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Thursday, ABC did not cover the latest jockeying in the Senate to assemble a majority in favor of immigration legislation. At the time, both NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Nancy Cordes filed on the plan to attract Republican votes with a massive jobs program for the Border Patrol in southwestern states. ABC's Jim Avila now catches up with a reminder on the current state of the security of the border with Mexico: at the moment it is not porous to illegal entry; the expanded security will cost billions of dollars; and the upshot will be the militarization of an entire region.
Last week, all three newscasts reported it as a significant development, when the White House announced that the CIA will start supplying arms to some of the opposition militias fighting in the civil war in Syria. In a brief stand-up from the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin pours a little cold water on that significance: the CIA has been training the rebels in anti-tank and anti-aircraft warfare since the end of last year, Martin reported.
Wednesday, ABC's Rebecca Jarvis offered on update on the real estate housing market: monthly costs are rising, since mortgage interest rates are increasing even as sale prices hold firm. Thursday, NBC's Tom Costello reported on the same phenomenon. Now, CBS' Anthony Mason discovers that mortgage interest rates are rising, even as sale prices remain firm.
Clayton Sandell on ABC earned points on Thursday for deviating from superficial weatherporn coverage of wildfires in western forests by putting them in the context of global warming. NBC's Gabe Gutierrez earns points now, for pointing to the price paid for fiscal austerity. National Forest Service budget cuts mean that the feds are passing the buck for brush clearance to local authorities. As for weatherporn: Neal Karlinsky on ABC still served up a portion, anyway.
It has been five years since that spate of stories from China about adulterated infant formula: melamine in the milk supply; babies afflicted with kidney stones. From Beijing, CBS' Seth Doane updates us that parents of infants are still worried. Formula imports are booming and Hong Kong has been forced to limit its exports to the mainland.
All three networks filed updates on the airlines. Both NBC and CBS commissioned in-house graphic artists to render a computer animation of a midair crash that failed to happen over New York City, as a Delta jumbo jetliner approaching JFK flew close to a Delta commuter jet taking off from LaGuardia: Tom Costello and Terrell Brown narrated the imaginary depictions, both with the help of audio from LiveATC.net. ABC had David Kerley enter the experimental Quiet Room built by Boeing to see if playing handheld electronic videogames messed with a jet's avionics. Kerley could not resist the celebrity angle: had actor Alec Baldwin been a potential saboteur?
ABC is usually the newscast that relies heavily on Virtual View, its in-house computer animation. Not this time: CBS's graphics team was put to work twice, for Terrell Brown's non-existent mid-air plane crash, and for Ben Tracy's leaking radioactive pollution. CBS' Carter Evans told us about the nuclear toxins at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State on Wednesday; now Tracy, from Los Angeles, narrates the animation, imagining how even supposedly-safe double-walled containment tanks are not doing their job.
When photography switched from film to digital, there were tens of thousands of layoffs at Kodak and similar firms. David Muir's Made in America series on ABC has detected a slight revival: the business of incorporating digital images into customized fabricated items such as mugs, cards, and albums. He found a factory that used to be based in Japan that has now hired 500 workers. He did not tell us where it is located -- but he did help its name recognition. Shutterfly.
For the third daredevil basejumper story in a row ABC lavished free publicity on Red Bull. See Nick Watt this time last year. See David Wright last month. Now Alex Perez tells us about a trio that skydived illicitly off the top of the Trump Tower in Chicago. Actually Perez told us very little about them -- so he told us about Luke Aikins instead, the Red Bull basejumper whose Trump Tower leap was licit, a stunt for the Hollywood movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Over the past couple of years, there have been six different features filed on the nightly newscasts profiling individual acts of charity to the homeless population of street people. All six have been aired by CBS; three of those six filed by Steve Hartman. Hartman goes On The Road to Hartford to bring us Joe Cymerys, the kindly barber of Bushnell Park.
NBC's sibling cable channel, USA, owns the broadcast rights to the upscale dog show run by the Westminster Kennel Club. When NBC sent Mike Taibbi to Petaluma for its annual dog show, the network did not have to fork over a dime to find the ugliest of downscale mutts.
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