Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Saturday, September 01, 2012 2:31:33 PM
Alleged news reporter Brian Ross of ABC "News" renewed his title to infamy a few weeks ago when he implied that the Jim Holmes who shot all of those people at the Aurora theater might be the same Jim Holmes who has his own page on the Colorado Tea Party website. It took very little research to prove that the two men were two very different men. One glaring difference is the fact that the two men are roughly thirty years apart in age. The question then became why a veteran news reporter like Ross would make such an obvious mistake. Sloppiness and the hurry to make a "scoop" were the most frequent guesses. (It occurs to me that Ross's "scoop" came up with the same contents that a scoop used to clea a cat's litter box comes up with.)
I don't buy it.
For one thing, this mistake was too obvious to be what is truly called a mistake. ABC News surely knows how to access the Colorado Tea Party webpage, and personal pages have personal profiles. Even if Ross is too stupid to check, his editors and the network news directors at ABC are not. Anyone knows that Jim Holmes is a very common name, and that the odds were that these were two different men. Furthermore, the news herd know full well that the only violent incidents involving Tea Party members have featured the TP members as the victims. One of the things that frustrates the herd most about the TP is that they are so law-abiding that the herd has nothing to use against them.
Except lies.
It reminds me of the 2008 Presidential campaign. The Democrats predicted that the Republicans would make BO's race an issue. When the Republicans (who don't think that way anyway) refused to follow the Donks' script, the Donks and the herd simply claimed that they had.
It is my contention that Brian Ross, George Stephanopoulos, and ABC News knew that they were airing a slanderous report, and aired it anyway. What they were doing was launching a dirty political assault, and it had nothing to do with news reporting.
They were intentionally slandering patriotic citizens who they detest, and the fact that they might be endangering the health or even the life of an innocent man and his family meant nothing to them. After all, you can't make a revolution (and that's exactly what they're shooting for -- pun intended) without spilling some innocent blood.
They did not make a mistake. They were lying, and they knew it.