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For the third straight day, the lobbying campaign to persuade the Senate to tighten gun control legislation made the lead spot on one or other of the networks' newscasts. Monday, ABC's Jonathan Karl led with President Barack Obama's rally in Connecticut. Tuesday, CBS' Nancy Cordes led with the bereaved lobbyists from Connecticut working Capitol Hill. Now NBC's Kelly O'Donnell leads with a legislative compromise to require background checks for those seeking to purchase a weapon at a gun show. In fact both NBC and CBS led with the compromise, crafted by Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania. So the gun control debate was Story of the Day. ABC led with Bob Woodruff from Seoul, where they are in an emergency pre-war state of Watchcon-2, still waiting for North Korea to testfire its Musudan missile.

The Manchin-Toomey team was covered by the Congressional correspondents of NBC and CBS, Kelly O'Donnell and Nancy Cordes respectively. ABC went to Jonathan Karl at the White House (at the tail of the David Muir videostream), where less progress seemed evident. Karl pointed out that proposals to ban assault weapons and to limit the size of bullet magazines had failed to attract majorities, and that the House posed a bigger obstacle to legislation than the Senate anyway.

For backgrounders on background checks, see CBS' Chip Reid on the flaws in the FBI's mental health database (a point that ABC's Jonathan Karl made in February); and ABC's David Muir as he recycled an expose he filed five years ago with Omar Samaha, the brother of a student slain in the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007. Samaha had used ABC's cash to buy weapons at a Virginia gun show, no questions asked.

NBC decided to air an excerpt from the speech by First Lady Michelle Obama, denouncing gun violence, and paying tribute to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old girl killed in a Chicago park in January.

Meanwhile from Seoul, ABC continued to use cartoon images to depict the threat of battle. Martha Raddatz has already shown Virtual View computer animations of nuclear USAF stealth bombers attacked the North and the North's nuclear-tipped ICBMs headed for Alaska. Now Woodruff animates the imaginary take-off of the never-before-tested red-tipped Musudan.

Richard Engel filed a longer overview on the Korean tensions for NBC. As far as Engel is concerned, Kim Jong Un is gaining the upper hand with his bluster. His nuclear bomb has turned his small sanctions-bound dictatorship into a regional power; and he has taught nations such as the Islamic Republic of Iran how useful it is to develop the bomb. Look at the dancing in the streets of Pyongyang: a state-sponsored mass waltz.
Andrew Tyndall 4/12/13 3:04:53 pm

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