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The feverish coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings may finally have broken. Admittedly, all three newscasts rounded out the week with updates on the Boson investigation, but they were cursory affairs, not close to headline status. Instead, CBS led with the state of the economy, as the monthly ritual of the publication of unemployment statistics was observed. ABC, for the second straight day, led with the wildfires in coastal southern California. ABC's newscast was anchored by substitute David Muir. NBC also led with the wildfires around Point Mugu in Ventura County, and they qualified as Story of the Day, even though no homes were destroyed, and no residents were killed by the flames.

The fire coverage was standard stuff, the typical eyecatching nature porn that video news cameras lap up. You would think that, in order to put the early season flames in context, at least one of the correspondents would have allowed the words "climate change" or "global warming" to pass his lips, to account for the unusually light California snowpack, or the unusually dry tinder brush. But neither ABC's David Wright nor NBC's Miguel Almaguer nor CBS' Carter Evans could bring himself to utter the words. ABC asked weathercaster Ginger Zee to account for these unusual spring conditions. Her explanation, too, was meteorological not climatic: it's an "Omega Block."

As for the unemployment data, CBS did what it normally does on the first Friday of a month. It assigned Anthony Mason to explain the statistics: a jobless rate of 7.5%, net new monthly hiring increasing by 165K positions. Check out the playlist for the last six months of unemployment coverage: CBS' Mason has filed on the data in all six months; NBC filed five times out of six, four with Tom Costello, this time with CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo. As for ABC, it skipped coverage in four of the five previous months, and this time was no exception. Instead as far as ABC was concerned, the economic news of the day was the status of the stock market not the labor market: Rebecca Jarvis got the assignment.

CBS rounded out its labor coverage with a feature by Jim Axelrod in Minnesota, where JW Hulme, a leather goods firm, has joined a consortium called the Makers Coalition to train jobless workers in the skills of sewing manufacture. And, yes, men may apply to acquire a seamstress' skills.
Andrew Tyndall 5/6/13 7:05:44 pm

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