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The pharmaceutical industry came in for scrutiny from CBS and ABC. ABC's Paula Faris filed a show-&-tell of a focus group of toddlers, demonstrating that child-resistant tops on pill bottles were by no means child-proof. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook publicized the protest by oncologists in the journal Blood that prices are too high for many cancer medications. In LaPook's crosshairs was Gleevec, the $92K-a-year treatment for leukemia made by Novartis.
NBC has been remiss in its lack of coverage of the fertilizer explosion in the small town of West outside Waco. With 14 fatalities it was, after all, much more deadly than the Boston bombings, yet so far NBC has assigned only one package to a correspondent on its nightly newscast. CBS' Manuel Bojorquez updated us on the safety investigation as to why 540K lbs ammonium nitrate was being stored in the West facility, yet was not reported, as required, to federal authorities.
Tom Costello organized an anecdotal experiment with himself and three other NBC correspondents -- ABC's Matt Gutman did the same singlehandedly on Monday -- to check how widespread the delays might be to airline travel, now that furloughs of air traffic controlers are in effect. Diana Alvear and Gabe Gutierrez were unscathed (as Gutman had been); Costello himself was delayed by an hour or so; Stephanie Gosk got screwed -- heading for Newark and landing in Allentown. Costello suspected that the huffing and puffing about furloughs on Capitol Hill may be caused by a threat to the lawmakers' own homebound travel for recess.
As for NBC's Alvear, she was assigned to her network's new General-Electric-sponsored series The Big Idea. In this case it was EyeSpy 20/20, a videogame by Richard Tirendi, tailored to replace an old-fashioned eye chart as a children's ophthalmic diagnostic tool.
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