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The ricin-laced letter that was mailed to Mayor Michael Bloomberg was ABC's lead on Wednesday from Pierre Thomas. Now the news that three such anti-gun-control letters have been mailed from an address in Shreveport attracts the lead spot on NBC and CBS, who had Maurice DuBois sit in as substitute anchor. Ricin qualified as a highly-dubious Story of the Day: ABC's Brian Ross said the poison was of "amateurish toxicity" while CBS' Bob Orr dismissed it as "low-level." ABC reverted to Tornado Alley for its lead item, with its own stormchaser Ginger Zee filing from Oklahoma.

CBS' in-house former FBI honcho John Miller came thisclose to reprimanding DuBois, the substitute anchor, for elevating the ricin scare to a seriousness it did not deserve. The letters contained no spores, Miller noted, just harmless mashed-up castor beans. Whoever sent the letters was craving attention and publicity -- just what the news media was granting. Of all the correspondents covering the ricin story, only NBC's Pete Williams did not stipulate just how ineffectual this poison was, calling it a biological weapon instead. He quoted Dr Cathleen Clancy's worries about damage to one's lungs and guts. ABC's Ross is not immune from criticism on this front, with his alarmist leaps from the Shreveport letters to KGB assassination and al-Qaeda plotting.

The Weather Channel's stormchaser Mike Bettes was on the case in Oklahoma for NBC along with ABC's Ginger Zee. Zee uncharacteristically veered towards a public-policy angle in her coverage, questioning the wisdom of zoning residential subdivisions in tornado-prone suburban Oklahoma City -- but, nah! Ginger is really a weather pornographer at heart. CBS, wisely, aired a brief clip of a funnel cloud in passing but did not bother to assign a correspondent to the storms. NBC, unwisely, went all in, and followed up stormchaser Bettes with Janet Shamlian's human interest from that fatal, ruined elementary school in Moore.

Education proper was on the minds of all three newscasts. NBC filed its annual compilation of celebrity highlights from college commencement addresses, a similar highlight reel to the one ABC aired on Monday. In all NBC used clips of nine famous people (plus self-congratulatory clips of two of its own -- anchor Brian Williams and correspondent Richard Engel). ABC on Monday used clips of seven (plus one piece of self-congratulation for correspondent Martha Raddatz).

What do Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Julie Andrews, and Stephen Colbert have in common? They were the four consensus picks, newsworthy enough to appear in both ABC's compilations and NBC's.

Anchor Diane Sawyer filed her own education feature for ABC's Hidden America feature series on poverty (previous installments have included Sawyer on teenage gang violence, Clayton Sandell on teenage prostitution, Cecilia Vega on abuses of the mentally ill, and Chris Cuomo on substandard pediatric dental care). Sawyer took us to Strawberry Mansion High School in inner-city Philadelphia for its cafeteria fights, its bullied students, its inattentive parents, its budget cuts, its CCTV surveillance.

Oh yes, this was a Sawyer report, so religiosity was part of the mix. Tuesday she brought us America Strong prisoners-of-war saying their prayers. Now we see Hidden America security guards saying theirs.

On CBS there were two education stories, one from college, one from school. Chip Reid joined in graduation season at College Park to survey the state of the job market for University of Maryland graduates. Dean Reynolds, who was praising charter schools in Cleveland Wednesday, now previews the closing of public schools in Chicago, repeating what he and NBC's Rehema Ellis told us in March. The city has a shortage of schoolchildren: 145,000 fewer than in 2000.
Andrew Tyndall 6/1/13 3:53:00 pm

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