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Little did she know it, but Amanda Knox offered words of advice for the day's headliners in the nightly newscast portion of her media blitz for her book Waiting to be Heard. Ms Knox, a onetime exchange student in Perugia, said this in response to ABC anchor Diane Sawyer: "Just know your rights. Be in touch with your family. Be careful." The newsmaking students who need that advice are Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, a pair from Kazakhstan now enmeshed in the federal prosecution system, just as Ms Knox had been enmeshed by Italian prosecutors. All three newscasts led with the arrest of the Kazakh pair, along with a third student, Robel Phillipos, an American from Cambridge Mass. The trio is charged with tampering with evidence in the Boston Marathon bombing case, and so, for the 12th weekday out of the last 13, those explosions were Story of the Day.

CBS kicked off with Elaine Quijano in Boston, where the three college friends of Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the bomb attack, were charged with obstruction of justice. After the FBI showed Wanted pictures of the Brothers Tsarnaev, the students had apparently taken a knapsack from their friend's dorm room at UMass-Dartmouth. Prosecutors allege that they were aware that the bag contained potentially incriminating gunpowder evidence. By the way anchor Scott Pelley misidentified Kazakhstan as a republic of Russia when, of course, it is an independent state.

NBC's Pete Williams and CBS' Bob Orr covered the arrests from their networks' DC bureaus. Both emphasized that prosecutors have not implicated the trio in the underlying bomb plot itself. NBC's Williams reported that they learned from television that their friend had been identified by name. In a self-serving piece of cross-promotion, he reported that it was MSNBC's Morning Joe that relayed that news.

ABC handled the arrest via Brian Ross in New York. ABC anchor Diane Sawyer is not the only one to milk an interview, turning it into a multi-parter. Besides her primetime special, Sawyer has given us Amanda Knox three times (here, here, and here). On CBS, John Miller divided his one-on-one with "Danny," the pseudonymous, enshadowed, voice-altered, 26-year-old carjacked SUV driver into two parts (here and here).
Andrew Tyndall 5/2/13 10:28:45 pm

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