Ross' report yesterday that Hasan had attempted to "make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" took over the internet yesterday and sparked a furious round of speculation that Hasan's attack was part of an Islamic terrorist plot. The headline, "Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda," said it all. The far more mundane truth emerged today in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post: Hasan had communicated via e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American cleric living in Yemen who formerly served as the imam of a mosque Hasan had attended in Virginia. What did they talk about? From the Washington Post:

The FBI determined that the e-mails did not warrant an investigation, according to the law enforcement official. Investigators said Hasan's e-mails were consistent with the topic of his academic research and involved some social chatter and religious discourse.

We were confused this morning, because Ross had clearly reported that Hasan had made contact with "people associated with Al Qaeda," and the only contacts that other reporters were confirming were with al-Awlaki, who is, as far as we know, a single person. We called Ross and asked him if there were more "people." No, he told us, his initial report was only in reference to al-Awlaki.

"That's how it was initially described to me by my sources," he says. "Given what they told me, that's all I could say. It's a strange use of the word 'people.' But when pinned down, my sources said it's just al-Awlaki."

A strange use, indeed. How about false, too? Especially because Ross' original story did, in fact, report that al-Awliki was among the "people" Hasan was suspected of having contacted. So he reported that Hasan contacted more than one person associated with al Qaeda, and then named one person that he was suspected of contacting. What he apparently didn't bother to do was "pin his sources down" on exactly what they were saying. The result was a clear suggestion that Hasan had tried to communicate with the al Qaeda network on more than one occasion.

So did he? Al-Awlaki is routinely described by the FBI and others as an al Qaeda supporter, and a fiery inciter of violence against infidels. And he was the imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as Hasan. But while it's clear that Al-Awlaki is a bad guy, what's not clear is whether he's simply a propagandist or someone who actually operates as a part of al Qaeda. It's one thing for Hasan to have sent e-mails to someone who vocally supports al Qaeda, and quite another for him to have sent e-mails to al Qaeda itself, or to operatives actively involved in trying to kill people. Ross told us that, according to his sources, "Al-Awlaki is considered a recruiter," which is how he justified invoking the name of the terrorist network. We'll defer to him on that point.

But without knowing what the e-mails are about, can it really be known that Hasan's communications were "attempts to reach out"? The FBI didn't consider them as such. Ross didn't know the contents of the e-mails when he described them that way, but felt perfectly justified in doing so based solely on the knowledge that Hasan had sent the e-mails.

We asked Ross if he had tried to contact Al-Awlaki in reporting the story:

"Yes."

So you reached out to al Qaeda, then?

"To al Qaeda? No. I reached out to him. Oh. I see what you're saying."

What's particularly maddening about Ross' hype is that it had already been well established that Al-Awlaki was the imam at Hasan's Virginia mosque in 2001. Hasan's mother's funeral services were held there at the time. While it hadn't been definitively established that Hasan had ever met Al-Awlaki, it was abundantly clear that the two men were in one another's orbits and that Hasan likely heard him preach. That wasn't reported as a "contact with al Qaeda," but once Ross got his hands on the fact that Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who had a web site with a comment form, he turned it into a blockbuster story.

Which wouldn't be the first time. Ross reported—inaccurately—after the anthrax attacks in 2001 that the powder contained a "potent additive...known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons - Iraq." He laundered CIA agent John Kiriakou's lie that the agency only used waterboarding once, for 30 seconds, when in fact Kiriakou wasn't even in the same country as the secret prison where his colleagues waterboarded two men a total of 266 times. He fell for the lies of Alexis Debat, a grifter and fraud who masqueraded as an intelligence expert. And he hyped his access to the phone records of DC madam Deborah Jean Palfrey for days, but only came up with the names of two low-level clients.

Ross' stock response to these complaints is that he only reports what his sources tell him. "We reported what we knew, when we knew it," he says. "I'm comfortable with the story." His problem, as we've said before, is that he has shitty sources. And he just repeats what they tell him. Which is how you get from "Hasan sent e-mails to his former imam, who now preaches in support of Al Qaeda. We don't know what the e-mails were about, but they didn't raise alarms at the FBI" to "Hasan tried to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda" to the headline's blunt, and thoroughly unsupported, reference to "Hasan's Contacts with al Qaeda." It would have been a good story if Ross had stuck to the first, accurate, formulation.

A source familiar with the discussions inside ABC tells Gawker that among the options Disney/ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney is considering for GMA is returning some or all of the broadcast to the network's entertainment division, a move that would simply formalize the de facto devolution of GMA—along with the other the morning newscasts—into a music-and-cooking show dressed up as a news broadcast.

Charlie Gibson is hanging up his hat at World News Tonight in December, at which point Sawyer will ascend to the anchor chair. ABC is in panic mode as it tries to figure out how to remake the broadcast in her absence. CNBC's Dylan Ratigan was supposed to join the network and fill Sawyer's pumps after Gibson retired, but he reneged on his commitment to do so and jumped to MSNBC in May instead. Gibson and Sawyer declined to delay their own plans, so now ABC is casting about for a replacement—George Stephanopoulos, Bill Weir, and current GMA co-host Chris Cuomo are all being mentioned as potential anchors around which the show can be rebuilt.

But the makeover plans could extend beyond simply shuffling personnel: Sweeney, who is personally commanding the network's strategy for GMA, is considering more drastic options, including bringing the show into the fold of the entertainment division. The whole show could be run out of Los Angeles, or the first hour could be produced as a newscast by the news division with the remainder being handed over to entertainment.

A decision hasn't been made, and we're told that the idea is still just that at this point. Spokesmen for both ABC News and the network both vigorously deny that handing over any part of GMA to the entertainment division is on the table—news division spokesman Jeffrey Schneider says there's "zero discussion" of a handover, and network spokesman Kevin Brockman says "someone is blowing smoke up your skirt."

It's not a crazy idea: GMA may have been a laughingstock among "serious journalists" when it answered to Hollywood, but it was also the number one morning show until 1995, the year ABC handed it over to the news team in New York. And the intervening years haven't been kind to the notion that morning newscasts ought to be run with news values in mind: GMA producers digitally altered Whitney Houston's voice to make it sound less crack-addicted last month after the show's entertainment producer appealed to network brass in L.A. for permission. Any serious distinctions between the news side and the entertainment side went out the window long ago.

Such a move would be disastrous for ABC News—GMA reportedly brings in more than half of the news division's revenue, and the show is the division's biggest power center. But relieving it of the pretense of having to behave like a news show would free ABC up to engage in all sorts of advertiser-whoring behavior and ratings-friendly booking arrangements—the stuff that it already does in a half-assed way and has to pretend not to—and give it a chance to beat Today like it used to, before it had to pretend to be news. So it could be a tempting idea.

Why bother? Because the TV news portion of the White House Press Corps is an exclusive country club of identical privileged tools who've convinced themselves that arguing with a stonewalling flack for an hour a day is doing the dirty work of democracy. And insulting one of them is tantamount to censorship.

White House communications director Anita Dunn said Fox News doesn't behave "the way that legitimate news organizations behave," which is an objectively true statement, as long as your definition of "legitimate news organizations" means organizations in operation after the death of William Randolph Hearst.

This outraged Tapper!

Tapper: It's escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations "not a news organization" and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –

(Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are "not a news organization." How are they any different from, say –

Gibbs: ABC -

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o'clock tonight. Or 5 o'clock this afternoon.

Tapper: I'm not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a "news organization" — why is that appropriate for the White House to say?

Gibbs: That's our opinion.

First, they didn't say that Fox is "not a news organization." We just said what they said, and it's true. Eric Boehlert lays out many examples of Fox's "news" programs fucking the truth up, though really their sponsoring of, promotion of, and reporting on the fucking tea parties is all the proof you need that they don't behave anything like ABC News.

Back when Jake Tapper worked for Salon, would he have considered it a ridiculous attack to say that that online 'zine was not objective? Would've he really have quibbled with the idea that a site run by liberal journalist David Talbot might not be considered "legitimate" by a Republican president? Even if they were sending real-life good journalists like Tapper and, later, Michael Scherer to cover the White House? (Of course, no site that publishes Camille Paglia and Cary Tennis can be considered legitimate, but their terribleness transcends partisanship.)

Does Tapper understand that despite the fact that he is very good, personal friends with Major Garrett, Garrett's employer is actually a research and communications arm of the conservative movement? In a much, much, much more direct and partisan fashion than almost any liberal "equivalent" news source? Like, The Nation and Keith Olbermann and The New Republic and Air America are liberal news organizations staffed and run by liberals dedicated to achieving liberal political goals, but if they've ever all joined together to organize a partisan campaign as PR-savvy as the Tea Parties (or the Iraq War) while still maintaining poses of objectivity, we've missed in next to the thousands of op-eds and Special Comments on how Obama is continuing Bush's torture regime and Senate Democrats are spineless cowards.

But now, once again, Jake Tapper is a hero to the right-wing blogs. Because he knows that it is the objective reporters job to always object, to everything. If the President says the ocean is quite large, it is heroic reporting to demand that his spokesman acknowledge that outer space is even bigger.

Politico brought Huckabee's newly filed campaign finance report to our attention with an item about how deadbeat news outlets CNN and ABC News owe the campaign $2,906 and $833, respectively, for "Press Travel Reimbursement." We checked, and it does. But the eye-popping figure to us was $23,570 owed by the campaign to Top Kick Productions of Houston, Texas for "travel - charter." Hmmmm—what is Top Kick Productions, and what films has it produced? Why, Lone Wolf McQuade, Deadly Reunion, and Silent Rage! Certainly looks like Chuck Norris' production company. Indeed, Norris listed Top Kick as his employer in a donation to Huckabee's PAC last year.

Huckabee and Norris were famously inseparable on the trail last year, but why would Huckabee be more than $23,000 in the hole to a white ninja/Texas Ranger for travel expenses? An accountant for the Huckabee campaign confirmed the debt to us, but hasn't gotten back to us about why the campaign owed Norris for travel—it looks like Huckabee flew around on a jet either owned or chartered by Norris, and so is obligated to repay him at market rates. But who knew Chuck Norris had a jet?

Representatives for ABC News and CNN had no immediate comment about the fact that they're deadbeats.

That strikes us as something of a demotion—Holmes appeared frequently on CNN's air, especially during the election, and also has been a regular guest as a right-wing talking head for Bill Maher. Now it looks like she's trying to get out of the punditry game and refashion herself as a newsreader—she's filling in this week and next as an anchor on ABC News Now, ABC News' (mostly failed) attempt to create a 24-hour news network online. No one's watching, but at least she doesn't have to defend all those foaming-at-the-mouth teabaggers who hate her because she's black, right? Must be a relief. We expect Ed Rollins to show up as a CBS News intern any day.

An ABC News spokeswoman insists that Holmes is only "reading the news and debriefing correspondents in the field" as a freelancer in a one-off gig, but it sounds like a tryout to us. If indeed it is, it should come as no surprise that ABC News would move an avowed political partisan and right-wing operative into a purported news slot, because it seemed to work OK for George Stephanopoulos.

Holmes was still listed as a contributor on CNN's website today when asked a CNN spokeswoman about the new gig; the spokeswoman confirmed that Holmes is no longer with the network.

This American diplomat, who is 34 and married, is shown in a hotel room, in his underpants, and then we cut to the what is probably the same room but suddenly it is quite dark and someone is having sex with some lady, maybe, who knows. Blackmail! Oh and before all this the guy is maybe on the phone talking to a lady about something in Russian.

Scandal-mongering ABC investigative reporter Brian "One Source" Ross would like you to watch this wonderful video. Seriously, it is pretty great. We don't know if the FSB added the wonderful musical accompaniment themselves or if it should be credited to Brian Ross/Jane Birkin.

We reported a little over a month ago that the Today show had booked Blagojevich to appear on the morning he happened to be arrested by the FBI, but bumped the interview so they could flack for Jay Leno's new show. We found that out through a Freedom of Information Act request to the state of Illinois asking for e-mails from representatives of the media to Lucio Guerrero, Blagojevich's press secretary (we got the idea from South Carolina's The State, which did the same thing—to comic effect—after Mark Sanford's Argentinian Rhapsody).

The first raft of e-mails we got were from December 8, the day before Blagojevich got popped, and it included one from Today producer Lexi Dauber apologetically canceling a scheduled remote Q-and-A with Matt Lauer to make room for Leno news. We just got another batch covering the 48 hours after the arrest, and guess what? Dauber and her fellow Today producer Stephanie Siegel all of a sudden really wanted to talk to Blagojevich!

The traditional route for a reporter desperately trying to convince someone to submit to an interview when it's obviously not in their interest to do so is to drop all pretense of toughness and objectivity and lie to them: We will be your friend! Not like all those other mean reporters. While Dauber and Seigel's e-mails to Guerrero are understandably sympathetic, an internal write-up of a phone call with Siegel outlining the terms of her interview request shows what they were really willing to give up. Matt Lauer or Meredith Vieira would call Blagojevich before the interview to "go over the line of questions," and Seigel stressed that "they are sensitive."

CBS's Early Show also went the simpering route, telling Guerrero that there is "far too much hearsay going around" and offering Blagojevich an opportunity to "set the record straight" and "clear his own name." They were even willing to "rent a private space to keep him away from the rest of the media's view." We all know how annoying prying reporters can be.

ABC News' Diane Sawyer, on the other hand, didn't try to buddy up to Blago. To her credit, Sawyer's producer offered a fairly straightforward pitch that managed to avoid over-the-top sycophancy.

Larry King's producer relied on the rogue's gallery that has traipsed through King's studio in the past, positioning the host as the go-to guy for crooks, liars, and other humiliated figures—go with us and you can be in the fine company of Jeffrey Skilling, Gary Condit, and Bob Packwood!

King's CNN colleague Anderson Cooper wasn't even trying: His producers sent in a perfunctory, We-asked-Governor-Blagojevich-to-come-on-the-show requests that they knew weren't going to open any doors.

Likewise the producer for CNN's Campbell Brown dashed off an email that would allow her to dutifully report that a request was in.

Sometimes brevity is your best bet when dealing with a harried flack who's clearly deluged with requests. That's what Andy Shaw, a political reporter for Chicago's local ABC station, decided to go with.

That kind of approach is important when you know your target is dealing with all manner of zany proposals. Like a request for comment from "a representative for Dan Ackroyd [sic] and Jim Belushi" on their call for Blagojevich's resignation. When a press aide forwarded that message to the governor's press assistant, she responded, "What? I want you to explain."

(For the record, it looks like that was a hoax call—we can't find any evidence that one-half of the Blues Brothers and the talentless brother of the other, dead, half ever made such a demand.)

The most pathetic request comes from Pat Curry, the news assignment editor for WGN, a local Chicago station. He wasn't even asking for an interview with Blagojevich—he wanted Guerrero himself to come on, and delivered a masterwork of flattery and faux sympathy. "I wouldn't expect you to be able to comment on a federal investigation, and could easily brush that off," Curry wrote, signing off with, "Humbly, Pat Curry."

A producer for a local Chicago talk radio show hosted by husband-and-wife pair Don and Roma Wade wins the award for discretion, declining to put in writing the "incredible offer" he had for Guerrero.

We'll never know what that offer was, but guess who got the first post-arrest interview with disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich?

You can read the whole batch here. Interestingly, not one e-mail from Fox News turned up. It could be that they relied solely on the phone, or that their e-mails somehow got missed by our FOIA requests. Or maybe they figured it wasn't worth trying.

Matt Drudge broke the story: Charlie Gibson will retire as anchor of World News Tonight in January, at which point Sawyer, who has been co-anchor of Good Morning America since 1999, will take over.

Sawyer has long complained that she was tiring of the morning routine, and her tenure at GMA has been an open question for years. And Gibson, who was shabbily passed over in the wake of Peter Jennings' death from lung cancer and only got the gig because Bob Woodruff was injured in Iraq and Elizabeth Vargas got pregnant—a point he managed to make in his farewell memo, below—only hung around to gain the satisfaction of showing his bosses that the old horse still had some fight in him. So it's not terribly surprising that he would leave and Sawyer would take his slot. Still, it's a colossally stupid move. Or, as one TV insider put it to us: "It's the dumbest fucking idea in the long, hoary history of dumb fucking ideas in the news business."

Morning news is a growth business, and second-place GMA has been keeping Today on its toes for years. Sawyer is an integral part of a profitable, growing show, and ABC News has decided to upset the apple cart—putting GMA's success at risk and providing and opening to CBS to finally get in the game—so it can put her to work on an evening broadcast that nobody watches anymore outside of retirement homes. It's like trading a successful ballplayer down to the minor leagues.

Look how well it worked for Katie Couric: She gave up a successful morning franchise for the CBS Evening News, which has racked up little more than all-time audience lows since she took over. When CBS boss Les Moonves was engineering Couric's defection back in 2006, we asked him this question: If you could have Today's numbers at the CBS Early Show, or the NBC Nightly News' numbers at the CBS Evening News, which would you pick? He answered the only way a rational TV executive would: He'd pick the Early Show. Then why, we asked, are you devoting all your resources to resurrecting the Evening News? "Prestige," he answered. For some reason, these old people think a nightly newscast that grabs the biggest share of a dwindling and dying audience is something worth banging your dick on the table about.

Sawyer is apparently thinking along the same lines—she wants the Big Chair, even if it's not what it used to be. It'll be nice to have ladies helming two out of the three newscasts, and maybe Sawyer will be able to keep up the heated race with Brian Williams for the top slot that Gibson started. But to what end? So ABC News can lose ground on GMA, the show that actually brings in significant profits?

Here is David Westin's e-mail to ABC News staff, and below that is Gibson's note to World News Tonight staffers:

Today, Charlie Gibson announced to his colleagues at World News that he has decided to step down as anchor effective at the end of this year. I attach below Charlie's full email.

I have asked Diane Sawyer to serve as the next anchor of World News, and she will assume that position in January.

Charlie and I have been talking about his decision for several weeks, and he has persuaded me that this is both what he wants and what is best for him. I respect his decision, just as I respect the enormous contribution he has made to ABC News through the years. Most recently, he stepped in to lead World News after a difficult and turbulent time – both for the broadcast and for ABC News over all. We suffered from the loss of Peter and then the severe injuries to Bob. Charlie came to the fore to keep us on the path of doing the first rate journalism that had distinguished World News for many years. We owe him much for the leadership he gave us when we needed it most.

Since then, Charlie has covered all the major events with the substance and grace that we all expect from him. Most importantly, he headed our coverage during a presidential election unlike any other. Now, having accomplished so much in so many different parts of ABC News, Charlie has decided it is time for him to step down. I have told him that he has an open door to continue to work with ABC News, but he's asked for a bit of time before he comes back to us.

Diane Sawyer is the right person to succeed Charlie and build on what he has accomplished. She has an outstanding and varied career in television journalism, beginning with her role as a State Department correspondent and continuing at 60 Minutes, Primetime Live, and Good Morning America. She has interviewed every President since President George H. W. Bush up to and including President Obama. She has handled an array of breaking news special events, including on 9/11 and, most recently, the presidential election. She has done distinguished documentaries on topics as varied as North Korea, the plight of women in Afghanistan and in prisons here at home, and poverty in Camden, New Jersey, and in Appalachia. We are fortunate to have a journalist of Diane's proven ability and passion to step into the important position of anchor for World News. She will continue with her documentaries in her new role.

Diane's presence will certainly be missed on Good Morning America. But we are fortunate that both Charlie and Diane will remain with their current broadcasts for the next four months; we will be making further announcements well before any changes are made.

Charlie Gibson's e-mail to World News Tonight staff:

I have always been taught you should never bury the lead – so I write to tell you that I have told David Westin I want to step down as anchor of World News, and retire from full time employment at ABC News.

It has not been an easy decision to make. This has been my professional home for almost 35 years. And I love this news department, and all who work in it, to the depths of my soul.

I have received much comment, and quite a few emails and letters referring to the signoff Eddie Pinder convinced me to use - wishing that everyone has had a good day. But the proudest part for me has been saying "...for all of us at ABC News...", since those words signify in my mind that I have been in a position to speak for an entire news department that I consider second to none.

It had been my intention to step down from my job at Good Morning America in 2007 but with Peter's illness, Bob's injuries, and Elizabeth's pregnancy, the job at World News came open in May of 2006, and David asked me to step in as anchor. It was an honor to do so. The program is now operating at a very accelerated, but steady, cruising speed, and I think it is an opportune time for a transition – both for the broadcast and for me. Life is dynamic; it is not static.

I have told David I would like to continue in some capacity contributing occasionally to ABC News. He has been receptive to the idea – and we will be discussing what that role might be.

Most importantly, my heart is full of gratitude for those with whom I have had the privilege to work as a correspondent, as a host at Good Morning America, at Special Events, and now as anchor at World News.

I'll be anchoring World News through December and will have a chance to thank many of you personally. In the meantime let's get back to the news...

South Carolina's The State has once again put the state's open records law to excellent use by getting a hold of more obsequious e-mails from exclusive-hungry reporters to Sanford's press secretary during his disappearance, including a doozy from ABC News' Jake Tapper (click the image for a closer look):

At the time, no one knew exactly where Sanford was, and the Argentinian Connection had not yet been revealed. Tapper was engaging in the age-old reporters' practice of trashing the competition to official gatekeepers in the hopes that said gatekeepers will be goaded into believing that you are "on their side" and and will therefore be the best choice for their client/principal to talk to. Needless to say, the only side Tapper was on is his own. Never believe anything a reporter ever says to you.

The "slimy" spot in question did little else aside from report (gullibly) Sanford's staff's contention that the governor was hiking the Appalachian Trail, recount the previous conflicting explanations for his absence, and raise perfectly reasonable questions—questions that we're sure Tapper himself had—about Sanford's political prospects in light of his strange behavior. There was nothing "insulting" about it.

Tapper followed up with another e-mail, tattling on NBC News's David Gregory for writing about Sanford on Twitter:

Politico reached Tapper for comment about the e-mails:

Busted. In retrospect, the story I was referring to wasn't slimy enough — at that moment the only ones who knew of the governor's affair were Sanford, his wife, his mistress, and the State newspaper. But I shouldn't have said that, and I'll try to leave the media criticism to others from now on.

Good idea! We've e-mailed Mike Viqueira, the NBC News reporter whose spot Tapper trashed, for comment. We were all like, "Tapper's a total tool, I can't believe what he wrote about you! You should totally respond to Gawker. Also-FYI!—he's Tweeting about it. Slimy!" We'll let you know if we hear back.

How is the internet fighting with the old media today? In many ways! A study found that "traditional media" typically beats blogs on news stories by about 2.5 hours, although "3.5 percent of story lines originated in the blogs and later made their way to traditional media." Although 96% of snide jokes about news items originate with blogs! And Twitter has an unbeatable edge when it comes to tools that allow J-school professors to tell fellow subway riders that Michael Jackson died. Internet traffic is also a leading excuse for canning writers. These facts brought to you by the New York Times—on the internet! What a crazy, mixed up world.

In an op-ed titled "Doing no favors for their gender," an old man named Richard Connor (pictured) writes that it's not just that Sarah Palin and WP publisher Katharine Weymouth fucked up—it's that they fucked things up for their kind: "Men make stupid decisions every day, but let's face it: For better or worse they still have the upper hand. Pressure still exists for minorities, and I include women in that group, to be better than everyone else. Yet they still have to - rightly or wrongly - prove themselves. Palin and Weymouth did otherwise last week. They set back the progress of others in their professions. Both need to leave the stage and return to the wilderness." Again, Richard Connor is an old man.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff is back reporting from Iraq for the first time since he was damn near killed there by an I.E.D. in 2006. He's one of the good guys.

The Harvard Business Review has put its vast business expertise to work—for itself! "A good example is the way we've recently realigned the editorial staff around 'beats'...We spent a lot of time team-building to make that happen," says the editor. "Beats"! Imagine that. Will Harvard ever stop totally revolutionizing things, for the better?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Greta Van Susteren has heard just about enough of this complaining by US president Barack Obama about her TV show. He complains about it all the time. She hears. "I have been told that he does not like me or ON THE RECORD at 10pm or my network mainly because of our Reverend Wright coverage. I have two things to say about that: 1st, I bet I have as much if not more years working on the street with poor African Americans than the President does." Mmmm.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.ABC News is asking Nielsen for an investigation after the ratings service recorded ABC's evening news broadcast's lowest ratings ever last Friday. That was the first day of the switch to digital TV, meaning all the olds who watch ABC News were too befuddled to make the teevee work, so they didn't watch, QED. What's the big woop?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.A big ole' government project called "Chronicling America" has now posted one million newspaper pages on the internet. They hope to eventually post 20 million pages, which should happen well after newspapers are history.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The New York Post ran a "news" story today about their PR man, Howard Rubenstein, getting an award from his school. Come on. If the Post ran a blowjob story on every blowjob award somebody gave Howard Rubenstein, they'd scarcely have room for stories about actual blowjobs.

"Not allowed to leave the hotel, but I think I can see small# of protesters on Vanak Sq," wrote Sciutto about a half-hour ago. CNN's Reza Sayah has been on the streets, but explaining to viewers that he's not being allowed to broadcast any footage from rallies. UPDATE: A CNN spokeswoman says Sayah's "credentials limit his movement to the proximity of the workspace (the hotel) and the surrounding area."

According to an ABC News spokesman, Sciutto was warned by Iranian authorities earlier this week that his permit to operate in the streets had been revoked by Iranian authorities, but his team ignored the threat.

UPDATE: An ABC News spokeswoman says that Sciutto is not physically barred from leaving the hotel, but that his credentials prevent him from doing any work outside of it: "He's not supposed to work outside of the hotel—film, attend protests, do interviews, etc." But he could go out for a bite to eat if he wanted to. The spokeswoman says keeping Sciutto from leaving the hotel was ABC News' idea: "Jim was out this morning, but once the new regulations were announced, we thought it best for him to stay closer to the hotel." Sciutto has updated his Twitter feed to clarify, writing, "In ans. to some q's, we're not confined to our hotel, but barred from working outside."

An NBC News spokeswoman says that NBC News crews have not, to her knowledge, been confined to their hotel.The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

The New York Times' Bill Keller, who left the editor's desk to report from Iran last weekend and is still in the country, told Editor & Publisher via e-mail that his movements in the country are being closely monitored:

the iranians watch us closely, seem to know where we are much of the time. yesterday i took a five-hour drive to isfahan, in western iran (details TK in the nyt) and on the way we stopped to take a peek at the holy city of qom. as we were making a loop through that city, my translator got a call on his cell phone from the ministry that oversees the press: "please tell me, what is your program in qom.'

Keller's visa is up tomorrow, and as various reporters' visas expire, they're faced with a difficult choice:

some reporters have contemplated overstaying their visas, trying to work under the radar. even if you manage to elude the authorities, though, you create real dangers for all the iranians you would need to hide you, translate for you, get you around and help you get the story out.

UPDATE: Reuters reporters are confined to their offices. The service is adding an editor's note to dispatches from Tehran: "Reuters coverage is now subject to an Iranian ban on foreign media leaving the office to report, film or take pictures in Tehran." And the Associated Press' latest dispatch likewise contains this paragraph:

The report could not be independently confirmed due to the media restrictions barring reporters for foreign organizations from reporting outside their offices.

"[O]ne ABC employee acknowledged that Nightline, the late-night ABC News show, has been talked about as a future 10 p.m. possibility," wrote Carter and Stelter. Its a weakly presented nugget—it comes from an "employee" of ABC rather than an executive or someone described as a well-placed source, and it's hedged to within an inch of it's life. ABC News executives are professing ignorance of the proposal.

The main beneficiary of such a move would be our friend Jimmy Kimmel, who would then be free to start at 11:35 and go head-to-head with Conan O'Brien. Carter wrote in January that ABC was considering replacing Nightline with Kimmel as early as this year, a notion that ABC News executives aggressively shot down. In either scenario, of course, Kimmel comes out on top. (Wait—he's an employee of ABC, right?)

Expanding Nightline to an hour and moving it up to 10 p.m. actually makes economic sense—the marginal increased costs of producing a second half-hour would be outweighed by the potential gain in doubling the show's ad revenue. And there are more viewers to attract at that hour. The question is whether it can make more profit—and provide a better lead-in for its affiliates' local news operations—than Lost or Private Practice or any of the new dramas it's launching at 10 p.m. next season. NBC's Leno move might open up space for dramas on other networks, making them a better proposition. Or it might herald an audience shift toward light-weight programming at 10 p.m. If it's the latter, moving up Nightline would be easy and smart.

But really—does anyone care anymore? Carter's January story about Kimmel taking Nightline's spot was cast in the breathless language of a battle between entertainment and news values. That was the case back in 2002, when ABC tried to lure David Letterman over to replace Nightline. But it was the case because Ted Koppel was hosting the show at the time, and Nightline was serious and designed to actually gather and distribute valuable information about the world. The fates of Martin Bashir and Cynthia McFadden may be interesting from a business perspective, but the battle between entertainment and news values was lost long ago.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But he was paying attention. We noticed yesterday that Tapper has altered the way he posts transcripts of the White House press briefings. He used to put his own questions in bold and render Gibbs' answers in italics, which we thought inverted, in terms of visual presentation, the relative weight that ought to be given to each—not to mention encapsulasted a certain self-regard that we and others had noticed in Tapper's professional style.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But now he's putting Gibbs' answers in bold and his own queries in italics. Did he judiciously consider the issues raised by our post and, with grace and humility, re-examine his own practices with our critique in mind? We'll say yes, just for kicks.

Since loudly leaving CNBC in late March, Ratigan had been rumored to be going to ABC, perhaps to Good Morning America.

"In ABC's mind, they had—and have—a deal with Ratigan," says a source with knowledge of the negotiations. "This wasn't a handshake deal. This was a deal deal. ABC got fucked, royally."

Ratigan, who has said his ambitions run more toward David Letterman than David Brinkley, will anchor MSNBC from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

News of Ratigan's departure from CNBC were accompanied by a leak to Page Six of a tape of him screaming at his producers: "I'm not going to host a fucking TV show that consists of reading fucking e-mails to fucking traders."

ABC News and Ratigan couldn't consummate their agreement because CNBC had a noncompete clause in Ratigan's contract, which barred him from negotiating with competitors until six months after he left. But CNBC could waive that clause, which it clearly did in order to let its sister network snatch Ratigan from ABC News's grasp.

Ratigan's move from CNBC to MSNBC, which are both units of NBC Universal, was expertly orchestrated—instead of simply working his way over internally, he left suddenly, with an attendant tabloid story making the announcement, and put himself on the open market so ABC News could bid up his price. Then he wound up back in the embrace of the same company, presumably with a tidy raise.

"If MSNBC is paying this guy what ABC would have paid him," the source says, "then they are way overpaying him."

An ABC News spokesman, citing the noncompete clause, denies that the network was ever in negotiations with Ratigan: "You can't lose something you never had."

Ross is the guy who breathlessly announced that he had the phone records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey—a.k.a. the Washington Madam—only to come up with the names of two lousy low-level clients in a much-hyped sweeps-month 20/20 investigation that went nowhere. For years he relied on Alexis Debat—an ABC News consultant who was revealed in 2007 to have concocted fake interviews with American politicians for publication in a French journal—for stories ranging from secret U.S. operations in Iran to Americans joining the Taliban. (ABC News says those stories were still true.) He's the guy who reported inaccurately in 2001, in the aftermath of the anthrax attacks, that the anthrax letters contained a "potent additive...known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons - Iraq." And he's the guy who, just last week, falsely accused Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of calling Barack Obama an "indentured servant" to the coal industry by taking a quote from his interview with Kennedy dramatically out of context.

Now Ross has drawn the ire of the New York Times for his 2007 exclusive reportfeaturing former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who came forward on the record to confirm that the CIA had waterboarded suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou pointedly used the word "torture" to describe the process but insisted that it was exceedingly limited, and that it worked—Zubaydah started cooperating after one 30-second session, Kiriakou told Ross.

As the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Scott Shane point out, Kiriakou was either lying or didn't know what he was talking about. According to the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos released this month, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

Ross' story, the Times reports, "heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique" and "ricocheted around the media," leading Rush Limbaugh to proclaim: "It works, is the bottom line. Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works." What didn't ricochet around the media was the fact that the torture occurred in Thailand, and Kiriakou was sitting at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.:

But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

On "World News," ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself "never carried out any of the waterboarding." Still, he told ABC that the actions had "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

Ross never claimed that Kiriakou was in the room when Zubaydah was tortured, but if his viewers had known that Kiriakou was on the other side of the planet when it was happening, they may not have fallen so hard for his bland lie that it only happened once, briefly, and that it worked.

In Ross' defense, when you are writing about the CIA and top secret intelligence programs, a certain margin for error has to be built in to the equation. Sure, Kiriakou didn't know what he was talking about. But he was a CIA officer, he did have access to intelligence about Zubaydah, and he was willing to talk. Who wouldn't put him on TV? You're only as good, the saying goes, as your sources.

Brian Ross' problem is that he often has shitty sources. Kiriakou, Debat, whoever was telling him that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks. ABC News and others defend him as a hard-working reporter with many important stories and awards under his belt—including a Polk-award-winning December 2005 report that named Poland and Romania as the locations of the CIA "black sites" that the Washington Post had uncovered a month before. But at least one former colleague says he's just gullible.

"Ross has a reputation for being able to be spun, because he's so desperate for stories," a former ABC Newser tells Gawker. "If he has one source for something, and he seems trustworthy, he'll go with it. The New York Times' investigative guys say, 'We never take anything Brian Ross reports with anything less than a pound of salt.'"

Indeed, according to another knowledgable source Gawker spoke with, Kiriakou was in talks with at least one other reporter around the time Ross lined him up for the exclusive. The other reporter didn't trust Kiriakou—for one thing, he was willing to meet in the open, in public places, which suggested that the information he was offering wasn't all that valuable—and passed him by. But Ross bit.

ABC News has issued a fierce defense of the Kiriakou story, disputing the Times' claim that Ross underplayed the fact that Kiriakou had no direct knowledge of the waterboarding and pointing out the three occasions on which the Times itself relied on Ross' story.

And ironically, in reporting on Ross' latest episode of gullibility, it appears as though the Times has left itself open to charges of cooking a story. The Times' Stelter and Shane quoted former Human Rights Watch lawyer John Sifton high up in their piece accusing the press of "sanitizing" the torture program by running with stories like Kiriakou's claims. But it turns out that, while Sifton did say the press coverage tended to sanitize torture, Sifton says he also repeatedly defended Ross to Stelter, telling him that Ross shouldn't be singled out for getting details of a highly secretive program wrong.

"Placing blame on ABC News is unfair and nonsensical, and for the New York Times in particular it is hypocritical," Sifton wrote today in an angry letter to Times public editor Clark Hoyt. "Mr. Kiriakou's account given on ABC News was hardly the first time a media company has quoted CIA officials providing rosier-than-reality accounts of interrogations.... [F]or the Times in particular to focus on the Kiriakou story is downright nutty. If it is a crime to cite uncritically Mr. Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's supposed 30-second waterboarding, then the Times is just as guilty as ABC News. This is because the New York Times itself interviewed and cited Mr. Kiriakou in a June 2008 article by Scott Shane about CIA interrogations, which focused on CIA analyst and interrogator Deuce Martinez — a point Mr. Stelter didn't mention."

Sifton also takes Stelter to task for initially claiming that his story was about the media's treatment of the torture issue in general, and not Ross' story specifically. Sifton, who says Ross is as good a reporter as you can be when it comes to covering CIA activities under a veil of secrecy, says he told Stelter specifically that it would be unfair to single out Ross when any number of other reporters have made similar mistakes. "I didn't know that this story was going to be a hatchet job on Brian Ross," he told Gawker.

Ross is working on a follow-up to his Kiriakou story, and for the time being ABC News has appended an update to the story on the web:

U.S. Government documents released in April 2009 indicate that Kiriakou's account that Abu Zubaydah broke after only one water boarding session was incorrect. According to a footnote in newly released, previously classified "Top Secret" memos, the CIA used the water board "at least 83 times during August 2002 in the interrogation of Zubaydah."

Following the release of the documents, Kiriakou said: "When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

Kiriakou told ABC's Brian Ross the alleged terrorist, Abu Zubayadah, broke in less than a minute and "from that day on he answered every question." The story spread to the major press outlets, and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and National Review's Jonah Goldberg used it to defend waterboarding.

It turned out the torture technique didn't work so well: CIA agents tried to break Zubayadah with it 83 times, according to a declassified government document. That doesn't sound quick or easy.In tomorrow's front-page New York Times story, Ross defended his source, but sounds a little bitter:

"I didn't give enough credit to the fiendishness of the C.I.A."

Right, because a news reporter didn't have any reason, in 2007, to believe a representative of the CIA would provide false information about crucial decisions, or abet awful human rights abuses.

(In fairness, though, Fox's 24 made torture cool way before ABC News.)

[NY Times, now admirably incorporating advanced cross-site hyper-link technology!]