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A botched assault by a mentally-ill gunman was Story of the Day. The man wounded a pair of security guards who in turn shot him dead. Normally such an incident would barely warrant a mention on a local newscast, let alone the networks' national news agenda. Yet NBC and CBS both led with the gunplay, deeming it more newsworthy than the latest unemployment statistics. ABC, to its credit, showed the sound judgment to lead with a 9.7% nationwide joblessness rate. What was it about the death of John Patrick Bedell, a 36-year-old Californian, that attracted so much attention? The guards who killed him happened to be protecting the Pentagon.

All three newscasts treated Bedell as a national security story, assigning the incident to their Pentagon correspondents. Bedell was certainly a colorful character. CBS' David Martin played us a clip from a get-rich-quick scheme he had posted on YouTube. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski checked Bedell's "frequent rants on the Internet" and found that Bedell was a Truther, accusing the federal government of instigating the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. ABC's Martha Raddatz was more interested in the War on Drugs than the War on Terrorism: "Since 2004, Bedell had been treated for bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety that he had tried to alleviate with marijuana. In 2006, Bedell was arrested for growing marijuana."

Bedell was armed with a pair of semi-automatic handguns. Justice Department correspondent Bob Orr on CBS (at the tail of the Martin videostream) checked into how this mental patient could obtain such weapons: "If there was a court order or if Bedell was ever deemed to be a threat to himself or other people, then that information should have shown up on a background check, preventing him from ever owning a weapon in California…In neighboring states, like Arizona and Nevada, weapons can be bought in private sales with no background checks."

Andrew Tyndall 3/9/10 11:18:06 pm

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