Read More of the Same Day's Blog

The third murder of a civilian law enforcement official in the past eight weeks -- all of which may turn out to be assassinations -- was the Story of the Day. Mike McClelland, the District Attorney of Kaufman County, Texas, was killed at his home over the weekend. ABC and CBS each led its newscast from the scene of the investigation: Pierre Thomas traveled to Texas from ABC's Washington bureau; Anna Werner, who also covered the January killing of Mark Hasse, one of McClelland's deputies, was already based there for CBS. NBC's lead item was Richard Engel's follow-up on last Friday's Story of the Day, the gathering tensions on the Korean peninsula.

The third law enforcement murder was that of Tom Clements, the head of Colorado's state prison system, covered by all three newscasts last month. Speculation concerning the Clements killing surrounded 2-11, the white supremacist prison gang. As for the Kaufman County prosecutors, all three newscasts -- ABC's Pierre Thomas, NBC's Gabe Gutierrez and CBS' in-house ex-cop John Miller -- mentioned a different racist group, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. ABC's Thomas and NBC's Gutierrez also both threw in speculation about Mexican narcotics cartels for good measure. NBC's Gutierrez noted that DA McClelland made a point to carry a gun wherever he went, a precaution that saved neither his own life, nor that of his wife.

ABC, which did not assign a correspondent to cover ADA Hasse's murder in January, made that shooting just that little bit more sensational in retrospect, by reenacting it with the visual aid of a Virtual View computer animation

As for the Korean tensions, ABC mentioned them only in passing. David Martin, filing from the Pentagon for CBS, reminded us that North-South relations have not been so unsettled since 2010. Back then, the response by Seoul to a provocation by Pyongyang was merely "tit-for-tat." Now, under South Korea's newly-elected President Park Geun-Hye, joint planning with the Pentagon involves "tougher retaliation." NBC had Richard Engel file from Seoul, a city he found to be calm. Engel's analysis of North Korea's newly-elevated Kim Jong Un was that his bluster is a pose required domestically, in order to consolidate his own power by cleaning house of potential rivals.

NBC's Engel did play a clip of a North Korean video animation, in the style of ABC's Virtual View, showing a missile shooting down a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber. Martha Raddatz had already brought us ABC's computer-animated war with North Korea: here nuclear USAF stealth bombers attacked the North; here the North's nuclear-tipped ICBMs headed for Alaska.
Andrew Tyndall 4/2/13 7:37:45 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report