NBC and CBS Trumpet Sunday Night Interviews with Joe Wilson, "NBC's Got Him!"

October 28th, 2005 8:49 PM

In a ten-second promo at the end of Friday's NBC Nightly News, an announcer excitedly promised, “Sunday: Joe Wilson, the man at the center of the CIA leak scandal and NBC's got him!” Viewers then saw a short clip of Wilson as he sat across from Campbell Brown: “The White House trained their guns on me.” Back to the announcer with matching text on screen: “The Dateline interview: Sunday 7, 6 Central.” CBS ran its plug for 60 Minutes inside a CBS Evening News story in which John Roberts asserted: "The case started with the outing of a CIA operative, but [prosecutor Peter] Fitzgerald found no crime in that. It didn't sit well with Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. In an exclusive interview for Sunday's 60 Minutes, he told Ed Bradley:" CBS played a soundbite of Wilson accusing Karl Rove despite Rove's vindication so far: "After Mr. Rove said about my wife, 'She's fair game,' I would like to see him frog-marched out of the White House. Whether it's in handcuffs or not is immaterial. If it was not illegal, it was certainly, it seems to me, a dubious ethical comportment. And I think we deserve better from our senior public servants."

Video of NBC's promo in Real or Windows Media

The 60 Minutes Web page, as of Friday evening, has nothing on the “exclusive” Wilson interview and MSNBC.com's page for Dateline is also bereft of any mention of their interview, which is either a conflicting “exclusive,” or a re-run of an earlier interview aired to promote his 2004 book, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity. The Dateline page does feature a posting, timed and dated 1:41pm EDT Friday, of a chapter of Wilson's book.