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The video that went viral from a school board meeting in Panama City was the Story of the Day. Both CBS and ABC led with footage of Clay Duke, the 56-year-old husband of a laid-off special education teacher, threatening a vendetta against the school board, threatening its male members with a gun, shooting over their heads, and then, wounded by a security officer, killing himself. No one else was hurt. The event itself was not nationally newsworthy; the existence of the video was the element that was unusual. NBC placed the video second in its running order, leading with winter weather instead.

CBS' Mark Strassmann, NBC's Mark Potter and ABC's Ryan Owens were all sent to Florida to cover the school board members' press conference to relive their terrifying experience. The suicidal gunman's widow, the teacher who was laid-off, was quoted by CBS' Strassmann as saying that "the world and the economy got the better of her husband."

ABC anchor Diane Sawyer asked Sharyn Alfonsi to teach us "important lessons about what to do and what not to do in this kind of crisis." You might think that Sawyer was referring to the kind of crisis that the Duke family and millions of others nationwide are going through: being laid off, feeling desperate, wanting to lash out, toying with violence, turning those destructive urges on oneself. No. That is not what she had in mind. Sawyer wanted to know about the one-in-a-million circumstance of being threatened by a gunman. Alfonsi had Wally Zeins, a onetime NYPD hostage negotiator, "walk us through it step by step."

Andrew Tyndall 12/17/10 12:12:43 am

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