POLITICO: And when the dust from Boston Marathon bombing clears, viewers will remember two things about the cable news coverage of this historic event: that John King blew it, and that Pete Williams got it right.
On Wednesday, while CNN was self-destructing after falsely reporting that a suspect has been taken into custody, Williams rightly reported otherwise. Through Thursday, he reported what was known, while resisting the temptation to speculate on what he did not. Then, in the early hours of Friday morning, Williams was among the first to report on the ongoing developments of the search for the suspects — including that one of the suspects was dead and that both suspects were legal residents with foreign military training. [...]
“MSNBC isn’t a news network — they don’t do news,” is something I’ve often heard folks at CNN say.
This week’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings demonstrated that that is a false argument. MSNBC doesn’t need to “do news,” because they have the resources of NBC — they have Williams, Michael Isikoff, Richard Espositio and Jonathan Dienst, just to name a few. CNN may have more boots on the ground, but in the chaotic 21st century media environment, viewers want quality not quantity.
