While Fox News and CNN may snipe at each other daily over the latest culture war developments, their workers banded together when a real tragedy struck reporters covering the war in Ukraine.
The Wall Street Journal reports that CNN's chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and Fox News foreign correspondent Trey Yingst worked together in a Kyiv hotel room to track down the bodies of two Fox journalists who were killed by a Russian attack.
The pair sat in the hotel room – which was serving as a makeshift CNN newsroom – and made calls to local morgues and hospitals to attempt to find the bodies of Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and local Ukrainian producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova, who had been killed by an explosion. They were also trying to locate Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall, who had been injured in the attack.
The duo relied on reports from Ukrainian military officials to determine the reporters' last known whereabouts.
Eventually personnel from NBC and Sky News also joined in on the search effort. After some time searching, Fox News' security team learned that the reporters' remains had been identified. Later, with help from the US Defense Department, Mr Hall was eventually secured and extracted from the country.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with David Rohde, a former New York Times war correspondent who had been kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008 while reporting in Afghanistan. Mr Rohde said rivalries were good for stories, but had to be set aside when it came to safety.
“We should compete aggressively against each other in terms of stories but shouldn’t compete when it comes to safety,” he told the paper.
Ms Ward was praised for her altruism in Ukraine prior to the revelation that she had helped her news rivals track down their dead and wounded. She paused a live report she was giving in Kyiv when she saw an elderly Ukrainian woman struggling along a street and went to help carry her bags.
“So people are obviously incredibly affected by this situation. They're frightened. They're exhausted. They're on edge. They've got their pets. They've grabbed whatever they can,” she said after helping the woman.
Mr Hall eventually made it safely out of Ukraine and was transferred to a hospital in Texas. He has had to undergo multiple surgeries resulting from the explosion that wounded him in Ukraine.
