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Contempt. That is what the three networks showed for the problem of the Greenhouse Effect. President Barack Obama made a major speech, instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to shield the atmosphere from coal-generated carbon. Neither CBS nor ABC bothered to mention it in any more detail than in passing. NBC, which nominally has assigned the environmental beat to Anne Thompson, did not even have her file a pre-edited package to describe the policy. Thompson sat in the studio to deliver a stilted live summary of the President's main talking points.
A couple of weeks ago, NBC's Richard Engel was in Istanbul when he snatched a soundbite from Gen Salim Idris, an opposition militia leader in the civil war in Syria. Now Engel claims an Exclusive for his trip to the general's training camp at Khan al-Assad near Aleppo. General Idris has already received supplies of uniforms and rations from the United States but no weaponry yet. Engel did not tell us the name of Idris' 80K-strong fighting force but he did report that it is no longer at war with the regime in Damascus. Its foe now is a sectarian Shiite coalition, drawn from Iraq, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
President Vladimir Putin went public about Edward Snowden, the fugitive former contractor for the National Security Agency. Both NBC's Andrea Mitchell and CBS' Bob Orr are based in their networks' DC bureaus, so they narrated Putin's declaration that Russia will neither detain nor expel the young man. All the hue and cry, Putin observed, was as productive as shearing a pig. Mitchell folded a soundbite from her Moscow-based colleague Jim Maceda into her report. Maceda pointed out that Snowden is technically not inside Russia proper but in no-man's-land, since he is still in the airport transit lounge on the other side of passport control. Mitchell, as she likes to do, used a soundbite from her lunchtime Reports program on MSNBC. It was a rare word of praise for Snowden, from Michael Leiter, her network's in-house counter-terrorism expert. "Methodical."
CBS and ABC filed a couple of sort-of investigative reports from Capitol Hill -- sort-of because it is not clear they amount to more than a storm in a teacup. Actually coffee cup in the case of David Kerley's Washington Watchdog expose, courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation, on ABC. It seems that leaders of the House of Representatives charge snacks and beverages against expenses when they hold breakfast meetings. Each year all that coffee and all those bagels total $2m. So what? On CBS, Nancy Cordes repeated the results of an investigation by Rep Darrell Issa into a small business (technically a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business) called Strong Castle Inc, which has $260m in contracts with the Internal Revenue Service. Did Braulio Castillo really injure his ankle in 1984? Is the SDVOSB office in DC's Chinatown Hub Zone legitimate? So what?
Surprise! I predicted on Monday that NBC would routinely append its disclaimer that it is being sued by defendant George Zimmerman to every report it files on the murder trial from Sanford Fla. What do I know? On day two, Ron Mott's report contained no such context. It did, however, contain a soundbite from his network's in-house legal analyst Kendall Coffey, as predicted. So I am one-for-two. ABC's Matt Gutman was more interested in future testimony than in current court proceedings. He told us that Zimmerman, in his capacity as a neighborhood crimewatch volunteer, had made 50 separate 911 calls to his local police department. Gutman wondered how many of those 50 would be played to the jury.
CBS did not use a reporter in Sanford. It did persist with the debate over abortion restrictions in Texas, with Manuel Bojorquez filing for the second straight night. Of the dozen reports filed in the last 30 months about possible pro-life crackdowns on abortion rights, eight have come from CBS.
When 23 boy scouts huddled under a tarpaulin in a thunderstorm at a camp in New Hampshire, ABC considered the lightning so newsworthy that it commissioned a Virtual View computer animation of the flash and assigned Chicago-based Alex Perez to run through a few tips for taking shelter from the storm, making this ABC's fourth lightning strike in the past year. None of the scouts was permanently injured, although the electricity did provoke muscle spasms and brain seizures.
Talking of stories about blasts where people could have been seriously injured yet survived. NBC's Kristen Dahlgren brought us Earl, the bomb-sniffing dog, whose nose protected a unit of marines in Afghanistan from a roadside bomb. Earl came home from war and started sniffing for the state police in Rhode Island under the care of Damien Maddox. Brad O'Keefe has now left the Marine Corps yet wants to be reunited with Earl. Dahlgren brought us the K-9 handoff from trooper to corporal.
ABC's animal story was lethal: Linsey Davis updated us on the death of Dawn Brancheau, the 42-year-old killer-whale trainer, at SeaWorld three years ago. Tilikum the Orca is now the subject of a movie documentary Blackfish by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. Blackfish is the seventh theatrical documentary to receive publicity and promotion on the nightly newscasts so far this year: five were on ABC, No Place on Earth, Venus and Serena, Sole Survivor, TWA Flight 800, and Blackfish; two on NBC, The Dream Is Now and TWA Flight 800 (again); one on CBS, Ghost Army.
ABC's Dan Harris did not require documentary footage to help him report on the theft of $1.2m in cash from the cargo hold of Swissair Flight 017 from Zurich to JFK Airport in New York. He had imaginary footage instead: a clip from Hollywood's Ocean's Eleven, a clip from Hollywood's Goodfellas, and the Virtual View visualization of his network's in-house computer animators.
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