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The fourth day of the publicity roll-out of the lobbying effort for gun control legislation did not have the appeal of the first three days this week. The technicalities of a 68-31 Senate cloture vote hardly have the oomph of Monday's Presidential speech, or Tuesday's bereaved citizen lobbyists, or Wednesday's bipartisan compromise. Nevertheless all three Congressional correspondents -- NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, CBS' Nancy Cordes, ABC's Jeff Zeleny -- did their best to make parliamentary procedure newsworthy. I was not impressed by the Biblical analogy that anchor Diane Sawyer used to describe the dispute between the National Rifle Association (a committed, stubborn, minority) and gun-control advocates (a hard-to-mobilize, liberal, majority). Sawyer labeled the former Goliath, the latter David. Hardly. What about Maccabees and Hellenists?
All three newscasts ran video of the hellacious twister that left a 56-mile trail of destruction through Mississippi. NBC handed narration to Gabe Gutierrez in Alabama. CBS used its local affiliate WIAT-TV, also in Alabama, and reporter Leigh Garner. ABC filed from Hazelwood Mo where Alex Perez found the roof ripped off a house that was built of yellow bricks. The Yellow Brick Home, geddit? His video included a yelping dog, geddit?
Part two of Holly Williams feature on CBS about wombs-for-rent in India looked at the surrogate motherhood trade from the point of view of the impoverished pregnant women, whereas part one showed us Dana and Sumanth Chandra, the Chicago couple with the fertilized egg that needed to be carried to term. In India, Williams revealed, there is no recourse for the family of an illiterate woman whose pregnancy killed her in its eighth month -- except for the charity of the couple whose baby happened to survive.
If I was TurboTax, the income tax preparation firm, I would be irritated that my advertising was used as an illustration by ABC's Steve Osunsami for a story about Debbie and Keith Sleight, a Georgia couple whose returns were misprepared and who ended up owing the Internal Revenue Service some $16,000 because of fabricated deductions. The preparing firm was Heath Brothers, nothing to do with TurboTax.
Strawberries? You want strawberries? You had better lobby Congress to add migrant worker visas to immigration legislation, Ventura County farmer Edgar Terry suggested to Bill Whitaker on CBS, the network that brought us Harvest of Shame.
London-based Lama Hasan got hold of surveillance video of sidewalk pickpockets to illustrate her ABC report on the closure of the Louvre Museum in Paris in protest against the persistent targeting of tourists by thieves. Too bad that the video was fuzzy and unenlightening -- not worth the effort. So she resorted to fake pickpocketing, reenacted for the BBC, to bolster her report.
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