Big Morning News Shows Disgracefully Fail to Mention One-Year Anniversary of Kabul Blast that Killed 13 US Service Members

Friday marks the one-year anniversary of 13 U.S. service members losing their lives near the Abbey Gate at Hamid Karzai International Airport (now Kabul International Airport).

Yet most of the mainstream media shows disgracefully failed to even mention, let alone cover, the one-year anniversary of the tragedy that was part of the larger tragic failure of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

As my former colleague at the conservative watchdog Media Research Center, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck, noted on Twitter, CBS Mornings, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today didn’t mention the suicide bombing that killed the U.S. service members.

None of the major broadcast network morning shows — ABC’s ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘CBS Mornings,’ or NBC’s ‘Today’ — mentioned today is one year since 13 Americans were murdered by radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan.

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 26, 2022

Additionally, MSNBC’s Morning Joe did not cover the one-year anniversary.

This is hypocritical given that these shows have covered one-year anniversaries of other tragedies that, like the Kabul blast, turned political.

For example, CBS Mornings’ predecessor, CBS This Morning, which ended on Sept. 6, 2021, mentioned the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

Moreover, all the aforementioned shows remembered the one-year anniversary of the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered when Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin put his left knee of Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds while Floyd was in police custody over allegedly using a fake $20 bill.

Another example of these shows remembering a one-year anniversary of a tragedy is the 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, where far-right activists shouted anti-Semitic and other vile rhetoric such as “Jews will not replace us.”

There are plenty of such examples. It’s unusual to not mark something with such significance.

The 13 U.S. service members who sacrificed their lives to help get Americans and our Afghan and international allies and civilians to safety should have been remembered and honored. Instead it looks like they are cast aside for partisan reasons.

At the end of the day, there’s no excuse to not covering or even mentioning the anniversary of a major tragedy that affected the whole nation. One that was avoidable and for which there has been no accountability. NBC, CBS, ABC and MSNBC should be ashamed at this lapse.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.