How many times does he have to get these stories wrong before ABC News cans their hapless and constantly wrong "investigative correspondent" Brian Ross? We suspect he'll be allowed to keep screwing up, again and again and again, so long as his screw-ups result in lots of media attention. Little wonder Ross is one of the only broadcast network news stooges invited on Bill O'Reilly's show, again and again and again.

Gawker's John Cook takes apart Ross' big "scoop" yesterday, which swept both the wingnut and non-wingnut media alike --- cooking up the alleged Fort Hood shooter Army Major Nidal Malik "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda".

Those "contacts with al Qaeda"? Um, not so much, as Cook details. Turns out that Hasan's "attempt to reach out to al Qaeda" were, in actuality, three emails sent to the imam of the mosque that Hasan attended in Virginia in 2001, back when two of the 9/11 hijackers, reportedly, also attended the same mosque. The cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, has since moved to Yemen where he has reportedly spoken out in favor of al-Qaeda.

The emails sent to him by Hasan? Whatever they were about, Ross doesn't know, and the FBI, who reportedly did know, apparently didn't find they warranted any action be taken.

Oh, and the "people" connected to al-Qaeda who Hasan allegedly "attempt[ed] to reach out to"? Ross now admits there was just one --- singular, not plural --- and it was al-Awlaki.

Here's our favorite passage from Cook's excellent evisceration of Ross' yet-again irresponsible coverage, proving (by ABC News' own standards) that Ross himself may well be an al-Qaeda terrorist!...

In advance of tomorrow's related story [Update: That story now posted here], I thought you might appreciate a quick look at the following if you've never seen it before. Diane Sawyer narrates the story of FBI translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds as she was awarded the 2006 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.

In the bargain, it's also worth remembering that Sawyer herself is at least aware of Edmonds, who she is, and some of what she's had to go through, further begging the question of why ABC News has failed to even note --- much less investigate and/or cover --- the recent revelations of bribery and blackmail of current and former U.S. Congressmembers and high-ranking State and Defense Department officials, and the theft and sale of nuclear secrets by agents of Turkey and Israel, as detailed in her sworn deposition in August, and remarkable AmCon cover-story interview which followed it late last month...

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning

Shortly after my original piece, “Hate Speech and the Process of Dehumanization,” I received a form of constructive criticism. A friend suggested that while I provided a coherent explanation of Prof. Zimbardo’s basic concepts regarding the process of dehumanization as it relates Nazi atrocities and the Jim Crow South, my application of Zimbardo to the more contemporary question of Muslims and Arabs failed to do justice to Prof. Shaheen’s academic study of American films.

While the criticism is valid, that certainly had not been my intent.

The problem entails issues of length in the blog format --- the risk that length will reduce the size of the audience one hopes to educate.

For those who feel they’ve read enough, please stop here.

For everyone else, there is Prof. Shaheen’s Oct. 19, 2007 appearance on Democracy Now, and the following….

[Updated: Right on cue, the Teabaggers turn out to disrupt town hall meetings over the weekend. Video and details at end of article. ... UPDATED AGAIN: Lots more video now, the zombies come out all over the country.]

Are there simply no democratic (small "d") processes left that the Right isn't willing to corrupt to their own corporatized, nefarious purposes? It would seem not.

This from ThinkProgress, concerning the rightwing, corporate-sponsored (read: astroturf) "grassroots" FreedomWatch coalition, and their conveniently leaked talking points instruction memo [PDF] on how to create an appearance of dissension --- "Yell...Stand up and shout out...Rattle Him...Be Disruptive Early and Often" --- at upcoming town hall meetings back in Congressional districts over the August recess...

As detailed in the full memo, the strategy "worked," and media took the bait in the Himes' Town Hall event mentioned.

Over the weekend, far-right kook Michelle Malkin, for some reason, was allowed a seat at the roundtable on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos as if she was a legitimate voice.

She predicted (video here) that where Democrats and the White House have "vastly underestimated just how grassroots this movement is," they would soon face "townhalls-gone-wild" in the weeks ahead...

Following up on Saturday's NEWSWEEK scoop that Attorney General Holder "may be on the verge of" appointing a prosecutor to investigate Bush/Cheney-era torture, Digby notes how the chuckling dinosaurs of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday snickered their way through a discussion of prosecution for torture by the Bush/Cheney regime (in our name!) as if they were wise-cracking about any old political brouhaha from inside the Beltway. (Video/transcript here, courtesy of C&L.)

Note to Stephanopoulos: How about featuring some actual journalists and bloggers who've actually been covering this issue for months (years?) before you eventually come to wonder why your show has gone the way of all the dead trees in the newspaper publishing business. Greenwald, Scahill, Wheeler, Horton all come to mind. It might bring your show up to date...or at least, up to 2006 or so.

The serious folks out there, several mentioned above, took a look at Saturday's NEWSWEEK report with the grim sobriety and analytical acumen that it deserves, while in largely shabby followups Washington Post, New York Times, and Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal all seem to float anonymously sourced trial balloons, averring the notion that only low-level rogue interrogators who exceeded the boundaries of the DoJ's illegal torture justification memos would be targeted by such an investigation.

On that point, while Glenn Greenwald charges such an approach would be arguably "worse than doing nothing," as it would "actually further subvert the rule of law rather than strengthen it," he also notes:

Scott Horton's reporting counters the indications from anonymous sources in the increasingly obsolete WaPo, Times, and WSJ coverage which suggests focus on only low-level agents and contractors, rather than policy makers, by reporting that his sources at DoJ indicate just the opposite [emphasis ours]...

The once-great ABC News' Nightline decided on Monday night's show that they would take a look at the possible reasons for Sarah Palin's decision to cut and run from her first term as Alaska Governor. They promised to take a look at the leading theories, so as to help "separate fact from fiction."

How did they do it? First, they asked two of Palin's friends who both generally agreed she decided to abort the job largely because she was tired of it. Then, they presented five possible theories that have been floated.

"Those explanations from people who know Palin haven't been enough for Internet bloggers and conspiracy theorists," Nightline's Vicky Mabrey reads over screenshots of The BRAD BLOG, The Daily Beast, and others sites that reported on the possibility of a criminal investigation. "They've had a field day over the holiday weekend, speculating on a host of other theories why Palin would leave office"...

Via Mark Crispin Miller...

Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.

The myth of the "liberal media" has become such an article of faith these days that attempting to refute it is futile. But if evidence against liberal bias were being collected, on top of the pile would go the scant coverage the liberal media are giving two stories about the approval of torture and prisoner abuse by the conservatives currently holding the offices of president and vice president of the United States.

Earlier this month, a bipartisan U.S. Senate committee put the blame for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison squarely at the top of the chain of command. Here's Andrew Sullivan:

While fighting to try to ensure that as many voters as possible actually see their votes counted, and counted accurately, from the November 4th election, I haven't had much, if any, time to really pause to reflect on what happened a week ago last Tuesday and what it all meant.

While Elizabeth Hasselbeck's response to Obama's win (she had supported McCain) the next morning was both gracious and worth noting, Sherri Shepard's response that followed, tells the real story of what just happened. It had me in tears even today. From the November 5th, 2008 episode of ABC's The View...

Guest Blogged by Brad Jacobson of MediaBloodhound...

While cable news dutifully devotes nonstop coverage to the latest random criminal cases --- kidnappings, shootouts, murderous love triangles, car chases --- it's telling when a supposed break in one of the biggest manhunts in FBI history, for a terrorist who murdered and poisoned multiple American citizens with anthrax, takes a back seat to nearly every other story. That is, if it's mentioned at all.

Even as details, leaks, and a burgeoning list of questions bubbled to the surface last week, demanding serious scrutiny, the big three broadcast networks were equally blasé. Some nights skipping mention of the unfolding story altogether, as did last Tuesday's editions of CBS Evening News and ABC World News (though both that evening reported the eminently newsworthy story of a thrill-seeking English couple who married while being strapped outside separate airplanes). On the same night, Brian Williams afforded 39 precious seconds to the anthrax investigation on NBC Nightly News.

In covering one of the most historic criminal investigations in our nation's history, the worst bioterrorism attack on U.S. soil, the overall tenor and quality of network reporting (as well as much of the work in mainstream print media) has been nothing short of disgraceful. What America saw, instead, was a dearth of circumspection and a paucity of competent investigative work that mirrors the most feckless moments of the last eight years...

The corporate media still just don't get it. The topic came up at the end of an interesting discussion on Salon Radio Friday between Salon's Glenn Greenwald and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen.

At the end of their conversation about ABC News' appalling inability to either retract their false 2001 stories tying the anthrax attacks to Iraq (at a very crucial moment, during this country's build-up to war there), Rosen, who picked up on Greenwald's call for accountability there, notes the media's reluctance, particularly the networks', but all of them, to examine their horrible performance prior to the war, and in the subsequent seven years since.

Those failures, the corporate media seem to argue, are all "ancient history" now.

"Because in the minds of most of the people who work in big league journalism in New York and Washington," Rosen explains, "they have done this to death. And they're way past the point of examining their own performance in the run-up to the war."

"From my point of view," he adds, "they haven't even started."

"The watchdog press died under Bush," Rosen charges. "We may have a watchdog press again some day, it could be reborn. But it died."

As you may expect, we concur with that assessment. Yet, as bad as things are right now, had it not been for the citizen media of the blogosphere, including folks like Greenwald, we shudder to think how much worse it all might have been. And that's saying quite a bit.

"It's like we're on the other side of the Moon from them on this particular issue," Rosen concludes in regard to his big media colleagues, in a phrase reminiscent of thoughts we've had so often over the last many years. Which of us is/was living on the dark side of that Moon?

The answer seems pretty clear these days, and that's the point at which we pick up their discussion below. It's just the last couple of grafs, but they are well-worth the quick read...

Had this been a study showing liberal bias in the media, it would have been all over the place by now. But as the study offers evidence that it's McCain, not Obama, who has been given an edge by network media reporting since the start of the general election campaign, it seems we better help "catapult the propaganda" a bit.

Below is the beginning of David Knowles' coverage of the LA Times coverage of a new study from George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs. The new study offers empirical evidence underscoring what most folks who honestly study the corporate media already know: Democrats get a far tougher time than do Republicans in the corporate mainstream media.

For those self-proclaimed "conservatives" who continue to buy into the nonsense of the "liberal media" canard (no matter the dearth of actual, hard, real-world evidence to substantiate it) please note this study does not come from one of those 'liberal elitist think-tanks.' Rather, it was led by a man hailed by "conservative" propagandists, such as Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, for his previous studies on media bias. We have a feeling those same "conservatives" may accidentally not notice his latest study.

Take a look...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

John Aravosis at AMERICAblog makes some cogent, spot-on, and often rather amusing points. The condensed set-up...

Here are the first of his 9 suggested questions...

Read 'em all. Good stuff. It's going to be another very ugly season. As ever, proudly sponsored by your contemptibly wretched and horribly failed Corporate American Mainstream Media.