 |
         
|
Highways safety was covered by all three newscasts: NBC's Tom Costello and ABC's David Kerley publicized the recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board that blood-alcohol levels in states' drunk driving laws be made more strict. Kerley illustrated his report with a couple of terrifying dashboard videos; Costello delivered the underwhelming prediction that lower DUI limits would save only 800 of the 10,000 killed each year by drunk driving. On CBS, Ben Tracy gave free publicity to the It Can Wait public service advertising campaign by the cellular telephone industry. A consortium of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile is paying for PSAs against the driving-while-texting that accounts for 3,000 teenage deaths annually.
The important journalism story that NBC's Tom Costello covered Monday saw Bob Orr playing catch up on CBS: the clandestine decision by the Justice Department to inspect two months' worth of telephone logs from 100 reporters at the Associated Press for evidence of leaks of classified espionage secrets. NBC's Pete Williams cross-promoted discussion of the controversy on Morning Joe on NBC's sibling cable news channel MSNBC. Williams also replayed a clip from his own NBC Nightly News report from a year ago on the underlying story, the infiltration of a CIA spy into a Yemeni bombmaking cell, preventing the sabotage of a transAtlantic flight. The modest Williams, however, used the introduction to his story by anchor Brian Williams, not his own reporting.
The accusation by Russia that 29-year-old Ryan Fogle, an American diplomat at the Moscow Embassy, is a spy was all the pretext that NBC's Andrea Mitchell and ABC's Martha Raddatz needed to lard up their reporting with extraneous details. Mitchell dropped John Le Carre's name and offered free publicity to DC's Spy Museum. From Raddatz, we heard about Maxwell Smart, James Bond, and Anna Chapman -- you remember her, from the summer of 2010.
Meet Um Majed, the veiled so-called marriage broker, who sells teenage virgin girls to rich old Arab men. They are called brides but turn out to be little more than prostitutes. CBS' Clarissa Ward tells about the depravity from Amman, where the penury of Syrian refugees is blamed for the dishonor.
As the name suggests, the idea behind ABC's Made in America series is to publicize goods produced by domestic manufacturers for sale either here or abroad. David Muir lost the plot as he stretched last week's visit to Mexico City to cover imports that actually were Made in America. Part two concerned the growing Hispanic population in the United States, which is being served by Mexican exporters like the Grupo Bimbo bakery and Takis Chips snack food. You know: Hecho en Mexico.
NBC's Mike Taibbi shoehorned Prince Harry into his coverage of the military paralympic Warrior Games on Monday. Now his colleague Stephanie Gosk, and ABC's Bob Woodruff, file a Harry-Sandy combo as the British royal tours a storm-ravaged resort on the Jersey Shore. See reporter Gosk take a shortcut and put words in the mouth of her child interviewee in order to get the fairytale soundbite she was looking for.
How do blind people go birdwatching? CBS' Dean Reynolds tells us.
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
