OK, I’ve been REAL busy doing interviews and then taking care of the care, feeding, and placement of the videos
Sidenote: which means take the video, transfer to the PC, bring it into the editing software, start chopping it up, export each question (making sure to, you know, write the question down), upload to YouTube, make the post on GraniteGrok, and then filling in the “post” on YouTube – not a small amount of time and I just do it as a blogger and not taking the time that a REAL videographer would be taking (ouch!)
and since I’ve been running 4 threads per day for a while, that DOES take up a lot of time prepping. But they’re almost all up and scheduled, so back to writing. Finally. Now to play lots of catchup here.
A horrendous event in Aurora, CO for the midnight screening of Batman. Now, I’m not a movie person and there’s no way that I’m going to a midnight showing of pretty much anything except the “count the sheep” flick (I’m such a fuddy-duddy). But now we have the one of “our national discussions” once again. I have a bunch of things to say but a couple of things real quick.
First, why hasn’t ABC’s “Chief Investigative Reporter” (and using the scare quotes deliberately) been fired yet? You know, bloggers get dumped on all the time by the lazy Mainstream Press all the time because we do not have the “layers of editors and fact checkers” that they do (well, when you have no income from what you do and still have to pay the hosting charges, there is no money for those “layers”). Yet, to say that Brian Ross was irresponsible is to say that a tsunami will give you a bad hair day. Years and years of being the “go to Journalist” allowed he and Democrat hack George Stephanopoulas (also posing as a tried and true journo) breathlessly coming up with fact they wanted “Hey, this guy, this James Holmes, HE’S A TEA PARTY GUY!”. They thought they finally had the clincher to the meme they’ve being trying to make for the last three years – TEA Party folks are violent and gun crazy”. Yet, a simple Google search showed up an entire network’s resources as being worse than being Lefty hacks – in fact, they were just incompetent, untrustworthy, and in the rush to “move the story”, showed their ideological spines under the bright TV lights (in fact, they guy they “found” was in his 50s and not like the shooter who was in his 20s).
Yet, how forthcoming was ABC on issuing an apology? Not far at all, it seems – a “move along, nothing to see here”:
Editor’s Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.
Yeah, that was it. I can’t stand watching ABC News broadcasts but made it a point to do so just to see if they were really apologetic. If so, one would have thought that they would have apologized on the very next on-air broadcast. Did they?
No.
I also watch the Sunday talking head shows – including This Week with Georgie. Almost all of the show was about the incident – that would have been a PERFECT place and time to go all “mea culpa”. Did they?
Nope.
Journalism – not. The guy they fingered got death threats and a big hole in his reputation. Problem is, Georgie and Bri-guy have created yet another biggie for the MSM as a whole.
Guess who I really feel sorry for?
Update: I was still doing more checking and found out more at FOX News (emphasis mine):
That man is not the same Jim Holmes. The Colorado Tea Party Patriots, whose website Ross was looking at, put out a statement criticizing Ross for even floating the possibility — noting the Jim Holmes with the Tea Party group is 52 years old and not the same person.
“The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization are shameless and reprehensible,” the group said in a statement.
Ross clarified on air Friday, as ABC News issued a formal apology.
“An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted,” the statement said.
On air later in the morning, Ross also said: “An earlier report that I had was incorrect that he was connected with the Tea Party. In fact, that’s a different Jim Holmes. He was not connected to the Tea Party and what we do know about him is he is a 24-year-old white male who went to Colorado for a Ph.D.”
OK, he apologized. But look what he DIDN’T do as a decades long member of Journalistic circus: “The attempts of some media organizations to characterize the shooter as a Tea Party member without having made any effort to contact our organization“. There is only one description that encompasses this:
Lazy.
As celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsey says (er, screams) at his hapless contestant chefs on Hell’s Kitchen: “YOU DON’T CARE!”
