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NBC and ABC both publicized primetime news magazine offerings.
For ABC, Pierre Thomas previewed Cat & Mouse, a 20/20 special on the Alabama hostage siege involving a five-year-old boy snatched from a school bus that ABC also covered most intently at the time in February. Thomas claimed an Exclusive for obtaining the on-board security audio record of Charles Poland, the bus driver, vainly resisting the boy's abduction. Poland was killed. Thomas also had his network's computer animators imagine a Virtual View of what the cabin of the bus looked like.
NBC anchor Brian Williams previewed his own Rock Center sit-down with a sextet of amputees: the women who lost legs to the shrapnel from the pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. "I got my leg today, which is a huge step," dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis told him, literally. Movingly, Roseann Sdoia forces herself to look at her leglessness in the mirror each morning, to keep the phantom pain away.
It was not an explicit act of cross-promotion, but David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, did seem to use the initials NCIS more than necessary in his report on the alleged gang rape of a blacked-out midshipwoman by three college football players at the Naval Academy. The hungover woman was reprimanded for her drinking when she reported the attack, and later withdrew her complaint. The real NCIS, not the primetime drama of the same name (Tuesday nights on CBS), is still investigating.
Linzie Janis was her own one-woman Yelp on ABC, sitting down to chef Wally Weaver's ten-ounce sirloin steak at 3 Forty Grill in Hoboken, to illustrate her report on the rising price of beef.
CBS made it two Jet Propulsion Laboratory stories in three days. Wednesday, Bill Whitaker looked at the voyage of Voyager, 36 years after take-off. Now Ben Tracy imagines the giant $2bn Hefty Bag that astronauts might use to snare an approaching asteroid.
How many celebrities has ABC chosen as its Person of the Week in the last six weeks? Pop song writer Carole King, meet moviemaker JJ Abrams, pop singer Cyndi Lauper, and pop singer Neil Diamond. That's a vocal trio plus a director for the video.
What else? Mystery writer Cynthia Riggs from CBS' Steve Hartman, On The Road in romantic Martha's Vineyard. Sarah the 29-year-old asthmatic dolphin from NBC's Kerry Sanders on Key Largo. And the battleship Mary Rose, lost at war with France in the English Channel in 1545, courtesy of CBS' Mark Phillips.
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