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The defamation may not have been for ratings. It may have been for political purposes.

See, that’s the thing - there isn’t really a boundary between the two. If you want to be influential but you don’t want to do anything, you have to make talk seem more important than action. If you can do that you can attract an audience which you can then deliver to advertisers, which is how you monetize your influence. But promoting your own influence is sine qua non.
Journalists promote their own influence by warning the public of “dangers” which it wouldn’t know about otherwise. Of course you have the advantage in perceiving these dangers, especially if you make them up out of whole cloth. The “danger” posed by George Zimmerman is that he “is an armed bigot who will shoot you for no reason if you aren’t white.” You wouldn’t know that if journalism - all of journalism, actually, not just NBC - didn’t tell you (why would you, since it actually isn’t true??).
I’m delighted that Z. is suing NBC; I would have done so the day after that calumny was aired. But this affair is actually a golden opportunity, precisely because its effects are so awful. Zimmerman - actually, all non-blacks - are severely damaged by the promotion of the trope aired by NBC (and it actually doesn’t do blacks as a whole any favors, because while it promotes paranoia among blacks it causes suspicion among whites who have to consider the possibility that the black before them might be out for “revenge for Martin”). Zimmerman personally can obviously adduce great harm. And I emphasize the fact that NBC was merely acting as part of the pack of journalistic institutions when it committed that most egregious fraud by editing the tape the way it did. The other institutions were convicting Zimmerman in the press long before that.
And, not to be conspiratorial about it but just to be factual, all major journalism institutions are in cahoots. They are formally associated. Ever hear of the Associated Press?
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
The Associated Press newswire is a continuous, 24/7 virtual meeting of the membership of the AP which has been uninterrupted since the Civil War. It is impossible that the result could be anything other than that all member institutions should go along and get along - meaning, they cooperate in exaggerating the importance of journalism. They cooperate in promoting the fiction of “journalistic objectivity.” And they do that precisely by homogenizing journalism, and calling their unity “objectivity.”
Granted that if they all were objective, it would seem natural that objectivity would be the same for all - but where is the guarantee that unity is because of objectivity, rather than because of common motive? There is none. The reality is that objectivity is difficult or impossible, and can only be attempted by starting with an open analysis of your own motives and interests. But that is precisely the opposite of claiming to actually be objective. It is also the opposite of joining an organization (such as the AP or a member institution thereof) which you know will claim objectivity for you, even if you don’t openly claim it for yourself.
The conclusion is that journalism as an institution is not without its own peculiar interests, and that it does not actually try to attain objectivity. All claims to the contrary are propaganda. It is not merely NBC but all of the Associated Press which should be sued. Sued into oblivion.