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The news agenda was a model of incoherence. Each of the newscasts led with a separate story. None of those stories was significant enough to warrant coverage by a correspondent on any of the rival newscasts. And none of them qualified as Story of the Day. That was the national pastime. Anthony Bosch, who runs the Bio-Genesis rejuvenation clinic in Miami, reportedly supplied performance-enhancing drugs to as many as 30 major league baseball players.

ABC's Byron Pitts offered a hat-tip to Outside the Lines at his network's sibling cable channel ESPN, although he did not mention Bosch by name. Jim Axelrod did on CBS. He predicted that the punishment for slugger Alex Rodriguez would cost him $15m. Stephanie Gosk covered the scandal on NBC, mentioning both Bosch and OTL, but her report was not posted online as a videostream. Sports coverage often fails to make the transition from broadcast to online, presumably because network lawyers cannot be bothered with the hassle of asserting their legitimate fair use exemption against copyright claims

As for those lead stories…

CBS has covered the court martial of Sergeant Robert Bales more closely than either of the other two newscasts, so it was apt that it should assign Ben Tracy to kick off with Bales' guilty plea to the premeditated massacre of 16 civilians in an Afghan village last spring.

A four-story building, under demolition, fell down on top of a thrift store in downtown Philadelphia. There was nothing to this collapse except a local story, yet NBC unaccountably decided that this was its national lead. Kristen Dahlgren got the assignment.

ABC made it five times out of the last eight weekdays that it has led with weather. Steve Osunsami and Good Morning America weathercaster Sam Champion filed a double-header, knee-deep in Mississippi River floods and on the track of a Gulf of Mexico tropical storm.
Andrew Tyndall 6/6/13 10:10:19 pm

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