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Stubbornly, NBC clung on to the Boston Marathon bombings, assigning Pete Williams to lead off its newscast on the investigation for the eleventh time out of the last 14 weekdays. But neither CBS nor ABC concurred with that judgment. For them, their lead was the wild forest fires fanned by the Santa Ana winds, and sure enough they were the Story of the Day.

All three networks assigned a correspondent to the fire lines in Ventura County. On ABC, David Wright narrated the coverage, folding in reportage from Akiko Fujita. NBC, too, was double-barreled: Mike Taibbi filed, with a contribution from Ayman Moheldin, who is normally found in the Middle East, not the Pacific West. CBS had Ben Tracy cover the blazes.

Rounding out the weather beat, CBS' Dean Reynolds traveled to North Dakota to watch the rising Red River waters around Fargo, but could not persuade Mayor Dennis Walaker to spit out the words "global warming" to account for his town's repeated disasters. NBC and ABC filed brief summaries on the heavy late-season snowstorm on the great plains: Clayton Sandell from Colorado for ABC; the Weather Channel's Mike Seidel from Minnesota for NBC.

As for Boston, NBC's Williams reported for the first time that there is evidence that the bombmakers' pressure cooker recipe was not taken from the al-Qaeda periodical Inspire, as he had suggested before, here and here. The bombs apparently used Vaseline as a binding agent for the gunpowder, a tip that Inspire never offered.
Andrew Tyndall 5/3/13 10:39:05 pm

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