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Accordingly, ABC designated the three unidentified USNavy SEAL snipers who rescued Captain Phillips from his pirate captors as its Persons of the Week. CBS' Kimberly Dozier and NBC's Chris Jansing had both profiled the SEALs on Monday when the rescue story broke. ABC held off until the end of the week. Anchor Charles Gibson called the secretive, elite commandos "one tough group." The sailors operate in mountains and deserts and jungles as well as oceans. "Normally their work would go unnoticed." Not this week.
ABC apparently paid attention to its own Exclusive reporting by Jim Sciutto in Mombasa. In his Wednesday interview with First Mate Shane Murphy and Second Mate Colin Wright of the Maersk Line's Alabama, they insisted that their captain never agreed to be taken prisoner in an exchange to keep his crew safe. Phillips had been captured while he was showing the pirates how to operate the lifeboat in which they were to make their getaway. So ABC's John Berman, at the Vermont ceremony, noted that Phillips "would not take an ounce of credit"--and did not try to award him any either.
Not so NBC's Mike Taibbi and CBS' Jim Axelrod. They gave no credence to Sciutto's account. "Phillips gave himself up to those Somali pirates in exchange for his crew's freedom…a regular guy who rose to the most uncommon challenge…a pure and selfless hero and a reluctant celebrity," gushed Axelrod. Taibbi called the 53-year-old Phillips "a career seaman who volunteered his life to save his crew and his ship."
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