‘You Don’t Get Over That as a Journalist’: NBC’s Kate Snow Covers Harrowing Night of Gun Violence in America

Kate Snow spent last Saturday night in Chicago with Pastor Donovan Price, who rushes to the scene of shootings in the city to comfort victims of gun violence and their families.

Snow, senior national correspondent for NBC News and Sunday anchor of NBC Nightly News, trailed the pastor for an extraordinary report that saw her and three other correspondents embed with emergency responders in four cities to witness one night of gun violence in America.

An Emmy Award-winning journalist who has covered everything from the heroin epidemic to Bill Cosby’s sex abuse, Snow joined me on this week’s episode of The Interview for an in-depth conversation about what she saw, how the report came together over the course of several months, and how an NBC crew of dozens worked to turn the segment around in less than 24 hours.

Saturday night is particularly bad for shootings in America, and even more so in the summer, when people spend more time outside. Snow said that Weekend Nightly News executive producer Matt Frucci came up with the idea for the report because of how difficult it is to capture the scale of the violence that occurs on any ordinary weekend in America.

“Honestly, most weekends we can’t even scratch the surface,” she said.

While most media coverage focuses on mass shootings, Snow noted that most gun violence in America is happening on a smaller scale – with far greater frequency.

“What struck me most was the regularity of it,” Snow said. “There is a regularity to the gun violence that happens. And it’s often not big. It’s often not a mass shooting, but a shooting of one person or two people.”

Frucci proposed examining one night, setting off a months-long process to embed NBC News correspondents in four American cities — Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore — for one Saturday night in the summer.

The correspondents wrapped up shooting early Sunday morning around 4:30 a.m., leaving less than a day for the Weekend Nightly News team to turn hours of footage from several different cities into a report for that night’s show.

“How did we pull that off? A lot of people. A lot of people were involved, dozens and dozens,” she said. “It took a lot of planning. It just took a lot of coordination.”

NBC correspondent Gabe Gutierrez reported from the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where surgeon Tom Scalea said nights often feel like a “war zone.” Gadi Schwartz followed Houston Police overnight commander Larry Crowson to two shootings in the city, while Jesse Kirsch embedded with Philadelphia police.

Snow followed Price, who said he’s been to 1,000 homicide scenes, as he traveled to the University of Chicago Medical Center where yet another family was grieving the loss of a young man shot dead that night.

“When they found out that their loved one had died, you don’t ever get over that as a journalist, seeing people react to the worst news of their life,” Snow said.

Price prayed with the family in the early hours of the morning, and teared up as he spoke to Snow about the toll that the relentless violence takes.

“I’ve been blessed to be loved,” he said. “It’s important that I love now. If they get love, and I never get love again, that’s cool. Because I know what comes after this. There’s plenty of love there.”

Download the full episode here, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read more coverage of The Interview on Mediaite.

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