Breaking: Insiders tell TVNewser that with 90 minutes before the network evening newscasts are set to go live, the network pool video of President Obama’s first trip to Baghdad is nowhere to be found.
“The shit hit the fan in the last half hour,” says a network insider.
Pres. Obama arrived in Baghdad earlier today for a surprise visit, his first as President. He met with U.S. troops as well as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
When it came time to feed the video of Obama’s meetings, the pool producer passed the tape off to someone, perhaps a member of the military, who was then supposed to take it to a checkpoint where a second pool producer was waiting to pick it up and feed it back to the U.S. networks.
But somewhere in the hand-off, the tapes went missing. We’re told that second pool producer was waiting at the checkpoint for some time to receive the tapes, which have yet to arrive.
“This is so rare. I don’t know if this has ever happened before,” said our insider.
The Pentagon has its own video of the President’s arrival and some of his movements in Baghdad which the networks may end up using for their stories tonight.
As we mentioned in an earlier post CBS News is the pool for this leg of the trip.
Stay tuned to see how this plays out on the evening newscasts…
> Update: The tapes have been found. A member of the military located them around 5:35pmET. But it’s unlikely they’ll make it to the feed point in time for the nightly newscasts. “This is a pretty big failure,” says a network higher-up. “It is the pool’s responsibility to get the tapes from point A to point B. It’s really unfortunate.”