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When the ground is sodden, ABC's David Kerley showed us (here and here) last fall giant backyard trees topple over, crushing cars, destroying home roofs. How does that happen? His colleague Ginger Zee repeated ABC's explanatory Virtual View computer animation, the one Kerley narrated last November.
Both ABC and NBC ran a closing feel-good feature in the aftermath of nature's fury.
ABC's substitute anchor David Muir designated the students of Edison NJ's Martin Luther King School as his network's Persons of the Week for helping out their pen-pals in the tornado-ravaged Briarwood Elementary School in Oklahoma. Those pen-pals afforded Muir the pretext to rerun schoolma'am Robin Dziedzic's twister video, which Muir had snared as his Exclusive last month.
NBC's Katy Tur showed the charity Operation Prom Making a Difference in the Rockaways in Queens NY, where the Channel View School for Research would have had its senior prom wiped out by Superstorm Sandy if not for its philanthropy, and the sponsorship of (free plug) Men's Wearhouse. Catch the pink paisley waistcoat!
CBS' weather feature saw Dean Reynolds return to Bob Bleuer's farm in Channahon Ill. Remember the drought that Reynolds showed us shriveling the cornbelt last July? Well, if your prayers were for rain, you might find that they had been granted -- in buckets.
Also following up was substitute anchor David Muir on ABC. Last November Muir's Made in America feature had him travel to Cabot Pa to offer free publicity to Loggerhead Tools, the firm that makes the Bionic Wrench. Loggerhead had lost its wrench contract with Sears, undercut by the retailer's own Made-in-China Craftsman brand. Now Muir brandishes the stack of supportive e-mails from ABC News viewers endorsing Loggerhead's original. Muir claimed credit for helping to fix the wrench up with a new retail vendor, Walgreen's drugstores, and even offered his personal product endorsement: he bought one for his own father, for a Father's Day gift.
She styles herself on Twitter as an author, a dog lover, a hair icon, a pants suit aficionado, a glass-ceiling crasher. She has launched a pre-school childcare campaign dubbed Too Small To Fail. She is the topic of the first reported package of Campaign 2016 on any of the three nightly newscasts. She was covered by NBC's Andrea Mitchell, who managed to slip in self-serving cross-promotion for her network's late night comedy star Jimmy Fallon as an extra. She herself teases that her future is "TBD." Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Lavishing free publicity on the State Department and the Coast Guard, CBS sent Margaret Brennan off to a training camp in West Virginia, where diplomats learn to avoid carbombs and kidnappers, and NBC sent Lester Holt to a training camp in North Carolina, where swimmers learn to rescue foundering mariners from helicopters.
The Ford Foundation was credited by substitute anchor Natalie Morales for underwriting NBC's coverage of poverty, with its series In Plain Sight. You would not think that a news division would need to be paid an incentive to put poverty on its news agenda and if you look at this playlist of domestic poverty stories from the first six months of this year you would see that NBC has not lagged its rivals. Nevertheless, this was only NBC's tenth such story in 24 weeks: Kevin Tibbles on the 13m workers in the fast food industry, averaging an annual income of only $18K for full-time work.
Investigating the state of firearms control laws, on Thursday, CBS' Manuel Bojorquez told us how a mentally-ill Minnesota man who hates cars was able to get the gun to shoot up passing SUVs. Now, CBS' Carter Evans tells us about the online loophole that allowed John Zawahri to construct the semi-automatic rifle that shot up Santa Monica College a week ago. AR15.com was his firearms resource.
How neat are the engineering students at the University of Maryland, channeling Leonardo da Vinci? Look at the 82lb whirligig that can hover as high as eight feet in the air, almost enough to win Sikorsky Helicopter's prize. See Steve Hartman go On The Road on CBS.
Well, there was not much sisterly solidarity in the way Elizabeth Vargas reached out to Talyaa Liera in her preview of 20/20's primetime special With Parents Like These on ABC. Talyaa likes painting, writing, music, and Tai Chi, and lives a continent away from Nathaniel, Eric, and Serena, her three children in Pennsylvania. What does that make her? "A west coast Bohemian," sniffed Vargas.
Here is Robert Bazell's playlist over the last six-years-or-so as he departs NBC News for Yale University. Here is the tribute to Bazell filed by substitute anchor Natalie Morales.
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