NBC botches the coverage of a ‘Free Palestine’ shooter and an ICE encounter.

T here’s a real problem in the media industry with reporters who prefer not to report.

Just as bad are the reporters who don’t know how to report.

These are issues we’ve covered in the past, but things aren’t getting any better. If anything, they’re getting worse.

Consider, for example, NBC News’ tortured handling last week of a deadly shooting at a wedding reception in New Hampshire.

The relevant facts, which were known at the time of NBC’s coverage, are that the alleged gunman, 23-year-old Hunter Nadeau, shot and killed one wedding-goer, 59-year-old Robert Steven DeCesare, and injured two others.

Just before opening fire on the wedding party, Nadeau reportedly said, “The children were safe,” and then shouted, “Free Palestine!”

Yet, as was first brought to my attention by Charlie Cooke, NBC practically had to be bullied into acknowledging accounts of the gunman’s reported words.

The shooting occurred on September 20 at roughly 9 p.m. By midnight, a local ABC News affiliate, WMUR, published an eyewitness account that claimed Nadeau had shouted, “Free Palestine!”

British tabloids were not far behind.

Yet, by noon the next day, NBC’s full-fledged write-up of the attack, which carried two bylines, one of whom is credited as a “researcher,” and a third contributor credit, inexplicably omitted details of the shooter’s alleged remarks. It published 20 paragraphs on a fatal shooting, and not one mention of the gunman’s alleged outburst. At least they remembered to include the “Guns in America” story tag in the report’s upper left corner.

Are we to believe that this is just a matter of laziness or oversight? If you believe these explanations, I have an infrastructure bill to sell you.

It wasn’t until around 3 p.m. on September 21 that NBC finally included details of the eyewitness account — only in passing, while quoting New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, a Republican, suggesting the shooter’s alleged statements don’t tell us anything meaningful about his potential motives.

NBC reported:

Formella also addressed reports that Nadeau said the words “free Palestine” during the attack, noting that he made “a number of statements” at the time. There was no indication as of yet that this was a hate-motivated crime, Formella said.

“In fact, I would say that at this point, the evidence leads us to believe that it is more likely that Mr. Nadeau was simply trying to make a number of statements to create chaos in the moment,” Formella said.

The above passage represents the totality of the NBC report’s coverage of the eyewitness account.

What’s impossible to overlook is that incidents such as NBC’s coverage of the New Hampshire shooting, where objectively newsworthy details are omitted or obscured, are hardly a rare thing. It’s also impossible to ignore that these incidents tend to favor very particular narratives.

There are plenty of examples of this type of thing, including a second incident from last week. NBC also falsely reported last week that ICE agents had used a five-year-old autistic girl as bait.

On September 23, NBC initially alleged in a now-heavily amended report that ICE agents held “a 5-year-old autistic girl in Massachusetts to pressure [her] father to surrender,” attributing the claim to the girl’s family.

The story originally reported:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents held a 5-year-old autistic girl outside her Massachusetts home to pressure her father to surrender to authorities last week, according to the girl’s family.

A video of the incident, obtained by Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra, shows a young girl surrounded by what appears to be several male law enforcement agents outside of her home in Leominster, Massachusetts, last Tuesday.

The girl is sitting beside what appears to be a law enforcement SUV and holding a bottle while encircled by the several men, according to the video. . . .

Edward Hip, drove home and “managed to run back into the parking lot of my house, but they grabbed” their daughter, [Hip’s wife] added.

A Department of Homeland Security official, Tricia McLaughlin, disputed the story immediately, claiming the truth of the matter was nothing like what NBC wrote.

Edward Hip Mejia “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over and drove back to his house,” she said on social media. “He fled from the car, gave officers the double middle finger, and darted inside his house. He abandoned his 5-year-old daughter in the car. Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment.”

The NBC story has since undergone significant revisions so that it now actually resembles McLaughlin’s version of events.

The report’s opening lines now read, “A video obtained by Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a 5-year-old girl, whose mother says is autistic, while agents attempt to arrest her father near their Massachusetts home. The video, provided to Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra by the girl’s mother, depicts the girl sitting beside an SUV with three agents nearby outside her home in Leominster last Tuesday. Her father at the time was inside.”

The new headline reads, sadly, “Video shows ICE with 5-year-old girl while agents attempt to arrest her father.”

There’s also a correction, which reads, “An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the activities of ICE agents in the video. The article has been updated.”

Most interesting of all is that the family’s story appears to have changed in the updated version, and NBC allows it to go unremarked upon. The story currently reads: “Her husband, Edward Hip Mejia, drove home and ‘managed to run back into the parking lot of my house,’ she said, and her daughter as a result was left with the agents” (emphasis my own).

This is interesting because, if you recall, the report originally said: “Her husband, Edward Hip, drove home and ‘managed to run back into the parking lot of my house, but they grabbed’ their daughter, she added” (emphasis my own).

Whether NBC’s staff readily ran cover for a lie or struggled with the language barrier in a Spanish-language article, the organization still initially ran with a half-baked account from one side of the story.

And they wonder why people increasingly get their news from Joe Rogan.