NBC and ABC left out key details in their reports on the easing of the refugee crisis in Iraq, notably the fact that the crisis may have been overblown or exaggerated from the beginning.
Lester Holt, filling in for Brian Williams on NBC's Nightly News, reported the official line from Washington on the latest from Iraq:
The Pentagon says U.S. airstrikes have helped break the siege by ISIS militants of a mountain where thousands of refugees were trapped but President Obama says airstrikes on ISIS targets will continue.
David Muir, filling in for Diane Sawyer on ABC's World News, reported much of the same thing:
President Obama’s revealing that the immediate humanitarian crisis has been eased. Those thousands of refugees marooned on a mountaintop so desperately climbing onto helicopters, some of them now able to reach safety.
CBS, however, included an actual report from its Pentagon correspondent, David Martin, on the efforts to rescue the number of Iraqis who fled to a mountain to avoid religious persecution from Islamic militants ISIS. Martin noted that the overall size of what has been reported as the humanitarian crisis may have in fact been wildly overestimated. Martin reported that U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and National Security Adviser Susan Rice had to call off a major operation that would have placed U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq after getting a report from a special forces unit that was actually on the ground:
What the Green Beret’s reported was a revelation. There were only 5,000 civilians on the mountain, and only 2,000 of them wanted to come down. The rest live there, tending crops and livestock. That contrasted with initial estimates as high as 35-50 thousand refugees. None of the civilians still living on the mountain were in danger of dying from thirst or starvation.
The report, while noting the role the delivery of aid and the support of Iraqi military had played in the situations improvement, also calls into question the severity of the crisis in the first place.