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There was one other story that warranted coverage by a correspondent on all three newscasts -- but this one really was chosen for its attractiveness as a video news story, not for any intrinsic importance. Just before dawn, a huge chunk of a bluff overlooking Puget Sound fell away from Whidbey Island, destroying one home and requiring 33 others to be evacuated. ABC had its own Neal Karlinsky on the scene in Seattle to cover it. NBC used Los-Angeles-based Kristen Dahlgren, voicing over video from afar. CBS decided to turn to KIRO-TV, its local affiliate, and reporter James Schugel. Compare the outsider Dahlgren with the local Schugel on whether the landslide was caused by weather or by geology.
The bellicose propaganda video from North Korea, threatening a renewed invasion of its southern sibling, attracted the attention of ABC's Martha Raddatz and NBC's Jim Miklaszewski Tuesday. Now Major Garrett plays catch-up on CBS, as the North-South telephone hotline goes dead.
CBS' Garrett was busy instead on Tuesday filing on the appointment of Julia Pierson, a onetime Orlando street cop, to be Director of the Secret Service. Now NBC's Kristen Welker rounds out the bio, complete with a coincidental comparison with a fictional female head of the Secret Service, invented by Hollywood and portrayed by Angela Bassett in Olympus Has Fallen.
It was not clear whether the point of Jim Avila's story on ABC from the Mexican border was that it is secure against illegal crossings or insecure. In clear view of four inspecting senators, we see a young woman successfully scaling the fence in Nogales -- before being apprehended. Whatever the case, the decisions made by the Border Patrol about deploying its surveillance drones look like a well-kept secret: Avila could not deliver any video of them flying and had to rely on the imagination of his network's Virtual View computer animators instead.
Since CBS' own Lara Logan was molested while she was covering the protests in Tahrir Square two years ago, it makes perfect sense that her colleague Clarissa Ward should follow up, airing chilling videotape from Cairene activist Aida el-Kashef of the mob violence -- even a do-it-yourself blowtorch -- that women face in public crowds. A perfect complement to Ward's horrors came from Mike Taibbi in Kabul, for NBC's Making a Difference series: women in Afghanistan rarely ride bicycles in public even for transportation, so the national female road racing team is so much more eyecatching -- and nervewracking. See them on a secret practice run as that yellow car door opens into their path.
Google gets a well-deserved shout-out for its Street View technology from ABC's Akiko Fujita: one of its mapping camera cars toured the radioactive streets of the ghost town Namei, near the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant. Before the tsunami, Namei had a population of 21,000. Meanwhile on NBC, Katy Tur was distinctly un-techie in her coverage of denial-of-service attacks apparently launched against an Internet spamblocker by an accused Internet spamserver. Tur did not bother to identify either one of the feuding sites.
Where does ABC's Nick Watt go shopping for his groceries? He introduced us to a feature on shoplifting from supermarkets -- yet his examples were Walgreen's, the drug store chain, and Victoria's Secret, the lingerie outlet. For fenced supermarket wares, Watt suggested Katy Perry's brand of perfume. In which aisle of the Safeway can he find that?
At first glance it looked like NBC's Jim Miklaszewski was displaying admirable tenacity following up on last Thursday's expose of the VA's hopeless disability claims bureaucracy with Veterans Secretary Eric Shinseki's mea culpa. Mik's get did not look so aggressive when he conceded that Shinseki was attending a veterans' jobs fair whose corporate sponsor was his own employer, NBC-Universal.
Is ABC getting paid commission for all the free publicity it gives to state lottery gambling? Of the 34 lottery stories filed on all three newscasts since the start of last year, fully 22 were by ABC correspondents. Here is the latest, with Steve Osunsami getting all ya gotta be innit to win it.
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