snip//
Walk me through the timeline of events at CNN last night.
We learned from the White House at 9:40 that the president was going to make a 10-minute statement. We had no other information; we had absolutely no idea what the content of the statement was going to be. But let's be honest, the president doesn't give a 10-minute statement unexpectedly on a Sunday night unless it's important. We immediately started to fire up all of our operations in Washington and elsewhere to prepare for whatever it was, we didn't know if it was domestic or international at that time. I called Wolf Blitzer, who was at home in Maryland watching the Washington Capitals game. And I said, "Get in. Now." He said, "What is it?" I said, "I don't know, but it's important." So he grabbed a jacket and a tie and he raced downtown to CNN Washington bureau.
At the same time, our chief national correspondent John King was at the hockey game with his daughter, and he raced to the Washington bureau. And our chief White House correspondent Ed Henry was at the hockey game and he raced to the White House. All not knowing what this was, we didn't know what the content of the statement was; we had no idea what the news was. Initially, as we started to run through ideas, it occurred to us that if it was international, the most likely candidates were that something had happened with Moammar Gadhafi or Osama bin Laden. But it could also be a major domestic story; we had no idea. By 10:00 we knew it was big, we just didn't know what, and by then we did know and began to report that it was national security-related around 10:00-10:10.
We began to learn that it was national-security related which excluded all domestic stories but we didn't know specifically what it was. Even as early as 9:45, we began to prepare for the possibility that something had happened to either Gadhafi or Bin Laden, so we pulled video of both of them, and maps of Libya and maps of the Afghanistan/Pakistan region to prepare for whatever the news was even though we didn't know what the news was, we were gearing up for something big and that was our educated guesses.
We began to get from various government sources just after 10:00 that it might be Bin Laden. This is a story that's so big, that our policy is better to be right than to be first. CNN is seen in every country. It's seen by friends and enemies of the United States. In a story as big as Bin Laden, it is essential that we be absolutely certain before we report it.
Even though we had more than a hunch by 10:15 that it was Bin Laden, we weren't prepared to report it as fact until we knew more, so we continued to check our sources. Wolf Blitzer, Gloria Borger, Ed Henry, John King all had information that were pointing us in the direction of Bin Laden. Ultimately John King got a third confirming U.S. government official that gave us sufficient confidence that this absolutely was Bin Laden, and we then went on and reported it at that time [approximately 10:45]. Those three sources confirmed what Wolf, Ed Henry and Gloria Borger had, so at that point
MORe~
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/programming/cnn-scrambling-prepare-unknown-story/37857
https://theobamadiary.com/2016/05/01/early-bird-chat-733/
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