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The disaster at the fertilizer plant near Waco -- with 14 dead, many of them volunteer firefighters -- has been severely undercovered, courtesy of the attention-hogging Boston bombing. ABC's Steve Osunsami made a good faith effort to set things right.
CBS' Congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes repeated the accusation raised by House Republicans that they had caught then-Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton in a lie when she swore that she had been unaware of requests for increased security at the Benghazi Consulate in the months before last September's militia attack. Cordes noted that she had no access to the underlying e-mail exchanges that were the basis for the GOP charges. Neither NBC nor ABC deemed the accusations to be worthy of coverage.
NBC, instead, chose to focus on the partisan back and forth on Capitol Hill concerning the FAA's furloughs of air traffic control personnel. ABC's Matt Gutman covered the ensuing airline traffic delays Monday. NBC's Tom Costello does so now.
The twitter feed of the Associated Press appeared to announce explosions in the White House. The hoax was so disconcerting that all three networks assigned a correspondent to cover it. ABC treated it as a stock market story, assigning financial reporter Rebecca Jarvis to cover the four-minute spasm of computerized trading that caused prices to plummet in automated response. CBS went with Major Garrett at the White House, who treated it as a journalism story, noting the disruption of other feeds -- from BBC and npr and CBS News' own 60 Minutes and 48 Hours. NBC used investigative correspondent Lisa Myers, who cited the claim by the Syrian Electronic Army that its hackers pulled off the scam.
If hands-free voice-activated text messaging is as distracting for motorists as using a hands-on device, why do automobile manufacturers install such a capability as a feature of their latest models? It is a good question and ABC's Paula Faris asks it, reprising her previous self-report of her own distraction. None answered.
CBS, along with NBC, covered the drought on the great plains more heavily than ABC throughout last year, including a four-part series along the Arkansas River by Jim Axelrod last September. That is all over now in Missouri, CBS' Dean Reynolds shows us.
Do you want to see a story on NBC about lovable mutts saved from animal shelters by would-be pet owners living miles away and the networks of volunteers who transport them long distance to safety? You could have seen Rehema Ellis' story three years ago, or Kerry Sanders' last October, or now Mark Potter's Operation Roger trucker, shipping Shelby the pooch from Oklahoma to Alaska, from Enid to Tok.
Will ABC's in-house physician Richard Besser be forced to declare the value of the free publicity that his newscast lavished on his new book as payment in kind on his income tax form next year? For that matter, will his publisher Hyperion have to do that too? Anchor Diane Sawyer helpfully informed us that Hyperion is a sibling business unit of ABC News, inside the Disney media conglomerate. For the record, Besser's book is Tell Me The Truth, Doctor.
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