• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, March 13, 2026

What’s the matter with TV journalism today? I give you exhibit A -- the reporting that took place in the aftermath of an attempted terrorist bombing last weekend near the official residence of the New York City mayor.

Local news got aspects of the story wrong, or underplayed parts of it entirely. And a CNN news anchor got it wrong three days after it happened.

The first places where I looked for stories when the story was breaking on Saturday in a neighborhood I know well were the websites of our local TV stations.

They were generally accurate in the early going, but also strangely lagging behind the story, which was changing fast. 

It is almost as if news media today acts in slow motion, especially local TV news media that sometimes seems as if they are the last to know when news is breaking in their own city.

At one point on Saturday afternoon, a news anchor on our local cable news channel, New York One, grinned good-naturedly as he reported that somebody threw a couple of “smoke bombs” at the site where rival protest groups were already in a pitched battle. He knew nothing of the story.

The smoke bombs turned out to be real improvised explosive devices thrown by two young men who now face federal terrorism charges.

The incident began at around noon last Saturday when two protest groups clashed on a quiet New York City street just south of Gracie Mansion, an old house on the East River where most of the mayors take up residence. Mayor Mamdani lives there now.

Behind barricades set up by police one block away from the Mansion, one group held a protest that they had titled “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City.” 

They reportedly numbered about 20. They chose the location because Mayor Mamdani is Muslim.

Other protesters arrived to oppose the group. Last weekend, news reports were pretty much in agreement that this group came to number approximately 125 people. 

There were fistfights and grappling. Seen later in video from the scene, one protester blasted some others with pepper spray. 

During the melee, two young men were filmed throwing two objects wrapped in duct tape that turned out to be potentially lethal homemade bombs. 

The coverage on Saturday was full of misinformation on the details of what happened, probably because New York news organizations were not present to cover the story. Sorry, we’re understaffed on weekends.

Eventually, the coverage improved. By the evening, local stations seemed to have it right. CBS-owned Channel 2 had the best story I read at the time.

On Sunday afternoon, the story advanced when New York police and FBI agents canvassed the neighborhood to make sure there were no other IEDs laying around.

They came upon a black sedan with New Jersey plates that had been parked in front of a fire hydrant for 24 hours five blocks south of the site of Saturday’s violence. They deduced that this was the car the two bombers drove to New York.

They found an IED in the car that was not completely assembled, and then brought in one of those bomb-disposal robots to take it away. I know these facts because I happened to witness some of it.

At one point on Sunday, I went back to the TV news websites to see if their stories had been updated.

Some had no news whatsoever of the discovery of another bomb on Sunday. Others reported this new aspect of the story, but buried it beneath all of the other news from Saturday that was already a day old. 

That is not how it is supposed to work. The newest news is supposed to be at the top, not the bottom. What has happened to journalism fundamentals? 

The most notable of these offenders was prime-time CNN anchor Abby Phillip, who told viewers on her show Tuesday night that the bomb-throwing was “an attempted terror attack against New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani.” 

This was not the case. Phillip and/or whoever wrote this script for her should have known it was not the case, since the truth had been known since Saturday. 

The bombs were hurled by two young men, apparently Muslim themselves, who later declared their allegiance to ISIS. The bombs were intended for the group of anti-Muslim protesters.

Mamdani is Muslim. He was inside the residence at the time of the incident, and far out of reach of the bomb throwers unless they had arms like Tom Brady’s.

On Wednesday morning, as CNN and Phillip were taking a beating on social media, Phillip issued a correction on X, and then issued another one on CNN Wednesday evening. 

“This morning, I issued a correction the first thing in the morning on X for a mistake I made in last night’s show,” she said Wednesday night.

“But I also wanted to do so on air as well. I incorrectly said that the bombs that were thrown by ISIS-inspired suspects in New York over the weekend were directed at Mayor Mamdani,” she said. “They were not.”

“I failed to catch and correct that mistake in real time. I take full responsibility for that and while we do make mistakes, it is important to acknowledge and correct those errors when they happen.”\

I think such errors happen often, and only once in a while does anybody actually notice them. Most of them go uncorrected and unacknowledged.