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All three networks covered the Capitol Hill hearings last week when female senators led the pressure on Pentagon brass to change its rules for cracking down on rapes in the ranks, taking authority away from unit commanders and assigning it to professional prosecutors. It was the Story of the Day back then. The upshot is that the Pentagon has successfully resisted that change: in personal terms, Sen Carl Levin overruled Sen Kirsten Gillibrand. NBC and CBS both covered it, with their Congressional correspondents Kelly O'Donnell and Nancy Cordes. ABC, which has been less interested in the scandal of military rapes all along, did not file the update.
The public relations flacks at AAA had a gala day, securing blanket coverage on all three newscasts by inviting correspondents from the DC bureaus to be guinea pigs at its distracted driving simulator in Landover. Watch ABC's David Kerley and NBC's Tom Costello and CBS' Sharyl Attkisson strap on brain-scanning helmets behind the wheel in order to test whether they could talk to a text-messaging machine and keep their eye on a green light simultaneously. AAA wants to discourage Detroit from making cars loaded with voice-recognition technology. It succeeded in having all three correspondents replicate its red-flag research findings.
Also covered by all three newscasts was the lung transplant surgery for Sarah Murnaghan, a ten-year-old cystic fibrosis patient in Philadelphia. NBC's Stephanie Gosk followed the public relations campaign that the Murnaghan family had mounted -- from the news media to Capitol Hill to federal court -- to get the eligibility rules changed allowing the girl to jump the queue to receive lungs that would normally have been transplanted into an adult. CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook narrated his network's computer animation of a lobe being lopped off adult lungs in order to fit into a child's chest. ABC's David Wright treated this queue jumping not as an ethics violation but as a family's vindication.
Now, look at the difference between the ways in which Wright and LaPook treat the girl's exclamation of joy at the fact that she is eligible for a transplant. Dr LaPook told us that the exclamation was in response to the news that a judge had overturned the federal guidelines and that, subsequently, the girl had become sicker and fallen into a coma before going into surgery, which was still taking place as the newscast went on air.
Now, look at Wright, airing the same video of her exclamation as he tells us: "Today she got her lungs." To me, David Wright looks flat-out deceptive. His report implies that young Sarah is jumping for joy after getting her new set of lungs when, in fact, if LaPook is to be believed, she was at the time comatose and still in surgery. Whom do you believe? Dr Jon? Or Mr Wright?
Since James Whitey Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica two years ago, CBS' Jim Axelrod has kept an eye on his racketeering prosecution (here, here, and here). Now CBS hands off to Elaine Quijano for the beginning of Bulger's trial.
ABC's trick of lavishing free publicity on smartphone apps and consumer Websites in order to give penny-pinching advice is usually the province of Paula Faris and her Real Money series (just in the last couple of months Faris has offered such tips to commuters, to baseball fans, to would-be home sellers, to surgery patients, and to college applicants). This time ABC's advice was for airline passengers, but it was not offered by Faris and Real Money. Instead Linsey Davis, cross-promoting The Lookout in primetime, made hipmunk.com her smartphone app of choice.
If you look at Rehema Ellis' education playlist over the past 18 months, you will see that she covers K-12 roughly twice as much as higher ed. True to form, her Education Nation takes a trip to principal Donald Lilley's well-mentored Annapolis High School in Maryland, where, just like in Lake Wobegon, the students -- of all races -- are now above average.
ABC has a soft spot for TED talks. John Donvan keeps that tradition alive by sharing Susan Austin's dancing submarine wheelchair.
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