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Correspondents stayed in Cleveland for day two of coverage of the Seymour Avenue captivity, again the Story of the Day. All three newscasts led with the return of two of the three captive women -- Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus -- to their celebrating families: David Muir filed for ABC, Dean Reynolds for CBS, and Ron Allen for NBC. Reynolds reported that the trio had been bound during much of their captivity; Allen said they lived most of the time, unchained, in upstairs rooms. Who knows? Lydia Esparra, a reporter for WOIO-TV, the CBS local affiliate in Cleveland, managed to grab a word with the bilingual DeJesus but she had lost her Spanish during her decade-long confinement.

ABC had also sent Alex Perez to Cleveland. He looked for background on Ariel Castro, the only suspect in the case, after his brothers were released without charges following their arrests. Perez came up with video of Perez, a jazz bassist, from the dashboard camera of a police cruiser from 2008. From CBS' DC bureau, Bob Orr worked his federal contacts, and reported that Castro had faced domestic violence complaints in 2005 that were ultimately dropped.

ABC also assigned Dan Harris to the most tenuous of follow-ups. No matter that two of the three Cleveland women were taken prisoner as teenagers and the third, Michelle Knight, when she was an adult, aged 20: Dan Harris gave us three examples of the abduction of children, a nine-year-old girl in Texas, a boy in Oregon in 2004, and Jaycee Dugard, kidnapped at age eleven, who has been featured so frequently with anchor Diane Sawyer as a rescued adult, 18 years later. Harris consulted the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, whose advocacy proposes the astonishing ratio that 1,000 false suspicions against innocent people are justified if they result in a single abducted child being found. That ratio provoked no skepticism from Harris.
Andrew Tyndall 5/10/13 4:41:03 pm

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