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This is the outline of the remainder of the tornado coverage.
For general network news reporters, CBS managed to get Anna Werner on the scene, complete with a crew, from her bureau in Dallas. ABC's Mike Boettcher, by coincidence, happens to live in Oklahoma. He filed by telephone, as an eyewitness, but did not have a camera crew, and there is no online link to his call-in.
NBC made most use of, and best use of, its local affiliate, which is KFOR-TV. Lance West reported by news helicopter on the Plaza Towers Elementary School, directly hit, perhaps with children still inside. NBC also aired a compilation of KFOR-TV's live coverage, which is well worth the look.
All three newscasts consulted local municipal officials, none of whom told us much: Mayor Glenn Lewis of Moore on NBC; City Manager Stephen Eddy of Moore on ABC; City Manager Jim Couch of Oklahoma City on CBS. CBS anchor Scott Pelley also interviewed Mary Fallin, Oklahoma's Republican Governor, but she was unenlightening too.
Then there was vox pop eyewitness testimony. Again, we can expect individuals' first-person accounts to be more finely honed, more selectively chosen, and better edited for impact, as the coverage unravels. For starters, NBC gave us Todd and Jennifer Tabor; ABC chose Melissa Newtown (at the tail of the city manager videostream); CBS did not identify its storm survivor.
About those two extraneous stories: CBS, which has covered the Internal Revenue Service scandal of the tax-exempt Tea Party applicants more heavily than its rivals, sent Dean Reynolds to Cincinnati, where the office accused of the targeting is located. Bonnie Esrig, a onetime manager there, offered a mundane explanation. Overwork.
Why was Andrea Rebello, a 21-year-old Hofstra University student shot dead? ABC's Gio Benitez suggested that a cop messed up. Instead of following procedure and waiting out a hostage siege, Officer Nikolas Budimlic rushed in and killed the coed in the crossfire. What is spooky about Benitez' report is that he shows how VirTra's virtual reality simulator is used to train cops how to shoot guns safely and then he depicts the standoff where Budimlic misfires using his own network's Virtual View computer animation. It's a Hall of Mirrors.
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