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"Outgunned and regularly outflanked in the field, they lack any sort of military strategy or leadership," was Mandy Clark's observation on CBS as the pick-up driving opposition to Khadafy's forces were retreating along the coastal highway from Sirte to Brega. NBC's Richard Engel explained that the troops loyal to the regime have switched from tanks--vulnerable to NATO's airstrikes--to jeeps armed with mortars. While opposition vehicles stay on the tarmac roads, the regime's jeeps are sweeping through the desert to the south to attack their flank.
NBC's Engel called the performance of the opposition troops "terrifying." Check out his description of their mortar and rocketry skills. CBS and ABC rounded out the Libya coverage from inside-the-Beltway. CBS' David Martin offered an assessment of the opposition forces from the Pentagon: "a rabble." From the White House, ABC's Jake Tapper filed an unbelievably self-serving report on the secret order to send CIA operatives into action.
ABC often makes the journalistically shoddy decision to use a clip of fictional footage from a Hollywood movie or a TV entertainment to stand in for actual video newsgathering. A couple of recent ludicrous, in-house examples are Nick Watt's use of a musical clip from Disney's animated Cinderella and John Berman's laugh-tracked yucks from ABC-TV's primetime sitcom Modern Family.
Tapper's report takes the cake. The expert soundbite on the advisability--or lack thereof--of sending CIA spies to Libya that concluded his package consisted of a piece of dialogue from a fictional spymaster about Zen Buddhism from the movie Charlie Wilson's War, which happened to be directed by the husband of Tapper's anchorwoman.
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