CBS This Morning stood out on Friday for devoting a 18-second news brief to the newly-released security camera footage of Floyd Corkins II's attempted mass shooting at the Family Research Council in August 2012. Charlie Rose identified Corkins as a "domestic terrorist" who targeted the social conservative organization for "being anti-gay" [audio available here; video below the jump].
The morning newscast actually played a clip from the video, which shows the admitted felon pulling a handgun on security guard Leo Johnson and the subsequent physical altercation between the two. By contrast, ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today both ignored the footage, which FRC uploaded onto YouTube on Thursday.
During the brief, Rose cited a short item from the Washington Examiner's Joel Gehrke on Wednesday, who reported on a separate video clip that the conservative group released. Gehrke outlined that the second clip shows Corkins' admission to a FBI interrogator – that he consulted an online list of "hate groups" compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FRC included the interrogation clip at the end of their YouTube upload of surveillance camera footage of the attack.
The CBS anchor didn't explicitly mention the Southern Poverty Law Center component to the story, but their video capture of the first two paragraphs of Gehrke's item did get the left-wing organization's name on the screen:
"Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups," Corkins tells interrogators in the video, which FRC obtained from the FBI. "I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that."
The full transcript of Charlie Rose's news brief from Friday's CBS This Morning:
CHARLIE ROSE: The Washington Examiner says a domestic terrorist claims he targeted a conservative group for being anti-gay. Newly-released surveillance video shows Floyd Corkins II entering the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council. He pulls a gun on the security guard, shooting and wounding him. Corkins will be sentenced next week.
