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The terrifying twister that touched down in Granbury was illustrated by an anecdote shared by both NBC's Gabe Gutierrez and CBS' Anna Werner: Marjorie Davis was dining with her son and daughter-in-law in her trailer home when it was picked up bodily and dumped more than 200 yards away; mother and son were killed. That cross-promotion for the Weather Channel on NBC was handled by Mike Seidel. ABC's Steve Osunsami offered safety tips for surviving severe storms. Why did he mention outdoor gatherings during graduation season? Because his colleague Ginger Zee filed just such footage a year ago, which Osunsami was happy to recycle.
Since graduation season is in the air, NBC filed extended excerpts from First Lady Michelle Obama's commencement address at Bowie State University in Maryland and Kerry Sanders filed his newscast's closer from the University of Central Florida, as all 36 members of the first graduating class of its brand new medical school head off to their residencies tuition-debt-free.
From England comes research in the online journal Reproductive Biomedicine that constant video monitoring of fertilized human eggs results in a healthier selection for implant for women undergoing In-Vitro Fertilization. NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman had already covered this advance in February so she filed an update and Linsey Davis brought ABC's viewers up to speed. CBS tends to find infertility treatments less newsworthy than the other two newscasts, and again skipped the story. Neither Snyderman nor Davis told us how much extra this shiny new technology will cost.
CBS almost always covers the civil war in Syria more heavily than its rivals, so recent investigations into the use of chemical warfare by NBC's Richard Engel, NBC's Ann Curry, and the BBC's Ian Pannell for ABC, ran contrary to trends. Now, from the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin reestablishes the conventional order, being the only correspondent to cover the delivery of new anti-aircraft and naval missiles from Russia to the Baath regime.
ABC, which is the most domestically-minded of the three newscasts, ventured an international dateline. Lama Hasan filed from France -- but in no way did her story stray from ABC's celebrity-loving beaten track. Hasan was in Cannes for the film festival, where $1m in jewels from the House of Chopard had been stolen from a safe in a Novotel. How did Hasan cover this? With Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief and paparazzi stills of bejeweled actresses on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. Which network owns the broadcast rights to the Oscars? ABC.
And that was not ABC's only celebrity story. JJ Abrams, the movie director, was profiled by David Muir as the network's Person of the Week. Muir's publicity whirl included plugs for Jimmy Kimmel, TED talks (a World News favorite), TV's Felicity, Alias, and Lost, the movies Super 8 and Taking Care of Business, and the movie series Star Trek and Star Wars. By my count, that is five out of nine Disney properties. Which network is owned by Disney? ABC.
ABC also loves lottery stories. Just since the beginning of last year, ABC has filed on jackpots 24 separate times (4 by CBS, 9 by NBC). David Wright consulted a FaceBook survey of the motives of lottery gamblers, including a gratuitous clip from his network's Barbara Walters in a seven-year-old interview with a winner. Unusually, CBS found Powerball's $600m prize worthy of attention, assigning Carter Evans to its long lines. Evans demonstrated his inexperience on this beat by calculating the odds that each of us has a 1-in-10m chance of becoming President of the United States. Does anyone know what that means?
Remember the Cleveland captivity story that dominated the headlines for three days last week? CBS' Jim Axelrod contacted the activist group Partners for Women & Justice to get a case history of a battered woman held prisoner by a violent man. Meet Jessica.
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