Read More of the Same Day's Blog

All sexually-active females of childbearing age -- including sweet sixteens and younger -- should be able to purchase an emergency contraceptive from an open display on drugstore shelves without a prescription. Thus Judge Edward Korman of Brooklyn contradicted Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who had restricted youth access to Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill. The ruling was the Story of the Day and the lead on both NBC and CBS. ABC, with substitute anchor David Muir, led instead from Korea, for the third day out of five this week.

It was no surprise that all three correspondents assigned to the contraception story should be female: ABC's Amy Robach, NBC's Stephanie Gosk, and CBS' Nancy Cordes. If you look at the 21 reports on the topic in our database over the past six years or so, all but four have been filed by a woman. ABC resorted to its graphics department for a Virtual View sex-ed computer animation of how fallopian tubes work. CBS' Cordes came up with the most extreme example of someone who would now be able to purchase Plan B: imagine an 11-year-old girl emerging from her love nest after a night of unsafe sex and heading to Walgreens to fork over $70. ABC's Robach said that the pill would be as easy to buy as a bottle of aspirin, a claim she could only make by ignoring that sky-high price.

As for Korea, NBC broke its string of five straight weekdays with that crisis as its lead. NBC's Richard Engel was scheduled after Gosk's kick-off with a focus on the expected launch of the Musudan medium-range missile, complete with a computer animation of the failure of Pyongyang's test-launch this time last year. Engel predicts the Musudan will be fired on April 11th or April 15th. Interestingly, CBS has paid almost no attention to the North's bluster about nukes and missiles so far this year, filing only one report, compared with four by ABC four, and eight by NBC. On the other hand, CBS has covered the risks of a renewal of warfare on the Korean peninsula itself as diligently as the other two networks. This time CBS' Margaret Brennan filed from the border town of Munsan, while ABC's Bob Woodruff filed from Seoul.

The tone of Korean coverage is beginning to sound slightly less hawkish: while ABC persisted with its in-house military consultant Stephen Ganyard on the odds of an armed response to a missile test, both CBS' Brennan and NBC's Engel consulted the diplomacy-minded Professor John Delury of Yonsei University.
Andrew Tyndall 4/8/13 4:37:24 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report