Brian Ross has officially been told he can no longer cover any Trump stories, via an ABC News.
Ross was the one who “Michael Flynn promised “full cooperation to the Mueller team” and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians”” — a d*mning report that got him suspended from the network for four weeks. And when he comes back, no more Trump reporting.
The detail here is that Ross told his audience that CANDIDATE TRUMP ordered it… except that’s not entirely accurate. “Candidate” Trump asked his top natsec guy to rethink U.S. foreign policy towards Russia, and president-elect Trump reached out to make it happen. This is ABC’s big scoop.
ABC President James Goldston said to the news division:
“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,” [ABC News President James] Goldston said [in a conference call with the news division]…
“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,” he added. “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.”…
Goldston also said, “If it isn’t obvious to everyone in this news division, we have taken a huge hit and we have made the job of every single person in this news division harder as a result. It’s much, much harder. We have people in Washington who are going to bear the brunt of this today and in the days forward. Very, very, very, very unfortunate. Really, really angry about it.”
One Trump associate seemed ready to high-five people over Ross’s giant screw-up:
“The reason why this mistake by Ross is going to be helpful is that it plays into the beliefs that conservative voters already have about the mainstream media,” said one former White House official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It was an affirmation of what they already believe to an extent about the ‘fake news’ media. That’s why it is so powerful.”
