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Following up from Tuesday's Presidential press conference by Barack Obama, Jonathan Karl reported from the White House that rebel forces in Syria are closer to receiving aid from the Pentagon: from anti-aircraft or anti-tank weapons -- to non-lethal body armor, vehicles or night-vision goggles. David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, followed up on the question about Guantanamo Bay by his colleague Bill Plante, to describe how Ensure, the liquid protein, is forced down the nose of hunger striking inmates under restraint.
CBS also had Elizabeth Palmer in the arid southern desert of Afghanistan, showing us how GI Janes are deployed by commando units: only female soldiers can interact with female civilians without violating cultural taboos -- and presumably only a correspondent of Palmer's gender can cover that.
The two big legislative stories of the second term of the Obama Presidency so far have been the debates over gun control and immigration. NBC's Kelly O'Donnell inquired whether there is a backlash back home against Republican senators who voted against the poll-tested popularity of extended background checks for gun purchasers. Sen Kelly Ayotte is already being praised and protested by radio and online video ads in her New Hampshire home. As ABC's Jim Avila did to rural Arizona last month, CBS' Anna Werner took a trip to the Texas ranchlands around McAllen to discover that immigrants and smugglers can still easily cross the border as trespassers.
The infanticide trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia physician, has been so sporadically covered that Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic famously posted 14 separate theses to account for its failure to make headlines. At last, Gosnell is covered on NBC, courtesy of Stephanie Gosk, complete with a "grisly" heads-up content warning from anchor Brian Williams. CBS assigned Elaine Quijano to the closure of Gosnell's abortion clinic two years ago. No package from ABC so far.
Tuesday, ABC's Rebecca Jarvis reported bullishly on the residential real estate market. Now she stays cheerful, filing from Rick Savino's All American Ford, a booming automobile dealership in New Jersey. The two stories are related: the dealership's bestsellers are pick-up trucks, needed because of the revival in home construction.
Sanofi, the pharmaceutical maker of Ambien, the sleeping pill, was hit by negative publicity from Lisa Stark on ABC. She recycled her own self-experiment from last August, in which she crashed her car in a driving simulator while under the drug's influence. Now Stark tells us that hospital emergency rooms admit 19K patients annually because of the adverse side effects from Ambien, and its generic Zolpidem.
On NBC, Tom Costello offered a hat-tip to Consumer Reports for its investigation into pharmaceuticals on turkey farms. Routine dosage of antibiotics to birds results in dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in our meat. Costello's tip: look for the USDA Organic or No-Antibiotic label. He should have told us how much more expensive that option is, but he failed to do so.
Tom -- Turkey, not Costello -- did flaunt his final close-up, though.
ABC and NBC closed with clever feelgood kids. Katy Tur, who had been in Boston to cover the marathon bombings, took a side trip to the Orchard Gardens School in Roxbury for NBC's General-Electric-sponsored The Big Idea series. Turns out it was not such a big idea: music programs are beneficial. It is a feature story NBC reporters have filed eleven previous times in the past five years. ABC's David Wright brought us Sylvia Todd and her Super-Awesome Maker Show videos online. Sylvia's show, which costs the eleven-year-old $100 per episode, encourages her peers to do their own science experiments. Wright could have given us an example, but he failed to do so.
CBS' Michelle Miller seems ready to wager her $2 on Golden Sense to win Saturday's Run for the Roses. Kevin Krigger is the colt's jockey in Kentucky Derby, a black man from Saint Croix. Miller introduced us to Professor Pellom McDaniels of Emory University, who studies the reverse-Jackie-Robinson phenomenon in thoroughbred racing in the final decades of the C19th: using threats, sabotage, and intimidation, an integrated sport drove out its champion negroes.
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