https://twitter.com/ABC/status/936628560374071296
(Gawker.com 07/20/12) When there’s breaking news, especially about terrorism and national security, ABC News’ Brian Ross is there. And under no circumstances should you listen to anything he says. His latest breathtakingly reckless report: Some Tea Party guy on the internet has the same name as the Dark Knight Rises shooter, so, you know, they have the same name. So there you go. Tea Party.
As Mediaite has noted, not long after authorities released the shooter’s incredibly common name, James Holmes, Ross ran it through his extensive network of plugged-in sources (Google) and came up with this nugget, which he relayed, live on the air, to Good Morning America‘s millions and millions of viewers:
Brian Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
OK then! There’s some guy on the internet with the same name. That is literally all Ross had—no other connection, not one reason to even remotely suspect that it’s the same Holmes. Just that there is a guy with that name, on the internet.
This is on top of Ross’ previous breaking-news blunders: There was the time he falsely connected the 2001 anthrax attacks to Iraq; the time he described the Ft. Hood shooter’s emails to Anwar al Awlaki—which the FBI knew about and regarded as related to his medical research—as attempts to “reach out” to “people associated with Al Qaeda”; and the time he falsely reported that one of the planners of the Christmas underwear bombing was a former Guantanamo detainee (the guy happened to be in Saudi custody at the time). And then, of course, there was the time he hyped the Toyota Death Machine story by passing off staged footage of a parked Toyota revving its engines as a runaway automobile.
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