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Last week, NBC's Richard Engel came up empty when he tested a urine sample after a suspicious attack by government forces in Syria but found no evidence of chemical warfare. Now the BBC's Ian Pannell has been given video of another suspicious attack from a helicopter on the village of Saraqeb. ABC, which has a newsgathering partnership with BBC, aired Pannell's report. Pannell had no urine to test along with video of the death throes of Mariam Khatib, a mother of eight.
Charlie d'Agata of CBS is embedded with GIs training Afghan soldiers in Mansurabad, an arid village in Kandahar Province. The GIs cannot believe it when they have not even succeeded in teaching them that landmine detectors need batteries to work.
Somehow hackers used a Missouri telephone number to run a scam to sell $519K worth of calls in Somalia, Azerbaijan, and Guinea. I watched Linzie Janis' explanation of how this was done on ABC three times and I still do not understand.
Vengeance against the United States for killing Moslems in Iraq and Afghanistan was the motive for the Boston Marathon pressure cooker bombs. That was the conclusion that reporters on all three newscasts made after police leaked evidence: John Miller on CBS, Pete Williams on NBC, Brian Ross on ABC. Investigators say they found the scrawled message inside the boat in the Watertown driveway where suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding after being wounded in the firefight that killed his brother. ABC's Ross said that Tsarnaev's handwritten anti-American curses discredit the arguments made in the Free Jahar YouTube channel on his behalf. Ross calls the video channel "bizarre."
Last week I resorted to IMDb to find an explanation why ABC's Linsey Davis was assigned to offer free publicity to the movie documentary Venus and Serena (the co-director turned out to be an alumna of Good Morning America). Now, ABC's Alex Perez has been assigned to give free publicity to the documentary Sole Survivor. Despite resorting to IMDb once again I am at a loss to know why the movie's content is newsworthy.
Almost as thrilling as the Weather Porn in the Story of the Day, is video of cars crashing over and over again. Such crash-dummy footage is routinely supplied by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. NBC took the bait again: this time John Yang, last year Tom Costello, in December and in August.
All three newscasts closed with a sports story. CBS opted for celebrity as David Beckham decided he would bend it no more (Mark Phillips' haircut highlights package was so loaded with sports clips that, presumably, it did not have the rights clearances to be posted online). ABC ran out Steve Osunsami for a second time in one newscast for an America Strong profile of Charlotte Brown, the blind teenage Texan pole vaulter. NBC chose girls' high school track-&-field too and Ron Mott's package was my favorite: runners Jordan Dickerson and Robin Jeter.
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