I’d be much obliged if people could send me examples of CNN news readers and anchors pushing the Drudge/NBC ‘the weapons were already gone’ line even now that NBC has pulled the plug on the story.
As we noted last night, on the Nightly News, NBC ran a segment on one of their news crews’ visit to al Qaqaa on April 10th, 2003, as embeds with the 101st Airborne. According to that NBC initial report, these were the first US troops on the scene and the explosives were already gone.
NBC didn’t run very hard with the story, though, as evidenced by the fact that it didn’t even show up on the MSNBC website. But after Drudge started hammering it and it got ginned around the Republican media echo chamber, CNN picked it up and started running with it harder than NBC ever did.
They even made it the headline story on their website for much of last night.
They did this apparently without doing a google or Nexis search to see that the NBC crew embedded with the 101st Airborne wasn’t with the first US troops to get there. That actually happened a week earlier, on April 4th 2003, as we noted in this post last night.
In a series of reports today from a member of the news crew in question and from follow-up reporting from Jim Miklaszewski, it became clear that the troops in question made no attempt to inspect the facility for the explosives in question.
Yet CNN is apparently still pushing it.
No matter how easy you guys give it up, they’re still not going to love you like FOX.
Sad.
Late Update: As of 5:29 PM on the east coast CNN has a front page story that still includes the now-defunct NBC story.
