 |
         
|
For the second time this week, a network correspondent caught up with US troops preparing to depart from Afghanistan. CBS' Elizabeth Palmer followed Gen Tony Thomas to eastern provinces Monday. Now ABC's Martha Raddatz goes south to Helmand with Gen Joseph Dunford. Dunford wishes for the US military to remain deployed in Afghanistan past the end of 2014. Since it is not the general's decision to make, it is unclear why Raddatz found his wishes newsworthy.
The Environmental Protection Agency made an announcement that the rest of country must catch up with California's clean air provisions starting in 2017 and cut back on levels of sulfur in gasoline. All three newscasts had correspondents examine the potential for extra refinery costs being passed on to motorists. Typically, the EPA lowballed the hike, at around a penny a gallon extra; the petroleum industry's worst case was nine cents. Check out the he-said-she-said via NBC's Stephanie Gosk from the New Jersey Turnpike, CBS' Nancy Cordes from the halls of Congress, and ABC's Jim Avila from the DC bureau.
The spring shipping season is starting on the Great Lakes. CBS' Dean Reynolds walked the decks of the Stewart J Cort, as aircraft-carrier-sized iron ore freighter, in Lake Michigan. Hear why shippers are hoping for "slate gray overcast" this spring.
The story of the dirty dentist of Tulsa, with a single patient infected with hepatitis out of a roll of 7,000, earned a correspondent on all three newscasts. Who knows why? This is essentially a local story, with no national implications. CBS' Elaine Quijano quoted Centers for Disease Control statistics that, nationwide, an unhygienic dentist has infected a patient with hepatitis or HIV a total of three times since 1991. I suppose anxiety about infection was newsworthy enough, irrespective of its groundlessness. Gabe Gutierrez filed on NBC. On ABC, in-house physician Richard Besser basically repeated the same story that David Wright had filed Thursday: so that makes two ABC leads in a row, stoking an identical imaginary anxiety.
Pity the poor manatee, with toxins from red tide algae in its food. CBS' Mark Strassmann delivered lovable up-close video from Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo…and then CBS offered a giant-animal doubleheader, as Steve Hartman followed-up on nine-year-old Eli Navant, the boy with the "velociraptor-sized appetite for dinosaurs," first profiled On The Road in January.
Anchor Diane Sawyer acknowledged that her ABC colleague Elizabeth Vargas did the legwork in preparing the free publicity for singer Marie Osmond's memoir The Key is Love. Still, Sawyer filed the story, designating Osmond as ABC's Person of the Week, narrating her peppy singing career, and segueing to the trials and tribulations of motherhood: one son, Michael, a depressive drug-addict, committed suicide; one daughter came out of the closet as a teenage lesbian, yet unlike brother Michael, Sawyer dared not even mention her name, as the saying goes. And yes, at the age of 48, Osmond did compete in the celebrity talent show Dancing with the Stars. That airs on ABC, don't you know?
Good Friday saw all three newscasts file a religious feature…
CBS was serious, with Barry Petersen on the plight of the Christian minority in wartorn Syria. Check out that miter on Patriarch Gregorius III. Interestingly, there has been a recent spate of Syrian war reporting that he been sympathetic to those loyal to the Baath regime, like these Christians, and suspicious of the rebels: ABC's David Kerley, for example, on al-Nusra's links to al-Qaeda; and CBS' Clarissa Ward on atrocities against prisoners of war in Azaz.
NBC was flippant. Chris Jansing saw the light side of the ratings success of History Channel's miniseries The Bible. She chuckled at its #HotJesus hashtag on Twitter and joked that upcoming Bible-based movies from Hollywood have ties to Batman and Gladiator and Kung Fu Panda. ABC's Nick Watt, by contrast, who is usually assigned to see the silly side of things, filed a similar feature on The Bible miniseries last week, yet made the serious point about born-again evangelical Christians being its target audience.
ABC went to Rome with Alex Perez, where a new book Il Mistero della Sindone sets out to debunk the debunking of the Shroud of Turin that happened in 1988, when carbon dating technology found that the fabric was made in medieval times. The new theory suggests that those fibers that happened to be analyzed were used for later repairs to the original shroud, hundreds of years later. "Probably authentic," was Perez' quoted from Russ Breault of the so-called Shroud of Turin Education Project Inc. If, on this Good Friday, CBS seemed serious and NBC flippant, ABC looked gullible.
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.
