Monday, a US soldier, John M. Russell, shot five US service members in Baghdad at a stress clinic. The five killed were Charles K. Springle, Michael Edward Yates, Christian Bueno-Galdos, Matthew Houseal and Jacob Barton.
The attack forced the network news to stop avoiding Iraq, at least briefly, for a brief moment or two.
Monday evening, the three networks all filed a report. The clear winner was ABC World News Tonight (click here for Martha Raddatz and Luis Martinez' text report and the video) which 'got lucky' because Martha Raddatz had, days before, gone to the stress clinic for a tour from Lt Col Beth Salisbury allowing ABC to be the only network with actual footage of the clinic. 'Got lucky' as opposed to got lucky? Reporters know you don't get lucky. You do the work over and over and 1 out of 1,000 times you'll have something you can use for a later story. Raddatz and ABC did the work, no luck involved. They did the work and they had the footage. Nothing prevented any of the other networks from doing something similar ahead of the shooting except for the fact that Iraq wasn't judged a priority by their news teams.
At a time when few facts were known, Raddatz was able to tell viewers that three of the dead were present at the clinic for treatment and two worked at the clinic. The clinic that, thanks to ABC News doing their job, viewers could see.
Viewers of The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric got to see something as well (click here), pure fantasy. Re-enactments are bad enough when they pop up on what is supposed to be news programming (and not an episode of Cops), but David Martin's 'report' topped re-enactment. With no floor plan of the stress clinic and no idea how or what order the events took place in, CBS News created a 'cartoon' that showed someone's idea of the shooting and how it took place. It was not news. It was not realistic and it was insulting to the viewers because it basically said: "We think you're idiots."
Martin's commentary during the report was off as well. That included presenting a narrative that's now known to be false but, even before he reported it, was already in conflict with other reports so it never should have been included. Apparently bored with sticking to what was known about the shooting, Martin took a side trip into military suicides. After that lengthy excursion, Martin did not, "This was not suicide, of course, but murder." A point that viewers at home had probably made some time ago.
As bad as that was, and it was really bad (Bob Orr would file a much better report Tuesday on The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric), it was almost journalism compared to what NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams served up.
Williams is a multi-million dollar news anchor but that's apparently not good enough for him so he rushes to play toy soldier. Appearing across from propagandist and retired Col Jack Jacobs, Brian Williams wanted to pant over "the temple of battle" and draw a thick line between himself and civilians ("folks here") who had never been in the military. Brian Williams has never been in the military. But that didn't stop him from playing soldiers.
It was really something to sit there and think about how much GE pays Williams and how they were allowing him to come across like an eight-year-old boy.
"US military investigators say a soldier at Camp Liberty in Iraq walked into a clinic for treating combat stress and killed five of his fellow soldiers in what is believed to be the worst case of non-combat deaths for US forces since the war started," declared Williams. "With more on this tonight, we are joined by retired US army Col Jack Jacobs a recipient of the Medal of Honor and an NBC News military analyst."
But there was no "more on this" because neither was interested in what had taken place. But there was time for what Williams kindly dubbed "a theory" and Jacobs explained his 'belief' that, "When you're focused on making sure that you and your fellow soldiers stay alive, when people are trying very hard to kill you, when you're trying to accomplish the mission, you're all together as a unit and you watch out for each other. And it's at times when you have lots of free time on your hands, if you're on a base like this, nobody's watching you, those are the times when the stress of repeated deployments and other kinds of things get to you and uh nobody's keeping an eye on you and this may be what happened here."
It wasn't revealed on air that Jacobs is a longtime foe of increasing dwell time. Even though the 'theory' rested on the premise that dwell time was just fine where it was -- research, reports and military doctors be damned.
It also wasn't revealed that Jacobs is a propagandist. For what NBC wouldn't tell you, read David Barstow's Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times coverage of the propaganda mill click here and here.