legitimate enough scoop to qualify as Story of the Day on the nightly newscasts of the three broadcast networks. All three aired a soundbite from CNN in which Sen Rob Portman came out as the first Congressional Republican to support the right to marry for same-sex couples. Yet none of the three newscasts selected the Portman switch -- as a Congressman he had sponsored the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act -- as its lead. ABC, with substitute anchor David Muir, and CBS both selected non-mainstream stories: a small plane crash in Fort Lauderdale and Senate hearings into the so-called London Whale. NBC decided to kick off with a story that was newsworthy enough that all three networks assigned a correspondent to cover it: the decision by the Pentagon to deploy $1bn's worth of extra missiles in Alaska as defense against a nuclear ICBM attack from North Korea.

ABC substitute anchor David Muir appeared to be demeaning Portman as a leader who is all bluster in his public appearance, a snake-oil-selling charlatan with no substantive power, when he introduced Jonathan Karl's report by calling the senator a "kind of Wizard of Oz"…or perhaps he meant a behind-the-scenes puppet-master whose bark is worse than his bite. Who knows? Karl's report from the White House neither clarified nor elaborated on Muir's metaphor.

Instead, Karl used the story of the senator and his son Will, who told his father he was gay two years ago, to cross-promote his own network's primetime sitcom Modern Family. CBS covered Portman from Capitol Hill, where Nancy Cordes undercut CNN's bragging rights by pointing out that Portman made his announcement in print, in an op-ed in his home-state newspaper Columbus Dispatch. On NBC, Andrea Mitchell folded the Portman story into other examples of renewed diversity of opinion in Republican Party ranks, by showing clips from the CPAC conference.
Andrew Tyndall 3/18/13 6:59:40 pm

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