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The focus of the news agenda shifted inside the Beltway. After three days of Supreme Court coverage, the baton was passed to the United States Senate, which voted 68-32 to approve immigration legislation. The vote was the lead item on CBS and ABC and qualified as Story of the Day. NBC led with an exclusive: Michael Isikoff Investigates General James Cartwright. The retired marine may be the one who spilled cyberwarfare secrets to The New York Times. Isikoff did not reveal who leaked the fact that the general is under suspicion of leaking.

NBC and CBS handled the immigration vote in the Senate the traditional way. Congressional correspondents Kelly O'Donnell and Nancy Cordes covered the vote and outlined the provisions of the legislation: legal working papers for currently undocumented residents; a 13-year process for them to apply for citizenship; extra resources to be spent on patroling the border with Mexico; new guestworker visa quotas for hi-tech and agribusiness. They both noted that the bill is unlikely to become law due to opposition in the House of Representatives

On ABC, Jim Avila focused on the immigrants not on the lawmakers. Since February, when the Hispanic Avila was reassigned to the White House beat for the ABC-Univision joint venture, six out of his 15 reports on World News have been immigration or border related. This time Avila covered the Senate vote from the point of view of deportation-fearing undocumented residents. He did not mention the border patrol or the guestworker visa aspects of the bill. He did not even mention the 68-32 vote count. Jose Antonio Vargas was a major source in Avila's report, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, who is undocumented himself. In his enthusiasm to describe the potential benefits of the bill for the nation's 11m residents without legal papers, Avila gave the misleading impression that the Senate's provisions are closer to becoming law than the House may permit.

In Isikoff's scoop, he delivered the reassuring tidbit that the criminal targeting of General Cartwright did not arise from questionable snooping around The New York Times. No sub-poena had been served on the newspaper. The Times' exclusive had concerned Operation Olympic Games, the cyberattack, in cooperation with Israeli spooks, against Iran's nuclear-enrichment centrifuges. The Pentagon deployed a computer virus dubbed Stuxnet, Isikoff reminded us, and Cartwright was the general in charge, before he retired in 2011.

Meanwhile the Presidential photo-op that would normally have made headlines was buried. Sure enough, all three White House correspondents accompanied Barack Obama to Senegal's Goree Island, where he posed at the Door of No Return, to honor the countless slaves, shipped from Africa in bondage to the Americas. NBC's Chuck Todd and ABC's Jonathan Karl chose the historical angle. On CBS, Major Garrett dragged the President back to the present. What was Obama going to do about Edward Snowden, the confessed leaker of National Security Agency secrets, now holed up in the Moscow Airport? Nothing, came the answer: no wheeling, no dealing, no trading; no scrambling of fighter jets to capture a 29-year-old hacker.
Andrew Tyndall 7/2/13 4:32:24 pm

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