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It turns out that there was a major overseas story that should have challenged the non-event in Orlando for top spot -- but only NBC covered it. Even then, Sue Herera of CNBC, NBC's sibling financial news channel, did not travel to Cyprus to watch the potential unraveling of the Eurozone. She narrated the banking crisis from New York.
There were two procedural political stories: Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton released a video statement through the Human Rights Campaign (HRC via HRC, geddit?) that gay people marrying each other was all right by her. NBC's Kristen Welker ran archival Tim Russert footage of her in 2004 asserting the opposite. It is hardly a Democratic profile in courage when she is slower to change than Republican Rob Portman, whose switch made Story of the Day on Friday. And from the Republican National Committee, Chairman Reince Priebus appeared on CBS' Face the Nation to publicize his party's revamp, entitled Growth & Opportunity Project (GOP, geddit?). Anchor Bob Schieffer, substituting on a weeknight, returned the favor by introducing Seth Doane's summary of the Priebus report, which Welker also granted a soundbite.
CBS' Schieffer suggested to his network's in-house physician Dr Jon LaPook that women should go ahead "to be safe" and get their breasts mammogrammed, even if public health guidelines advised against it. Why not? ABC's Cynthia McFadden tells us why not: the majority of abnormal scans -- an astonishing 60% rate -- turn out to be false positives, leading to invasive, expensive and unnecessary biopsies.
Assigned to her 15th same-old assignment this winter season to make a snowstorm interesting, ABC's Ginger Zee, unilluminatingly, tried to shoehorn the latest blizzard into a global warming pattern of climate change.
Here's a hint as to why Jim Avila files so frequently on aviation -- 35 separate ABC stories on the airlines in 2012 alone. He is a pilot who loves to fly himself. See Jim dice with death spirals, stalls and barrel rolls on this assignment on small plane crashes
Pope Francis I earned another trio of follow-ups: NBC's Anne Thompson and ABC's Ron Claiborne filed from Rome, while CBS had Elaine Quijano file from Buenos Aires on the then-Jesuit's role in the Dirty War of Argentina's military junta some 40 years ago. Quijano's question, NBC's Thompson reported on Friday, would get her labeled by the Vatican as a "left-wing, anti-clerical" element.
If born-again Protestants think the Papists get all the buzz, ABC's Nick Watt reminded us that the History Channel's cable TV hit miniseries is targeted at evangelicals and that Hollywood's movie moguls have, in turn, seen the light.
On a more highbrow, but still Biblical note, both NBC's Pete Williams (cross-promoting CNBC's American Greed art heist documentary) and CBS' Michelle Miller publicized the $5m reward offered by Boston's Gardner Museum on the 23rd anniversary of the theft of 13 masterpieces, including that oh-so-valuable Vermeer and Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
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