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What made the mutilation-murder in London of an off-duty British soldier newsworthy was the video of the blood-soaked killer remaining at the scene of his crime to explain his anti-imperialist, pro-Islamist motive to passers-by. ABC's Lama Hasan gave the London tabloid newspaper The Sun credit for the video, along with her own network's Virtual View computer animators. CBS' Charlie d'Agata gave credit to ITV News. NBC, which has a newsgathering partnership with ITV, made no mention of a credit in Michelle Kosinski's report.
The other killing to be covered by all three newscasts was that of Ibragim Todashev. Todashev, a Boston-area martial arts fighter, was killed by the FBI while being interrogated. So all three packages were filed by Justice Department correspondents at the networks' DC bureaus: Pete Williams on NBC, Bob Orr on CBS, Pierre Thomas (hey, Pierre, remember Journalism 101? You should name the city were the killing happened) on ABC. Todashev is newsworthy because his ties to the late Tamberlan Tsarnaev were being investigated -- not on account of the pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, but for a marijuana-trafficking-related triple homicide two years previously.
Only NBC's Chuck Todd was assigned to other killings by the federal government. Drones have assassinated four US citizens in Yemen and Pakistan. The only one of the four identified by Todd was Anwar al-Awlaki, the jihadist propagandist.
So the word "terrorism" gets used in all three stories. In the first case, since the target was military, not civilian, the term does not apply. In the second, the late Tsarnaev now seems closer to violent narcotics crime than to politically-motivated terrorism. In the third, terrorism was explicitly cited by the Justice Department to justify the targeting of al-Awlaki; about the other three dead citizens, Todd was silent.
Thus, the aftermath of the tornado and this terrorist trifecta suppressed coverage of last week's top story -- the Tea Party scandal at the Internal Revenue Service. The Congressional correspondents at NBC and CBS, Kelly O'Donnell and Nancy Cordes, covered the appearance of tax bureaucrat Lois Lerner before a House committee. Lerner took the Fifth and ABC mentioned it only in passing.
Maria Shriver, the former First Lady of California, was also on Capitol Hill, to mark her return to NBC News. She labeled her roundtable sitdown with a trio of female Solons Exclusive but it was hardly a scoop to grant publicity to their efforts to crack down on military rape. Shriver came across as a veritable Polonius, pondering whether the Pentagon's crisis was military-cultural-sexual-legal (…pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical…).
Wrangler, Asics, Walmart: these were the three retail brands that Holly Williams came across in her undercover CBS expose of fire safety and child labor violations at the Monde Apparels sweatshop in Bangladesh. Gradually, the nightly newscasts may be stirring themselves in the wake of the Triangle-style factory collapse that killed more than 1,100 workers in the outskirts of Dhaka last month. Last week, NBC's Stephanie Gosk singled out GAP, JCPenney and Walmart as major retailers of Bangladeshi apparel, even as ZARA and H&M sought to keep their names clean.
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