I actually saw this happen live on Saturday night and I also thought it was extremely unfortunate the scene they went back to on America's Got Talent was so inopportune. Not sure what, if anything, they could have done about it because it was joined, as they say, 'in progress," but talk about great moments in bad timing.    

Although it was rather odd, there's no need for folks to get upset.  I'm assuming that bulletin went out across the whole network, in which case central and west coast were watching different programming.  You can't really control what you're cutting in and out of.

It wasn't deliberate.

Legend has it after Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt, Q107 played "Happiness is a Warm Gun" by The Beatles.  If that's true, _that_ would have been rather inappropriate.  
 

cGrant wrote:

 Radio music logs are generated in advance and the jock has absolutely no control over what element is airing. That's assuming there actually was a live body in the studio.  

I don't disagree about 'shit happens', but...what? The jock absolutely has the ability to change a song in a situation like that. Maybe not the authority, but I've never worked with an MD or PD who would give them trouble for that. Either way, we're talking about 1980 - so, yes, there was someone in the studio, and there's a good chance they were controlling the playlist, at least to some extent 
 

Of course there was no way that Master Control had any idea what was to come. I think the real mistake here, if there was any, was that NBC did not put up one of those slates following the farewell to McCain, with a different announcer saying something like, "This concludes this NBC Special Report. We now return you to your regular programming, already in progress."

Just that small interstitial would have gone a long way towards blunting the impact of one scene immediately following the other. But for some reason, they didn't do it. And Peter The K is right that the other time zones likely didn't see it. The special was off the air after 8 PM Eastern, which means there was no network programming on out west then.  

It's what people in TV news call a "hard turn," although it usually involves coming out of a happy story and then into something awful. (We used to make the sound of brakes squealing as if to avoid an accident whenever that happened.)  And It happens more often than you'd think, especially on CTV's Noon News where they have weather guy Anwar Knight live somewhere doing shtick and joking around, saying, "Back to the newsroom. Alright kids, wave goodbye to mommy, daddy and Uncle Ken Shaw!" followed by yuks and laughter. 

And then the camera cuts to the anchor saying, "A mother and her 4-year-old girl were killed in a house fire last night..."

Jarring, terrible and completely avoidable if the producer is watching what he or she is doing. What happened to NBC wasn't predictable, but it could have been a lot less awful if they'd been a little more careful with a buffer announcement.

perhaps the network screwed up, or nobody saw it due to pvr.... that's for us media junkies to debate.   but american discourse these days doesn't need a reason to become immediately offended from the least little slip from left, right, or centre.  what's the cliche...  Tempest in a teapot?  that is the bigger issue here. as with another thread, cnn vs fox, who to trust.... the one that doesn't champion this kind of petty silliness.