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The collapse of a section of the 1155-foot-long Skagit River highway bridge between Seattle and Vancouver should have been Story of the Day. It was the lead item on all three newscasts, after an oversized tractor-trailer truck wiped out part of its outmoded 1950s-era design. Shades of the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis in 2007! Except it wasn't. Only two cars plummeted into the Skagit and all three of the people in them survived; back in 2007 the I-35 collapse killed 13. CBS did not even send its own correspondent to the scene, relying instead on KIRO-TV, its local affiliate. On the eve of a long holiday weekend, with all three anchors leaving early (substitutes were David Muir at ABC, Ann Curry at NBC, and Jeff Glor at CBS), there was not enough hard news from the bridge to exceed the continuing volume of human-interest from the Oklahoma tornado. So the feature-heavy aftermath of the Moore twister was Story of the Day for the fifth straight day, giving it a clean sweep of the week.

That is not to say the Skagit story did not have its appeal. The cool-under-pressure of 20-year-old Bryce Kenning, one of the drenched motorists, won him a soundbite from both ABC's Neal Karlinsky and KIRO-TV's Henry Rosoff on CBS. The other wet motorist, Dan Sligh, was quoted by ABC's Karlinsky and NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin, although Karlinsky included the better detail, about the shoulder dislocation. Karlinsky had his network's in-house computer animators working overtime: Virtual View imagined both Kenning's nosedive and the tractor-trailer's vandalism.

Commenting on Tuesday's saturation coverage, I speculated that it might have been the prospects of a Newtown-sized tragedy at the two destroyed elementary schools that drove Moore to maximum levels. In retrospect it was an over-reaction -- yet even for their end-of-the week features, the networks could not shake that schoolchildren angle.

NBC's Ann Curry closed with saved toddlers at a daycare center. Her colleague Kate Snow sat down with the staff at Plaza Towers Elementary School for a preview of her primetime Rock Center segment. ABC's substitute anchor David Muir decided to praise Moore's teachers as his network's Persons of the Week, allowing him to recycle the Exclusive video of Briarwood Elementary that he obtained from schoolma'am Robin Dziedzic on Wednesday. Muir came oh-so-close to spelling it out that he had traveled to Moore expecting a greater toll of dead children: he called its absence "a mystery, a miracle."

For CBS' closing On The Road segment, Steve Hartman caught up with the siblings of the Brown family, Caleb, Colby and Courtney, the same Courtney covered by CBS' Norah O'Donnell on Tuesday. Guess what? The Browns' dog's name starts with a "C" too. Hartman relied on the cheapest of tricks, waiting to introduce us to Charlie to make sure his report had a happy ending.

Alone CBS' Mark Strassmann came up with tornado human-interest that concerned adults -- although even Strassmann was family-oriented.
Andrew Tyndall 5/28/13 9:52:13 pm

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