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NBC's Jim Miklaszewski delivered a prize Dickensian visual to illustrate the bureaucracy that is slowing down the processing of disabilities benefits claims at the Veterans Administration. The load of paperwork is literally so heavy that it threatened an office building in Winston-Salem with collapse.
In more mundane fashion, Sharyl Attkisson on CBS waded through the alphabet soup of federal bureaucracies to tell us which ones will be allowed the flexibility to remove the sharp edges of those automatic sequester cuts, and those that will still have to live with the ax. Inflexibility, it seems, is the cross that Democratic-favored departments will have to bear, although Attkisson did not spell out that conclusion.
Steve Osunsami's sunny outlook on the state of the housing market is the latest of a series of peppy pro-realtor features on ABC in the last eight months: David Muir (here and here), Cecilia Vega (here and here) and Bianna Golodryga struck the same bubbly chord.
CBS' Anthony Mason hinted that the Cypriot banking crisis was a big deal, when he tied it into his coverage of Chairman Ben Bernanke Wednesday. Now he has an entire package on the problem. Yet neither Mason nor CNBC's Sue Herera on NBC have been dispatched to Cyprus to report on it first hand. ABC, meanwhile, has not mentioned the island, even in passing.
Until now, if you happen to be the beneficiary of a life insurance policy, the insurance company has not felt obliged to notify you actively in the event of that policyholder's death. They have just sat on the money passively, waiting for you to find out and file that claim. NBC's John Yang publicized the lawsuit settlements that the likes of AIG and MetLife and Nationwide have negotiated. A list of unclaimed benefits is at missingmoney.com.
All three newscasts had a correspondent cover the police car chase in Texas that may have ended the manhunt for the killer of Colorado's prison boss, a ten-hour drive away. NBC's Kristen Dahlgren and ABC's Pierre Thomas offered little context. CBS' Mark Strassmann reminded us that Tom Clements was the fifth criminal justice official to be violently attacked so far this year. CBS also led its newscast with Anna Werner on the assassination of a prosecutor in Kaufman County, Texas, in January.
National weather forecasts are usually useless, since most people need local meteorology, not nationwide trends. On NBC, Chris Warren of The Weather Channel, and on ABC, Sam Champion of Good Morning America dutifully went through the official forecast for spring from NOAA, the federal agency. CBS' Anna Werner added a so-what? with sumptuous, if endangered, pix: a continued drought will wipe out the wetlands on which two million ducks and geese depend. It is called the Central Migration Freeway.
The abandonment of the journalistic duty to report the W's of a story is spreading at ABC. In January John Schriffen did not tell us where a Michigan firehouse was. In February, Schriffen did not mention where a high school point guard plays. Earlier this month, Dan Harris skipped the detail of where an elderly woman died after a nurse refused to perform CPR, as instructed by a 911 dispatcher. Now, Angie Rivera, another 911 dispatcher -- we do not know where -- encouraged 15-year-old Doyin Oladipupo to stay quiet in a closet while her home was being burglarized. This time Amy Robach was the reporter withholding the information.
Wherein Janet Shamlian of NBC follows in the footsteps of Steve Hartman on CBS last June, and, like Hartman, gets smothered in hugs.
It is all very well for ABC's Darren Rovell to claim that the secret just-right ratio of lemonade to iced tea is 35-to-100 in his blatant puff-piece from Arizona's line of canned beverages, but doesn't that ratio depend on how strong you have decided to brew the iced tea after you have played your 18 holes, Mr Palmer?
How did ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser manage to get a cross-promotion for Good Morning America and its marrow-transplanted anchor into this story on cancer research that basically recapitulated one he had already filed in December?
How much does substitute Bob Schieffer enjoy being a news anchor? Listen to this old-school sign-off from the CBS newscast.
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