Read More of the Same Day's Blog

The Boston Marathon bombing story no longer has a monopoly on the news agenda. On a very busy day, the Senate voted to block gun control; mysterious mail may have tried to poison President Obama and a senator; an arrest was made in the assassination of a pair of Texas prosecutors; and progress was made in the investigation of the Boston bombing. Sure enough, Boston was still Story of the Day and the lead on both ABC and NBC -- but it now accounts for only 41% of the three-network newshole, and was bumped as CBS' lead by the gun-control vote. As for the Iron Lady of Great Britain, all that pomp and circumstance for her funeral in St Paul's Cathedral did not attract the attention of a single correspondent on the three newscasts. She merited just short video clips, narrated in passing.

The two main advances in the Boston Marathon story were visual and forensic.

ABC's Brian Ross and CBS' Bob Orr concentrated on the visual: the possible image of a man dropping off a bomb recorded by the surveillance video cameras of Lord & Taylor department store. ABC's Ross offered free publicity to the facial recognition system developed by Indiana's Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Laboratory.

NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Elaine Quijano focused on the forensic: fragments of the bomb's batteries, its wiring, its circuit board, its shrapnel, and its pressure-cooker container recovered from the debris field. The pressure cooker lid was recovered from the rooftop of a nearby building.

All three newscasts turned to in-house experts: CBS to John Miller, its former FBI man; NBC to analyst Michael Leiter, a former counterterrorism bureaucrat; ABC to consultant Richard Clarke, a former National Security Council staffer. By the way, no arrest has yet been made. None of the newscasts dignified CNN's afternoon error to the contrary by name. "Incorrect news reports," was the closest, from NBC's Williams.

NBC followed up on the Boston story in most detail, with Anne Thompson on the dead and the wounded, and Kerry Sanders on the Lutheran therapy dogs Making a Difference at Tufts Medical Center. The hounds had been shipped across New England from Connecticut, where they offered similar support after December's grade school massacre in Newtown. And the big sloppy wet kiss to Beantown that NBC's Thompson planted on Tuesday was matched by ABC's corny vox pop closer.
Andrew Tyndall 4/18/13 8:27:07 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report