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All three newscasts led with the state of the stock market, where investors were in a selling mood for the second straight day, amid warnings from the Federal Reserve Board that it will cut back on its monetary stimulus sooner rather than later. Yet these financial stirrings were not newsworthy enough to qualify as Story of the Day. A pair of softer stories were each covered by correspondents at all three networks: one was the back story behind the viral video of the astonished face of the toddler Grayson Clamp, which ABC assigned to its substitute anchor David Muir; the other was the untimely death of James Gandolfini, the actor who embodied HBO's Tony Soprano, which NBC assigned to its anchor Brian Williams. Gandolfini was Story of the Day.

The state of the financial markets was not a straightforward story to report, since the negative development of the withdrawal of support by the Federal Reserve Board, is prompted by a positive development, namely that the economy is becoming strong enough not to need that support.

So on the negative side, Carter Evans on CBS and CNBC's Maria Bartiromo on NBC both offered reasons why the price of major stock market indices have fallen by 5% in two days. Evans offered a slowdown in manufacturing in China; Bartiromo offered investors switching from stocks to bonds. On ABC, Rebecca Jarvis told us to look at the trends of the year so far, during which the price of financial assets has risen by 10%.

On the positive side, CBS' Anthony Mason cited the reasons for the Federal Reserve's optimism on Wednesday, and his colleague Dean Reynolds now offers a concrete example of boom times: the full employment in Thief River Falls in Minnesota, thanks to Digi-Key and Arctic Cat.

On the mixed side, both ABC's Rebecca Jarvis on Wednesday and NBC's Tom Costello now, brought us both sides of the housing market. There is more buying than ever going on, yet mortgage interest rates are starting to rise. Costello quoted Diana Olick, the real estate maven at CNBC, NBC's sibling financial news network. Because of a mixture of high prices and higher rates, buyers can afford "a whole lot less house than a month ago."

The reason why all three newscasts felt compelled to tell us about experimental brain implant surgery at the University of the North Carolina's Medical Center is that the patient's mother had her video camera rolling when the implant was tested. Grayson Clamp was born without an auditory nerve in his head, so he had lived the first three years of his life without sound. The microchip plugged straight into his brain stem and when it was switched on little Grayson registered a double-take of astonishment and awe at hearing his father's voice. The fact that the voice was telling him that his father loved him added to the emotional power of the video, even though, obviously, the boy would have been unable to divine any meaning from the words -- they would have been mere sounds. Anyway both ABC and CBS deployed their in-house computer animators to demonstrate how the implant works. ABC had substitute anchor David Muir narrate the viral video; NBC used Kate Snow; CBS went with its in-house physician Jon LaPook.

As for the actor Gandolfini, dead at age 51, ABC treated his surprise death as a news story, with Lama Hasan filing from the hospital in Rome. All three newscasts also filed obituaries. ABC sent Dan Harris to the very driveway in North Caldwell NJ where Gandolfini's character would routinely pick up the morning's edition of the Star Ledger. CBS had Ben Tracy file from Los Angeles while NBC's Jersey-born anchor Brian Williams invoked Garden State pride. All three obituaries gave credit to Gandolfini as a trailblazer in developing the flawed anti-hero character, now so common as a leading man in television dramas. All three dug into their own interview archives: CBS with Bob Simon in 2005, ABC on Nightline in 2012, NBC with Williams himself in 2007, promoting an HBO documentary on disabled combat veterans.
Andrew Tyndall 6/22/13 4:59:27 pm

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