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ABC anchor Diane Sawyer slapped an Exclusive label on her two-part sitdown with George W Bush on the eve of the dedication of his Presidential Library. In the serious part one, Sawyer covered homeland security, and the invasion of Iraq, and same-sex marriage, and Campaign 2016 -- and glossed over Hurricane Katrina, and torture, and AIDS in Africa, and the financial crisis, and the hanging chads of Campaign 2000, among others. In the light-hearted part two, Sawyer extracted a tone of bashful modesty about the supposedly Chardinesque Bush brushwork. David Gregory, anchor of NBC's Meet the Press did not interview the former President, but he did survey his eight-year tenure, during which Gregory had been NBC's White House correspondent. Gregory did touch on September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, education reform, AIDS in Africa, Social Security, immigration -- but still no mention of torture by name, just "an erosion of civil liberties."
ABC and CBS offered follow-ups to Tuesday's fake Associated Press story, released via a hacked twitter feed, of an explosion of the White House. CBS' Anthony Mason debunked Tuesday's reporting by ABC's Rebecca Jarvis and NBC's Lisa Myers that the fake news had triggered an automated sell-off on the stock exchange. Instead, high-frequency trader Manoj Narang told him, human beings would have reacted first by selling, and the computers would have reacted to the humans' sales, not to the underlying fake news. On ABC, Jarvis' follow-up was about how easy it is for hackers to break the log-in passwords on our personal computers' online accounts, too.
Floodwatch on the Illinois River: NBC's John Yang was in Peoria; ABC's Alex Perez was in Florence; and CBS' Dean Reynolds had the best line. Guess what replaces frittered catfish as the specialty on the menu at the Campsville Inn. Swimming ones.
Maybe it is not rising cholesterol levels that is the health problem when we eat too much red meat, CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook suggested, following the latest New England Journal of Medicine research. LaPook had his network's computer animators show us how digestive bacteria in our gut turn the meat protein lecithin into the chemical TMAO. It may be high levels of TMAO that are the key indicator for potential harm to one's heart. Earlier this month, NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman pointed the finger at carnitine.
Rehema Ellis nailed down that always-charming assignment to Montreal on NBC, to file almost precisely the same story that her colleague Tom Costello filed four years ago. Canadian college tuition is less expensive and McGill University is a great place to study.
For the third straight day, we were told that when there are fewer air traffic controlers in towers, there are fewer flights that take off and land on time. CBS' Carter Evans filed from LAX and NBC's Tom Costello told us about a House committee hearing at which the FAA was accused of springing the delays on passengers as a surprise. Costello dug out a quote from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in February warning of precisely this outcome.
A cooler flying story was filed by John Blackstone on CBS. Check out the Solar Impulse and its cool Swiss pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. I thought the machine (already featured by CBS' 60 Minutes) was spectacular enough to carry the story yet Blackstone apparently felt he had to inject extra star power, via Chesley Sullenberger. I suppose Sully has to earn his keep, since he is on the CBS payroll as a consultant.
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