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What a cast of characters was introduced to us by ABC! David Wright had us meet Valery Rozov! Brian Ross gave us Mani Chulpayev! Gio Benitez offered Yanira Maldonado!
Rozov jumped off a 23,000-foot-high ridge on Mount Everest in a squirrel suit -- and ushered in Wright's dizzying montage which shoehorned the dropping of boldnames Felix Baumgartner and James Cameron and Joby Ogwyn, and plugs for Red Bull and National Geographic, with promotion for the movies Man of Steel and Toy Story.
Chulpayev is accused of killing Lil Phat, the rap musician from Atlanta. That is just the half of it: Ross' Investigates feature included a hat-tip to NatGeoTV.com, a Chulpayev tirade followed by a ride in his Maserati, and a flash of his No Regrets tattoo with extra braggadocio.
Maldonado, a Mormon mother of seven from Phoenix, is in a Mexican jail, accused of trying to smuggle twelve pounds of marijuana through a checkpoint in Hermosillo. Benitez had his network's in-house computer animators imagine a Virtual View of what the weed looked like beneath her bus seat. Maldonado protests her innocence and her husband tried to pay police a $5,000 bribe to buy her freedom, Benitez reported. NBC also covered the case, via Miguel Almaguer.
Both Jeff Zeleny on ABC and Andrea Mitchell on NBC went to their archives to rerun greatest hits from Campaign 2012. Their reason: onetime candidate Michele Bachmann, the Republican Congresswoman from Minnesota, released a YouTube video to announce her retirement from the House of Representatives. Both Zeleny and Mitchell aired that YouTube clip, but then Mitchell piled on self-servingly. While Zeleny stuck with clips from the stump, Mitchell included bits from MSNBC's Hardball, NBC News' Today, and NBC's late-night comedy Saturday Night Live.
Last week, President Barack Obama made a speech on the Global War on Terrorism in which he promised to curb drone attacks. ABC's Jonathan Karl, at the time, noted that drones would not be used as retribution for past acts of violence, only as prevention for future ones. So watch David Martin's report on CBS on the drone assassination in North Waziristan that killed Wali ur-Rehman and six others. Martin sure made it seem like a revenge attack for the 2008 truck-bombing of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel and the 2009 assassination of seven CIA spies.
CBS also had Elizabeth Palmer follow up on the atrocity in the Afghan village of Alokozai. Sergeant Robert Bales faces court martial for the murder of 16 civilians there last March. It is amazing how much forgiveness $700,000 will buy.
Back in 2010, I commented that charter schools appearing on the network nightly newscasts seem to be from Lake Wobegon. All of them are above average. Check out CBS' Dean Reynolds on the three formats of charters run by Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland -- an intergenerational model, a citizens' academy, and a preparatory -- and you will see that below-par performance is still unheard of.
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