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For the third weekday day in a row all three newscasts had a correspondent file from Seoul. NBC's Richard Engel had the most detailed report, leading of his newscast with graphic video from the Demilitarized Zone. CBS' Margaret Brennan offered details about the now-closed Kaesong Industrial Park. ABC's Bob Woodruff filed a brief report on Pyongyang's impending test-launch of a mid-range rocket.
By the way, NBC's Richard Engel did that bad thing, inserting a Weekend Update joke by Seth Meyers from his own network's Saturday Night Live as part of his reporting. If you do not understand why this is bad journalism, here is what I wrote in criticism of NBC's Tom Costello in January, and here is where I repeated the criticism against ABC's David Kerley yesterday.
The statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad was toppled exactly ten years ago. CBS' Jim Axelrod introduced us to two men who were on the scene. Ed Chin was the Marine sergeant who wrapped an American flag around the statue's neck like a noose, an eerie premonition of the lynching-style execution that would be the end of the man himself. Kazem al-Jabouri was a blacksmith who undermined the pedestal with a sledgehammer and was outraged when invading troops, not Iraqis, took charge of the demolition. Baghdad is now too dangerous and he has emigrated to the safety of Beirut.
If you remember the Elian Gonzalez affair of 2000, it concerned an anti-Castro grandfather in Florida who wanted to keep a boy away from his father in Cuba, despite the fact that his son-in-law had legal custody. A federal court ruled that he had no right to do so and returned the boy to Cuba. Now ABC's Rio Benitez argues that the case of Chase and Cole Hakken, aged two and four, is a reminder of the Elian Gonzalez case. It appears to be its diametrical opposite.
A hat tip to Mother Jones, the left-wing periodical, was doffed by both NBC's Chuck Todd and ABC's Jim Avila. The magazine's expose was able to network attract coverage because of its celebrity angle: it obtained a clandestinely-recorded audiotape of an opposition research strategy session for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, discussing a potential re-election challenge for his Kentucky Senate seat by Democratic actress Ashley Judd. ABC's Avila noted that the Republicans even contemplated negative campaigning against Francis of Assisi, because Judd had positive things to say about the saint in her memoir All That is Bitter & Sweet.
Late season snow in Colorado caught the eye of The Weather Channel's Mike Seidel on NBC and Good Morning America's Sam Champion on ABC. ABC's Champion used a before-and-after split screen of his network's Denver correspondent Clayton Sandell, and then handed off to time-lapse video from his psyched xTreme Weather Team stormchasing colleague Ginger Zee. Seidel went to his colleague Mike Bettes for his show-&-tell. Look at his handful of Kansas hail, the size of ping-pong balls: "When that hits you, trust me, it hurts."
Up until now NBC's Anne Thompson and John Blackstone on CBS have been the two correspondents assigned to the continuing collapse of honey bee colonies. Together, the two of them have filed nine separate reports in the past six years. Welcome to the Georgics, Bill Whitaker, on CBS.
Given the fact that his own corporate bosses are one of the two media conglomerates that are filing lawsuits to stop Aereo's online videostreaming service, NBC's John Yang, and CNBC's Julia Boorstin, whom he quoted, were properly fair-minded in presenting Aereo's case. Since each user has an antenna, Aereo is a fair and direct use of the free over-the-air broadcast signal, not a repurposed and therefore pirated abuse. What was more dubious was the selection of the five seminal events of broadcast television history that are emblematic of its role in creating a shared national cultural memory. You be the judge: two of them are indisputable; two are questionably trivial; and one (the only non-news event) looks like mere in-house cross-promotion for NBC's past entertainment glories.
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