NPR can't get it together to save their lives -- or to practice journalism. They're back to the story that Tom Bowman's messed up from day one. Today, they G-Dawg and Bowman return for another installment of navel gazing. Panning the overly long text report, this is all you need to know:
The Marines knew almost immediately it was an accidental case of "friendly fire" — the deadliest such Marine-on-Marine attack in decades — and they opened an investigation. But the families of the dead Marines were told it was enemy fire and didn't get the truth for three years. It seems the son of a prominent politician — Marine 1st Lt. Duncan D. Hunter — was involved in the mishap. His father, Duncan L. Hunter, was chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee at the time. Rather than tell the truth, the Marine Corps buried the report of its investigation for years.
But that report? It never even mentions the death of a third man, an Iraqi man named Shihab. His family still didn't know the truth.
The rest of it? Paragraph after paragraph about G-Dawg and Bowman. The navel gazing never ends. They're too vain to grasp that they are not the story.
Arkan calls the next morning and tells us we can come to the family home to talk with him, his older sister, who is the matriarch of sorts, and a younger sister, Aliaà — but only after dark, when the mechanics who work in the attached auto shop have left. He tells us to keep a low profile.
We don't need your back story, we don't need to pretend that we give two s**ts about you, Tom Bowman. We need to what happened in the crime. Now how you 'figured' it out.
We slip into the auto repair shop. Arkan is there, smiling, and leads us through to the back, squeezing between a tool bench and a white car with its hood up. We walk out a back door and along a dimly lit walkway, to another building in the back of the garage. He invites us into a bright sitting room with whitewashed walls, high ceilings and couches set along three sides.
NPR -- ensuring that their reporters are the focus of every report?
Can you please stop making yourself the stars of your copy and instead focus on the actual news makers?
This isn't news.
It's p.r. and it's sad that Tom Bowman is still being allowed to offer this crap.
This is the third report -- or 'report' -- on this that he's screwed up. NPR should have been applauded with the first 'report' and would have been if it had been actual report and not an acting exercise for G-Dawg to curse on air and try to act 'macho.'
That garbage is why San Diego's CBS 8 has done a better job covering the story than NPR when NPR is the one the story was handed to by an informer.
All this time later, they're still failing to do actual reports and instead indulging the egos of Tom Bowman and G-Dawg.