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Thursday, the massacre at Fort Hood overwhelmed coverage of the healthcare debate on Capitol Hill. A day later, coverage of the shooting pushed aside unemployment. The dismal jobless data for the month of October--exceeding 10% for the first time since 1983--would have qualified as Story of the Day except for the carnage on the army base. ABC found Fort Hood most newsworthy, extending World News to a special hour of coverage. For consistency's sake Tyndall Report monitors only the regular first half hour. Altogether, the killings occupied 74% of the three-network newshole (44 min out of 59), a slight increase from Thursday (41 min). CBS (12 min v ABC 17, NBC 15) covered the hard news from Texas least intensely, finding time for a show business theme for its weekending American Spirit inspirational feature.

All three newscasts corrected an error they made in their early hours of Fort Hood coverage on Thursday. Major Nidal Hasan is not dead: so now the psychiatrist switches from being the slain shooter to the "accused" shooter as he recuperates from his wounds at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Second, NBC and CBS dialed back Thursday's suspicions that Hasan acted with a pair of accomplices. "Officials today confirmed the carnage was the work of one man," was how NBC's Lester Holt reported it. "This whole thing was the work of a lone wolf without connection to a larger group," CBS' Dean Reynolds repeated what unidentified "federal law enforcement officials" told his colleague Bob Orr. ABC did not update Thursday's report by Martha Raddatz that "two additional suspects were found." Even then she said that they "may not have been involved in the shooting."

Andrew Tyndall 11/10/09 6:34:11 pm

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