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CNN and Fox News Channel waited until the end of their signature evening broadcasts to extensively cover the steam pipe explosion in New York City on Wednesday.

Incredibly, CNN’s Lou Dobbs didn’t mention the transformer explosion at all during his 6pm newscast. (Headline News did a much better job during Prime News with Erica Hill.) But the 7pm Situation Room was on top of it.

Brit Hume mentioned the incident a couple times during Special Report. Viewers had to wait for The Fox Report for in-depth coverage…

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NBC’s Brian Williams and HDNet’s Dan Rather attended Saturday’s funeral for Lady Bird Johnson, the AP notes.

“Meeting and getting to know Mrs. Johnson was among the thrills of my adult life,” Williams wrote in a wonderful blog entry on Thursday. A mutual friend recently told Williams that Johnson still “enjoyed” NBC Nightly News every night…

The verdict in the Conrad Black trial finally came down this morning, and CNN was the only cabler (aside from CNBC) to cover it extensively, Rachel Sklar writes.

I love her description of what the other nets were covering: “Both MSNBC and Fox News spent most of the time in our random channel-surf covering the sad case of Zinna Linnick, the Tacoma girl snatched on July 4th and killed by an illegal immigrant sex offender (oy, Lou Dobbs is going to go berserk), with additional coverage of another missing woman, plus coverage of Terror! Terror! Terror! on Fox and two weather reports from MSNBC, one talking about the hurricanes that haven’t happened this hurricane season.”

MSNBC was first to report the death of Lady Bird Johnson on Wednesday afternoon.

Chris Matthews reported the news at 5:34pm and tossed to an obit package by Brian Williams.

CNN and Fox News followed at 5:37pm. FNC’s obit was narrated by Mike Emanuel; CNN’s was voiced by Wolf Blitzer.

Barbara Bush called into Larry King Live to share her memories…

Fox News was first to report the commutation of Scooter Libby‘s sentence on Monday afternoon at 5:44pm. MSNBC followed a few seconds later at 5:45pm and CNN had it at 5:47pm.

Strangely, Al Sharpton was hosting Hardball when the news came down. “I don’t know how Sharpton managed to restrain himself and play it straight when the news broke,” ICN says. “It was actually kind of thrilling watching the show at that point because I kept waiting for him to blow up but as far as I know he never did.”

David Shuster guest-hosted the 7pm live Hardball…

According to a TVEyes search, MSNBC was first to report on the Glasgow airport attack at 10:58am Saturday. Alex Witt attributed the news to the BBC via the AP.

CNN followed three minutes later, with Alfonso Van Marsh on the phone in London.

FNC was notably late, with Gregg Jarrett interrupting the Business Block with an alert at 11:25am, almost half an hour after MSNBC…

> Look at the message CBS News found on a jihadist Internet forum: “Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed.” It was posted hours before the scare…

> Today’s scare “comes just three weeks after what was described as an al Qaeda graduation ceremony of suicide bomb teams to be dispatched to Europe and the United States,” ABC’s Brian Ross notes…

> Good Morning America covered the plot with three correspondents: Jim Scuitto in London, Brian Ross in New York and Pierre Thomas in DC. The Early Show tossed to Richard Roth in London and analyzed the news with John O’Connor…

> FNC’s Steve Centanni thinks it’s 2006: Reporting on Fox News Live at 11:07am, he said today is “almost the anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in London last year.” The attacks were in 2005…

> Fox News London correspondent Amy Kellogg hurried to Piccadilly Circus this morning; she did a phoner at 5:59 and was live on camera by 6:28am…

E-mailer coverage notes:

> “FNC broke the news with Suzanne Sena giving live updates at 3 a.m., 3:30 a.m., and then interrupting a repeat of Special Report to simulcast a live feed from Sky News from 3:40 a.m. for about 7 minutes,” an e-mailer says.

> FNC started simulcasting Sky News at 4am, with brief breaks for commercials. The live coverage continued until Fox & Friends started at 6am.

> CNN interrupted the 3am replay of Larry King Live for updates on the situation. A live simulcast of CNN International started at 4am and continued until 6am.

> “As far as I can tell, MSNBC has no continuing coverage,” an e-mailer said at 3:40am. “Every time I flip back to MSNBC, they are still running Abrams rerun on wrestling/steroid/murder story.”

“When Paris Hilton was going to jail last week, more people knew about that than knew that we were sending people into space that day. It has replaced what is real news. There was always a place for it, but it was [gossip writer] Rona Barrett. Now it is the equivalent of Edward R. Murrow reporting it today.”

And: “When I was growing up, to watch guys like Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, I didn’t know what they thought of the news. Legitimate news people are giving their opinions. It is hard to tell the difference between legitimate news people and Nancy Grace and Bill O’Reilly.”

–O.J. Simpson, in an interview with Editor & Publisher (via Romenesko)

THR’s Ray Richmond writes:

“What this charade did convincingly underline was that if you blend a famed personality who has entitlement issues and legal troubles, an insatiable public appetite for showbiz dirt and an enabling media that has essentially lost touch with reality, you have the perfect recipe for a tabloid feeding frenzy. If it bears little resemblance to actual journalism, it doesn’t appear that really matters anymore.”

Here’s the full column…