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The kidnapping in Cleveland dominated all other news. The escape by one woman, Amanda Berry, from a house where she had been held captive for a decade and the rescue of two others, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, plus Berry's six-year-old daughter who had been conceived and born in captivity, was so clearly sensational that it was obviously the Story of the Day. It led all three newscasts and accounted for 40% of the three-network newshole (23 min out of 57). ABC put a special title on its newscast, Breaking Free: the Escape in Cleveland, and spent almost as much time on the story (11 min v NBC 7, CBS 5) as the other two newscasts combined.

Cleveland's 911 system released audiotapes of Berry's emergency call and all three newscasts included clips in their lead stories: ABC's by David Muir, CBS' by Dean Reynolds, NBC's by Kristen Dahlgren. Charles Ramsey, the next-door neighbor who broke a front door down to help Berry run to the telephone was featured in all three reports too. Berry and DeJesus were kidnapped as teenagers, Knight when she was 20 years old, all three within 21 months of one another, all three within five miles of their house of confinement on Seymour Avenue.

The home-turned-dungeon was owned by 52-year-old Ariel Castro, who was arrested, along with his brothers Onil and Pedro. Castro was a public school bus driver, fired in 2012. On NBC, the Castro-watch was assigned to Ron Allen, who characterized the neighborhood as blue-collar Hispanic. He reported that all three brothers would be charged with kidnapping and rape. ABC had Alex Perez use his bilingual skills to canvass the neighborhood.

Only CBS latched onto the federal angle to this local story. Bob Orr, in his network's DC bureau, reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation adds 80 names to its nationwide list of child abductees each year (none of these three were children when they went missing), of whom, on average, 38 are found alive.

John Walsh, the longtime host of America's Most Wanted, seized his chance to return to the media spotlight. Both NBC's Allen and ABC's Perez played a clip from AMW's show in 2004 publicizing the search for the missing then-14-year-old DeJesus: the teenage friend AMW interviewed turned out to be Castro's daughter, Arlene. NBC's Dahlgren used a Walsh soundbite and ABC anchor Diane Sawyer talked to him.

In their quest for parallels to this story of triple imprisonment, both CBS and ABC went to their archives to find famous not-quite-equivalent former abductees. Elizabeth Smart was 14 in 2002 when she was kidnapped and held for six months in Utah. CBS anchor Scott Pelley interviewed her on her inability to flee her captor, questions that Smart tried to deflect. Jaycee Dugard was much younger when she was kidnapped, only eleven years old, and she was kept captive even longer than the women in Cleveland, 18 years in all. ABC's Cecilia Vega dug out Dugard soundbites from her 2011 primetime sitdown with anchor Diane Sawyer -- and Vega also folded in a 2010 clip of Ms Smart.
Andrew Tyndall 5/9/13 6:58:35 pm

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