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Over the Fourth of July weekend, the citizens of Chicago suffered 63 shootings resulting in eleven murders. NBC's Kevin Tibbles checked out the trauma unit at Cook County Hospital and found that the demand for transfusions was so high that it came within three units of running out of blood.
Only NBC covered that urban violent crime wave. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent--NBC's Mark Potter, ABC's Steve Osunsami, CBS' Mark Strassmann--to the nine-bedroom mansion in the Florida Panhandle where a wealthy couple was shot to death last week. Byrd and Melanie Billings were newsworthy because of their family: they had 16 children, nine of whom were adopted Down Syndrome babies. Yet their deaths were sensational too. The mansion's security cameras traced a gang of killers approaching their home from a Dodge van in the front, an Escalade in the back, according to CBS' Strassmann: "Five masked gunmen dressed ninja-style went inside; less than five minutes later, the couple was shot dead." NBC's Potter quoted the police as alleging that robbery was a motive for the home invasion before adding this mysterious soundbite: "We believe that there are other motives that we have yet to confirm."
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