 |
         
|
NBC's Andrea Mitchell ended up in Kabul on a diplomatic assignment, following Secretary John Kerry from Jerusalem to Amman to Baghdad and back to Amman and then to Kabul. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer was in Kabul to cover the military, in the surprisingly green countryside of Afghanistan's eastern springtime. What is Pentagon bureaucratese for peace? "War termination," was the term a special operations major general offered.
Ahmed Warsame, the confessed courier ferrying secrets between al-Shabaab guerrillas in Somalia and AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in Yemen, may now be undergoing criminal prosecution in the federal court system. Yet, CBS' Bob Orr pointed out, two months elapsed between his capture on the high seas in the Gulf of Aden and his entry into the criminal justice system, during which time his interrogation was not bound by such constraints.
Friday's Story of the Day featured speculation on all three newscasts that the white supremacist 2-11 prison gang may have ordered the assassination of Tom Clements, the head of the Colorado state prison system. Now, even as ABC's Dan Harris repeats that theory, he offers no further insight into 2-11. So instead he runs video from a documentary by National Geographic on a larger, unrelated, white supremacist prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood.
There has only been one instance of a vial of noxious germs going missing from one of the 13 biohazard laboratories run by the Centers for Disease Control since 2004, yet that single missing test-tube of hemorrhagic fever virus was the scary headline that ABC's David Kerley extracted from a GAO report on quality control at the labs.
Last week, neither CNBC's Sue Herera for NBC nor Anthony Mason for CBS could land the assignment of a trip to Cyprus to cover the banking crisis there first hand. Now Holly Williams lands the plum, strolling along the boat dock in the Mediterranean sunshine.
With the help of AARP's jobs expert Kerry Hannon, Chris Jansing tried to be upbeat about the prospects for unemployed babyboomers for turning their prospects around on NBC's Road to Retirement. Everyone is getting older, she suggested, so why not make money helping out those that are even more aged than you?
I could not tell whether the statistic that 400 people drown each year trapped in cars submerged in water was a high or a low number. ABC's Lisa Stark showed us videotape of escape drills by the sheriff's department in Collier County Fla and she played us panicky 911 audiotape of emergency calls by those trapped. They certainly gave the impression that we are all at risk of becoming one of those dead four hundred. How many times do cars drive into water? And why? And how often is that water deep enough to drown in? Stark did not tell.
David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, has made it a specialty to sit down one-on-one with severely disabled veterans. See why Cpl Tony Porta decided to put a halt to the seemingly interminable series of surgeries -- 128 of them -- to treat the burns that had disfigured him.
It is one thing for Steve Osunami to reward himself with a little pat on the back for helping wannabe-warbler Kayla Slone, the Walmart checkout clerk, land herself a gig at the Grand Ole Opry. When his coverage of the gig has the Opry audience watching his original report on ABC last month before getting a chance to hear Slone sing, then the little pat on the back turns into self-aggrandizing ostentation.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
