ABC News president James Goldston exploded on staff on Monday in the aftermath of the network’s badly botched report on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a report that led to anchor Brian Ross being suspended for a month.
CNN obtained leaked audio of Goldston’s scathing remarks to staff — and to say he was furious would be an understatement:
“I don’t think ever in my career have I felt more rage and disappointment and frustration that I felt through this weekend and through the last half of Friday.
I don’t even know how many times we’ve talked about this, how many times we have talked about the need to get it right. That how we have to be right and not first. About how in this particular moment, with the stakes as high as these stakes are right now, we cannot afford to get it wrong. …
The thing that compounded our mistake is that not only did we make a mistake, if we had then corrected ourselves right away, again — we wouldn’t be in this position. It would have been a very different story. But we ended up in the impossible situation where we had actually conflicting information that we said on air, which conflicted with the information that was online. And then it took us seven hours, eight hours to get our story straight. This is not acceptable. It’s not acceptable. And we will all pay the price for a long time.”
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