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All three White House correspondents covered the President's speech at the National Defense University: ABC's Jonathan Karl, NBC's Peter Alexander, and CBS' Major Garrett. In the process of winding down GWoT, Obama wants to transfer Yemeni prisoners out of the camp at Guantanamo Bay and to transfer control of drone warfare from the spies at the CIA to the airmen at the Pentagon. None of the newscasts followed up on Gitmo; CBS was the only one to round out drone reporting. Elizabeth Palmer reported from Pakistan that the government had been ordered to shut down the CIA's drone base there anyway. Palmer reported that drone attacks aimed at terrorists are blamed for the collateral death of 1,000 Pakistani civilians.
The bloody-handed Londoner who was caught on video pointing to the deaths of Moslems as his motive for killing an off-duty British soldier appeared again on all three newscasts. On ABC, again, his rant came courtesy of The Sun newspaper. On CBS, again, ITV News received the credit. NBC, again, offered no credit. The soldier was identified as Lee Rigby, an army drummer. The arrested knifeman was identified as Michael Adebolajo. Lama Hasan filed for ABC; Mark Phillips for CBS; Michelle Kosinski for NBC. Despite the fact that she quoted Adebolajo as asserting that he was motivated by "an-eye-for-an-eye" vengeance, Kosinski called him "al-Qaeda-inspired," an organization his video screed did not mention.
Part two of Holly Williams' undercover venture for CBS into the sweatshops of Bangladesh (part one here) brought us Tahmina Akhter Sadia, the 15-year-old seamstress breadwinner for her family, and the widow of Aminul Islam, the tortured and mutilated labor organizer. Do you know why denim blue jeans have that fashionable, distressed, faded look? Toxic potassium permangenate.
During the depths of Great Recession in this country, Elkhart Ind was a frequent stopping point for CBS (especially Seth Doane) and NBC (but not for ABC). Here is that playlist -- and here is John Yang on Elkhart's eventual, but tardy, RV revival.
Nothing bad happened to a Georgia home when a chunk of metal fell off the wing of an overflying China Airlines cargo jet and crashed through its roof. Neither was any video available to show the impact happening. ABC's Steve Osunsami had his network's Virtual View re-enact it as a computer animation. So his report consisted of an imaginary depiction of a non-existent injury.
That weak story that NBC chose as its lead item -- Pete Williams on gay boy scouts: well, NBC's decision was flawed but not unusually so. All three newscasts considered it newsworthy enough to assign a correspondent to it. Besides Williams, there was CBS' Manuel Bojorquez and ABC's David Kerley.
The popularity of video of twins together (see ABC's Juju Chang two years ago or CBS' Steve Hartman in 2007) derives from our innate fascination with the idea of seeing a real-life mirror of ourselves. Just two weeks ago, ABC's Persons of the Week were identical college valedictorians Kirstie & Kristie, the Bonner twins, and CBS' John Blackstone brought us Ronald & Reginald, the Richardsons. So substitute anchor Dan Harris applied some sleight of hand in his closing feature on ABC. Harris found a class at Highcrest Middle School in Wilmette Ill that boasts a record-setting 24 sets of twins. He illustrated his double-the-pleasure story with just such cute mirror-image video (like a clip lifted from a Linsey Davis feature two years ago). Yet he had to admit that only two of the 24 pairs were actually identical. The other 22 were merely fraternal, the product of doubling in the fertility laboratory, not the source of doppelganger fascination.
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