ISIS – Continuing Coverage

NBC News and MSNBC’s coverage of ISIS gave us a comprehensive look at the 2014 terrorist group during its seemingly unstoppable rise in the Middle East. Richard Engel and company traced its evolution from an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq into a self-declared Islamic State, demonstrating that ISIS’s emergence should not have been a surprise. Engel holds the U.S. military accountable, showing interviews in 2010 with Gen. Michael Barbero, one of the military leaders responsible for training the Iraqi Army, who claims that the nation was ready to defend itself. Four years later, he returns to Barbero who admitted the U.S. withdrew from the region too early and that the Iraqi Army was not prepared for a threat like ISIS. The coverage also brought us the granular details of life for regions struggling against ISIS, following the relentlessly hopeful Kurdish resistance fighters in Kobani, Syria, and joining Bill Neely at a bridge near Kirkuk, Iraq, only 200 yards away from ISIS fighters. We were also given intimate portraits of how ISIS extremism crossed into our own borders with stories about Americans who joined the cause. By undermining the ISIS-produced propaganda of total dominance in the region, while also refusing to give in to the overly optimistic U.S. policy of warring cooperation in the region, NBC News and MSNBC receive a Peabody Award for ISIS – Continuing Coverage.