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Compared with four years ago, the election in Iran hardly matters. In 2009, all three newscasts offered extensive coverage, even before massive green street protests against ballot rigging erupted. This time the run up to the election of Hasan Rouhani attracted not a single report. The vote itself was covered by NBC's Teheran-based producer Ali Arouzi, by Elizabeth Palmer from CBS' London bureau, and mentioned only in passing by ABC.
Elsewhere in the region, NBC's Richard Engel had to use his gas mask again to cover the crackdown on Taksim Square protestors in Istanbul. CBS sent Clarissa Ward to Amman where Operation Eager Lion sees the Pentagon deploy F-16 fighter jets, Patriot missile batteries, and a unit from the Marine Corps in the landlocked Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
ABC turned labor rights activist. Rebecca Jarvis covered the bust of 14 7-11 outlets in Long Island and Virginia. The convenience stores are accused of the abuse of immigrant Pakistanis, here without legal working papers. Using the threat of reporting them for deportation, the stores stand accused of forcing them into indentured servitude, with 100-hour workweeks. Meanwhile, Bob Woodruff traveled to the coal mines of northeastern India for his Woodruff Explores series on Nightline. It was back in 1952 that child labor was banned in India, yet Woodruff still found a twelve-year-old working the mine's tiny tunnels in order to afford to put his brother through school.
I complain doggedly about weather porn: the instinct to capitalize on the thrilling, compelling, stimulating sight of Mother Nature, wild and out of control, to air the video just for the sake of allowing us to gawk at it for our own private satisfaction, without any public purpose (I am talking about you on ABC, Ginger Zee). Well, thank you Barry Petersen on CBS, for following up on the Black Forest wildfire near Colorado Springs with the public policy question: why have zoning laws permitted homes for 250,000 residents to be constructed in Colorado's fire-prone wilderness in the last 20 years? Unfortunately, Petersen's quality journalism only goes so far. He poses the question, yet offers no answers.
When it comes to worrying about tumors in your breasts, NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman leads the way. Her latest, on the Cleveland Clinic's SDIORT lumpectomy technique (Single Dose Intra Operative Radiation Therapy), is her fifth breast cancer story so far this year: only three have been filed this year by all others combined.
Back in February, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer lavished English celebrity chef Nigella Lawson with excruciating publicity, turning her into the network's Person of the Week as she launched her book Nigellissima. Having established Lawson as someone worthy of attention, ABC decided to dignify the London gossip -- did Charles Saatchi, her husband, try to strangle the self-styled domestic goddess in a restaurant? -- with a report by David Wright. Why would ABC do that? In order to recycle clips from ABC News' Candid Camera-style situational ethics primetime show What Would You Do? from three years ago. That's why.
CBS went to its primetime magazine archive from 2008 to dig out Steve Kroft's sitdown on 60 Minutes with John Martorano, the confessed hit man for Boston's Winter Hill Gang. Why would CBS do that? Because CBS is the only one of the three newscasts to have committed itself to the trial of James Bulger since his arrest in Santa Monica two years ago. That's why. Martorano testified at Bulger's trial and Elaine Quijano covered it.
The latest example of a quirky ABC specialty came courtesy of Gio Benitez: alarming mid-flight events aboard jetliners that turn out to be inconsequential. Benitez even made the effort to get his network's in-house computer animators to imagine a Virtual View of a harmless, distraught midair passenger en route via United Airlines from Hong Kong to Newark. Just three weeks ago David Kerley told us about the Alaskan Airlines emergency exit door that could not be opened in midflight; a week before that Nick Schifrin offered the British Airways flight that landed safely after an engine fire; and Steve Osunsami came up with the China Airlines cargo jet that lost a piece of its wing, harming nobody as the debris fell to the ground.
Do you want to read a steamy romance on the beach this summer? CBS' Anthony Mason recommends Falling Into You for your Kindle. It's the twentieth in the genre of foreclosure-prevention fiction from obsessive scribblers Jack and Jasinda Wilder. All 20 e-books have been written within the last six months.
There are two types of shark stories: Jaws-style scares in coastal waters, and Jacques-Cousteau-style explorations of the mysteries of the deep. ABC leads in both categories (8 out of 11 on the former playlist, 5 out of 8 on the latter). This time Matt Gutman finds video of a 50Klb whale shark and 19-year-old swimmer Chris Kreis. If it is Jaws, it is Jaws very, very light.
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