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A pair of sensational stories has been notoriously undercovered in recent weeks: the collapse of the apparel sweatshop in Bangladesh, and the murder trial of the abortion doctor in inner city Philadelphia. So this was make-good time. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to the guilty verdict against Dr Kermit Gosnell on capital infanticide charges. NBC's Rehema Ellis confined herself to the details of the case. Both Michelle Miller on CBS and Nightline anchor Terry Moran on ABC widened their reporting to put the case in the context of the pro-life/pro-choice abortion rights debate. As for the aftermath of the catastrophe near Dhaka that killed more than 1,100 workers (average monthly pay $37), NBC's Stephanie Gosk offered free publicity to Elizabeth Cline and her book Overdressed, which dubs cut-price clothing imports "fast fashion" on an analogy with fast food.
A pair of sensational stories has been notoriously overcovered in recent weeks: the bombings at the Boston Marathon finish line, and the decade-long captivity of a trio of Cleveland women. From Cleveland, CBS' Dean Reynolds sat down with Jennifer Daunch, the police dispatcher who orchestrated the raid that freed the women, and ABC's Alex Perez re-ran soundbites from CNN's exclusive sitdown with Onil and Pedro Castro, whose brother is charged with the abduction. From Boston, CBS' in-house ex-cop John Miller visited the hospital bed of Richard Donohue, the policeman who was wounded in the Watertown firefight that killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Next, CBS will be selling tickets to the policeman's ball.
CBS' Mark Strassmann had footage of the Mothers Day Parade shooting in New Orleans that wounded 19 marchers via a surveillance camera. It is riveting -- but neither of the other two newscasts gave it a mention.
When Steve Brill published his acclaimed TIME expose about dysfunctional pricing in the healthcare system in February, he kicked the door open to countless consumer watchdog stories. So far ABC's Real Money series has seized the opportunity. As she did in March, Paula Faris teams up with Michelle Katz, author of Healthcare for Less…. This time they demonstrate that there is no such thing as a market price for tonsil surgery.
Look at this playlist and you will see that the network newscasts love to combine heroism, disability and sport. Profiles of military veterans disabled by combat wounds are routinely painted through the continuing athleticism of their broken bodies. So the paralympic-style Warrior Games in Colorado Springs were a no-brainer for NBC's Mike Taibbi to cover, and when a celebrity British royal turned up as cheerleader, well that was just catnip.
Neither story is really important, but both provided eyecatching video of nature's vandalism. Ayman Mohyeldin on NBC takes us to the wine country of northern California to show the ground mysteriously giving way, cracking homes open. Ginger Zee on ABC takes us to Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota (yup, the land of a thousand lakes) to show us the crackling and tinkling of heaving ice.
There was no evidence of actual journalism being practiced in David Muir's report on Barbara Walters' countdown to her retirement next year -- but there was plenty of ABC News office politics. Watch, and diagnose the Disney power dynamics between Muir, Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Bob Iger. By the way, in Muir's thumbnail of Walters' bio he jumps from ABC Evening News straight to The View with no mention of the intervening 20/20, which Muir happens to anchor now, himself. What did he mean by that omission?
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