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Africa received unusual, in indirect, attention from CBS: not only was Benghazi the Story of the Day, but anchor Scott Pelley filed the second part of his cross-promotion for his 60 Minutes profile of Jessica Buchanan, the aid worker held hostage by bandits in Somalia and rescued by USNavy SEAL commandos. Also, CBS' closer by Steve Hartman was an On The Road profile of Zia Gorman, a four-year-old orphan from the Congo, adopted by a woman from Dallas who proceeded to spend every remaining waking moment with the girl for as long as she lived.
NBC and ABC turned to Bangladesh instead -- sort of. The scandalously undercovered sweatshop factory collapse in Dhaka that has killed more than a thousand workers, received airtime 17 days later because one more casualty, Reshma Begum, turned out to be alive. ABC had Linsey Davis cover Begum's rescue from New York using Virtual View computer animation, mystifyingly, including information about a hi-tech search-and-rescue microphone that was not used in Bangladesh. NBC filed from Beijing, where Ian Williams told us that major apparel brands use Bangladeshi sweatshops. Did he name those brands? Mystifyingly, he did not.
As for the trio of Cleveland captives, CBS' Dean Reynolds filed a straight news update on the final hospital release and a positive paternity test. ABC's David Muir dug up a daytime television clip from 2004, in which Luana Miller, the mother of the rescued captive Amanda Berry, was falsely assured by a psychic on the Montel Williams Show that Amanda was dead. Muir reported that Miller died of heartbreak soon thereafter. On NBC, Kate Snow filed a cross-promotion for her network's primetime magazine Rock Center. Snow revealed that missing women are no rarity in that Cleveland neighborhood: 34 cases in the last six years.
The global warming story was a big deal but only CBS deemed it worthy of coverage. Ben Tracy reported that the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- up to 4m years ago -- sea levels were 131 feet higher.
Instead of attending to that beat, as she should have, NBC's environmental correspondent Anne Thompson showed us the final spire, a broadcasting antenna, being added to the top of the World Trade Center. It is hard to decide which is more irritating: the fact that Thompson's report turned out to be little more than promotion for NBC's Today show, showing us anchor Matt Lauer literally tooting his own horn; or anchor Scott Pelley's pompous pseudo-patriotic paean to commercial real estate development in downtown Manhattan on CBS.
Those sports stories on ABC: Matt Gutman picked up a terrifying reel of near catastrophes from Outside The Lines on ESPN, ABC's sibling cable channel, to illustrate the dangers of being on the pitcher's mound when line drives scream right back at you; Nick Watt replayed clips of his own yachting adventure on the catamaran Oracle Tech to illustrate a fatal training accident aboard Team Artemis in tryouts for the America's Cup. No more rum punch for Nick, in his blue blazer! John Blackstone on CBS also covered the catamaran crash in San Francisco Bay. He promised that the regatta in July will be as extreme as NASCAR or Formula One, although this death-tinged package was less boosterish than the gung-ho version he filed last October.
Double the education pleasure one more time: Thursday, CBS' John Blackstone brought us a pair of identical school principals, trying to set an Oakland middle school straight. Now ABC anchor Diane Sawyer makes a pair of identical valedictorians her Persons of the Week, leading the commencement exercises at Spelman College.
Ronald and Reginald, meet Kirstie and Kristie.
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