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Legislation on both parental leave and child care has been inching through Congress. Hopes for passing some version of the Act for Better Child Care (ABC) before year's end were dashed two weeks ago by political wrangling over how to finance it. A family-leave bill is also stalled. Policymakers in some states are not waiting for Washington to act. Seven states, including Minnesota, Oregon and Rhode Island, have already adopted comprehensive parental-leave laws; ten others have passed maternity-leave bills...
...Casey, it was the story of a lifetime. A television cameraman for WSB-TV, the Atlanta affiliate of ABC, Casey narrowly escaped death last week as a Georgia tornado flattened his mobile broadcasting van. Casey's tape of the tornado was dynamite. Alerted that evening by WSB that the story was being transmitted by satellite, ABC News decided to use the gripping footage as its lead on Nightline. By the time it did, however, thousands of viewers had already seen Casey's emotional report on Cable News Network, an ABC rival...
What's going on here? In almost any other industry, CNN's coups would be viewed as nothing short of piracy. But television is a business built on tenuous alliances. While the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS and NBC -- have long been the dominant U.S. television programmers, they own only 20 stations. The other 620 that carry network programming are known as affiliates. These stations have traditionally served as supplementary news sources for the networks, but only loyalty and a common stake in competing against the other networks have prevented the affiliates from gathering and selling their stories elsewhere...
...ABC affiliate WCVB in Boston, news shows accounted for 39.5% of the station's revenues last year. WCVB boasts that it has the largest news staff of any U.S. station -- 350 reporters, producers, anchors and technicians -- as well as two trucks equipped with satellite uplinks to beam stories back to the station from remote locations. News departments at dozens of U.S. stations today own their own satellite-transmitting trucks, up from only a handful five years...
...increasingly aggressive, the networks are trying to reshape their own news products to offer affiliates something more than the day's headlines. All three networks, for example, run long special features during the regular evening newscasts and are experimenting with new concepts, such as 48 Hours on CBS and ABC's Primetime Live. Some news thinkers go so far as to wonder whether the network evening newscasts have a future. Says Andrew Stern, who teaches broadcast journalism at the University of California, Berkeley: "At some point you have to ask, What do the local stations need the networks...