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Both CBS and ABC filed from rebel-held enclaves in Syria. ABC used photojournalism by Marcel Mettelsiefen showing a clinic in Aleppo staffed by children, with Alex Marquardt narrating from London. CBS inserted its own Clarissa Ward into Maarat Nouman, a town occupied by the Syrian Martyr's Brigade militia. The house next to the one where Ward and her crew were sleeping was bombed by government fighter jets. See the boy medic who was killed on ABC; see a girl curse Bashar al-Assad on CBS.
David Muir interviewed Caroline Kennedy, the former First Daughter, about her prospects for an ambassadorship two weeks ago, when he made her ABC's Person of the Week. We know that, not because he aired that portion of the interview as he plugged her book Poems To Learn By Heart, but because he retrieves those soundbites now in a preview of her nomination as envoy to Japan. NBC's Andrea Mitchell, too, dug out an archival interview with Kennedy about her future in public service: that was by Tim Russert on Meet the Press in 2002. Many ambassadors are appointed "only because of the size of their campaign wallets," mused Mitchell. Watch Mitchell's report and you'll see that it is Kennedy's pseudo-aristocratic celebrity bloodline that makes her qualifications superior to mere moneybags.
Amphetamine is the new "performance-enhancing drug" for examination-stressed high schoolers and college students, says NBC's Robert Bazell. He offered a hat tip to The New York Times for its number-crunching of Centers for Disease Control data on the accelerating epidemic of ADHD among the nation's youth -- or at least an epidemic of diagnosis and drug-pushing among the nation's shrinks.
I am sure Stephanie Gosk was just trying to add an empathetic touch in her NBC feature on elderly drivers when she false-modestly confessed to being a helpless parallel parker. Gosk lavished free publicity on the Hartford Insurance Company and the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and hyped interactive exercise videogames. Try the pretzel and shadow boxing and goalkeeping.
ABC also worried about the dangers of driving -- very occasional ones. Last Monday, Lisa Stark told us that drowning in submerged cars accounts for a mere 400 annual deaths nationwide, yet she tried to get us all panicked about the need for a quick escape. Now ABC delivers a yet less deadly threat: nationwide, highway pile-ups in fog kill a mere 350 each year. Nevertheless David Kerley still pushed the panic button.
The sight of Kevin Ware's shattering shinbone has been so ubiquitous that there was no need for any of the three newscasts to show the gory exit of the University of Louisville point guard from the NCAA's March Madness tournament. NBC mentioned it in passing, with a still photograph from his hospital room. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook demonstrated the fracture in a computer animation. Good Morning America's Josh Elliott came closest on ABC -- but blurred out the shocking impact.
CBS made a special effort last year to cover the epidemic of gun violence on the streets of Chicago. It has also, over the years, specialized in features on photography: recent examples include Danny Goldfield, Lewis Hine, Jeremy Lock, Steve Liss, Eric Hubulow, Wilson Bentley, Vivian Maier and Barbara Krauthamer's Envisioning Emancipation. So it was a CBS sweet spot that Dean Reynolds should cover Carlos Ortiz' six-year, 20,000-image photography project Too Young To Die
Corporations are jumping on the April Fool's Day bandwagon, using practical jokes as publicity stunts. NBC's Kevin Tibbles played the enabler to Google, Scope mouthwash, Honda, Twitter, and Boden's menswear -- although, personally, I found nothing ridiculous about the Marylebone Manskirt.
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