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The element that translated the suicide of a student in his UCF dormitory into national material, was the video supplied by the campus police as they responded to a 911 call from Arabo Babokhani, his freaked-out roommate. The police had helmet-cameras running as they searched through evacuated corridors until they found James Seevakumaran's body, his bucket list for a mass shooting unfulfilled. CBS' Mark Strassmann and ABC's Matt Gutman both narrated the helmetcam footage from Florida.
NBC's Miguel Almaguer and CBS' John Blackstone were both at the gates of the massive Hawthorne Army Depot near Reno where USMC training in Afghan-style desert conditions had gone so wrong. A malfunctioning 60mm mortar was apparently the cause of the deaths. ABC's infatuation with its Virtual View graphics reached ridiculous proportions when Martha Raddatz' report from Washington showed us a computer-animated depiction of the training session, even though she had stock footage from 2010 of the same caliber mortar actually being fired.
Again, at ABC, as on Friday, imagined virtuality trumps videotaped actuality.
The three features revisiting the Iraq War took different angles: ABC's Bob Woodruff, himself brain-damaged in a battlefield injury, focused on disabled American veterans; NBC's Richard Engel examined the lasting damage to Iraq itself; without mentioning the al-Qaeda leader by name, David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, implicitly compared a failed pre-war CIA mission to kill Saddam Hussein with its later, successful manhunt for Osama bin Laden. Luis Rueda hatched the CIA plot to assassinate Saddam using bunker-busting bombs dropped from Stealth fighters on his hideout in the countryside at Dora Farms. Rueda's intelligence was wrong. The farmhouse had no bunker.
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