Lloyd Grove, Daily Beast: Inside Richard Engel’s Abrupt Change of Mind
Finally, a PR win for NBC: the network scooped the ‘New York Times’ with the revelation of the true identity of its chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel’s kidnappers.
Score one for image-battered NBC News, which has finally gotten the better of a rival news outlet intent on exposing its shortcomings.
The Peacock Network’s chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, on Wednesday night preempted a two-month-long New York Times investigation, bylined by three Times journalists and prepared with the help of six others—the sort of ambitious team effort that ordinarily would have landed on the front page but in this case was relegated to B1.
With the active involvement of NBC News President Deborah Turness and brand-new NBC News Chairman Andy Lack, who assumed formal control of the broadcast and cable news operations in a corporate shakeup earlier this month, Engel scooped the Times on its own scoop, correcting NBC’s long-held version of a harrowing December 2012 incident in which Engel and five other employees were kidnapped, blindfolded, and subjected to physical and psychological abuse for five days in civil war-torn Syria.
WNU Editor: I rarely post "Democracy Now" videos .... but this is an important story on how the mainstream media covers wars, and in this case the Syrian conflict. Kudos to the New York Times for starting the investigation in this story, and kudos to Richard Engel for coming clean. On a personal note .... I have always liked Richard Engel's coverage of the Middle East. He has put himself in harms way many times, and his reporting is sometimes clearly at odds with what the U.S. administration is trying to paint on what is happening in places like Syria and Iraq. I hope that he continues reporting on the conflicts as he sees it .... but as the above story has revealed .... what he reports is sometimes tightly controlled.
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