The journalist who reported incorrectly last year that President Trump directed Gen. Michael Flynn to contact the Russians during the 2016 presidential election is leaving ABC News.
“The time has come to say good-bye,” Brian Ross and his executive producer, Rhonda Schwartz, said in a memo to staff, according to Page Six.
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The statement added, “After a great run of 24 years, we have decided to pack up and move on from ABC News, an organization that has meant so much to us. We leave with enormous gratitude for all those who supported us and helped build the industry’s most robust and honored investigative unit. While we are signing off from ABC News, we are hardly leaving investigative journalism. There is much more to do.”
The real question now is: Who will take him?
Ross’ disastrous Gen. Flynn coverage last December, which sent U.S. stocks tumbling on impeachment fears, isn’t the worst of it. In fact, the ABC reporter has an astonishingly impressive history of similarly botched reporting.
In 2001, for example, Ross reported that Saddam Hussein was behind a rash of anthrax attacks in the United States. It wasn’t true.
Later, in 2006, Ross reported that Pakistani officials had arrested Matiur Rehman, a top-ranking member of al-Qaeda whose capture, the ABC reporter said, could lead U.S. forces directly to Osama bin Laden. The Pakistanis had not captured Rehman. ABC retracted the story.
That same year, Ross also reported that then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., was under federal investigation in connection to the Jack Abramoff scandal. Hastert and the Justice Department both denied the story, leaving Ross to defend his report by saying “it’s really a question of semantics” about the meaning of “under investigation.”
Four years later, in 2010, Ross reported certain Toyota vehicles suffered from “unintended acceleration.” It wasn’t true. Ross and his team were discovered later to have deceptively edited video to make it appear as if the cars were defective.
In 2012, Ross reported that a member of the Colorado Tea Party named James Holmes was responsible for the Aurora theater shooting. It wasn’t true. Ross had identified the wrong James Holmes.
Then, in 2018, Ross reporter that, “[Flynn] is prepared to testify that President Trump, as a candidate … ordered him, directed him to make contact with the Russians.” It wasn’t true.
Ross issued an on-air correction later explaining that Trump in fact gave that order after the election, making it not collusion, but diplomacy. The network, for its part, not only suspended him for four weeks without pay, but it also barred him from covering Trump.
Now, seven months after the Flynn disaster, Ross is leaving ABC with the blessing of the network’s president, James Goldston, who told staff this week that, “they have built a team of the best investigative journalists in our industry, and they leave behind an outstanding group that will continue to break stories for many years to come … We wish them well in their next chapter.”
A nice statement to be sure, considering the body of egregiously bad reporting for which Ross is responsible. It’s a bit astonishing that Ross lasted as long as he did at ABC. It’ll be nothing short of a miracle if he gets picked up by another network after all of this.
