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The shootout in the Sahara Desert was Story of the Day, the unanimous choice for the lead on all three newscasts, as it was for ABC on Wednesday. No matter that none of the networks was able to get access to BP's vast natural gas complex at In Amenas where the Algerian army's helicopter gunships were attacking a hostage-taking militia. Fluid was the euphemism of choice for correspondents to describe their lack of knowledge: ABC's Martha Raddatz filed from Italy, where she was traveling with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; CBS' Mark Phillips narrated from London; NBC's Stephanie Gosk from New York.

Should the militiamen be described as bandits or terrorists? That was how CBS anchor Scott Pelley summed up the confusion surrounding the story after hearing Mark Phillips' report. Phillips equivocated. On Wednesday, ABC's Brian Ross had reported that the hostage-takers were a smuggling gang; now he has switched, calling them an al-Qaeda group. NBC's Gosk disagreed, choosing the word militants rather than terrorists, citing their record of extorting tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments.

Gosk called the militia the Signatories of Blood Brigade. Phillips called it the Mass Brigade. Ross offered publicity to A Season in Hell, a memoir by Robert Fowler of his experience as a hostage at the hands of Moktar bel-Moktar, the "experienced desert fighter."

Incidentally, it is hard not to believe that, when ABC's Raddatz repeated Secretary Panetta's insistence that the motive for the hostage siege was terrorism rather than criminality, his certitude amounted to overcompensation. Just think about all the trouble that Panetta's cabinet colleague Susan Rice made for herself when she went on television and failed to identify that killer militia in Benghazi as a terrorist organization. Better safe than sorry: the Secretary might as well throw around the T-word.

Wednesday, NBC's Rohit Kachroo managed to report on the Algerian standoff in the wider context of the civil war in Mali. Now David Martin does the same from the Pentagon for CBS. The target for France's intervention, Martin asserted, is al-Qaeda in The Maghreb, which is now rather more than a mere terrorist cell, having seized control of the entire Saharan portion of that nation.

Andrew Tyndall 1/18/13 8:13:58 pm

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