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For every general officer that is a notch on Martha Raddatz' belt at ABC, Elizabeth Palmer at CBS has a match. Palmer moved on from Gen Tony Thomas in Afghanistan last week to her turn with Fightin' Joe Dunford. Last week, Thomas' terminology for peace was "war termination." What does Dunford call withdrawing troops? "Retrograding."
The Brain Initiative looks like the federal government's contribution to Charlie Rose's monthly The Brain Series on PBS. Sure enough, CBS' Bill Plante had a sitdown with Rose's co-host, Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. Funnily enough, of the brain functions mentioned in Plante's package, there was neurology and cognition -- but no psychiatry (and no mention of Rose, either).
Spring is here and NBC's in-house physician Dr Nancy worries about the sniffles. She usually does.
The economy is getting better and NBC's Tom Costello told us so. No surprise. Of the last eleven packages to be filed on all three newscasts on the recovering state of the macro-economy, all but two have been filed by either NBC's Costello or CBS' Anthony Mason.
It looked like Linsey Davis at ABC had a surefire watercooler story when she found an airline that is changing its fare structure to pay what you weigh: passengers who are twice as heavy pay twice as much. The fly in the ointment was that her example was an obscure polynesian island-hopper, Somoa Air.
The oil spill from a pipeline near Little Rock in Arkansas is just a local story, not worthy of national attention -- yet the crude is heavy and toxic and comes from Canada, just like the proposed contents of the unbuilt pipeline that can make headlines. So Anne Thompson covered the leak for NBC.
Bob Orr offered a sort-of follow-up on CBS to Monday's Story of the Day, the murder -- maybe an assassination -- of District Attorney Mike McClelland of Kaufman County, Texas. Possible suspects include the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a white supremacist prison gang. Orr had no information to link the gang to the murder -- but he did summarize the federal racketeering case against the gang that was made last November. The brotherhood's ruling council generals are Jive and Slick: that is Charles Lee Roberts and Larry Max Bryan, to you.
CBS was unable to be more celebratory about the release from prison of Louis Taylor, aged 58. Taylor is probably innocent, yet had been convicted at the age of 16 of the murder of 28 people, found guilty of the arson of an hotel in Tucson in 1970. CBS' 60 Minutes, along with Court TV, the cable channel, had championed Taylor's case. Yet, the conditions of his release from prison were that he would not be exonerated of the crime, and that he would waive any lawsuit for wrongful incarceration. So, Michelle Miller was unable to report total vindication.
HBO got a hat tip from NBC's Ron Mott for casting actor Wendall Pierce in The Wire and Treme. Pierce himself was given proper respect in Mott's Making a Difference feature for planting his Sterling Farms supermarkets in the middle of a New Orleans food desert. Well done, Antoine!
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