Please see correction at end of post.
After the media spent the week praying the Boston Marathon bombers wouldn't have ties to radical Islam, it's now going to be interesting to see how they report the religious beliefs of the Tsarnaev brothers.
Failing miserably Friday was NBC's Nightly News which despite airing a 90 minute special broadcast on the ensuing manhunt in Watertown, Massachusetts, according to an examination of the closed-caption transcript didn't once mention the Tsarnaev's Muslim connection.
By contrast, both ABC's World News Tonight and CBS's Evening News did report it.
The Nightly News's decision not to cover the Islamic tie was particularly odd given that this was exposed in NBC's 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 1:00 PM, and 2:00 PM special reports on the manhunt.
Yet there wasn't a word of the brothers' Islamic beliefs on Friday's Today show.
I guess NBC didn't want to bring this up during their two most-watched "news" programs.
Correction: It turns out that an NBC News Special Report on Friday evening, with live coverage of the manhunt in Watertown, Mass., cut into NBC Nightly News shortly after it began its 7 PM EDT feed on which this post was based. Thus, most stories scheduled to run on the NBC Nightly News did not air as NBC's Special Report consumed nearly all of the time examined in this post..
