The Reality Check

ABC's Terry Moran overheard the jackass comment from President Obama when he was talking to a CNBC reporter off the record about Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards. Then Terry Moran twitted about the comment setting off a chain reaction that all the news media eventually covered. Under traditional rules of journalistic integrity, journalists aren't supposed to quote people that want things off the record. That obviously wasn't the case with Terry Moran and ABC News.

This comes shortly after ABC News' Charlie Gibson, who was until recently their flagship anchor equivalent to Walter Cronkite, Dan Rathers and Peter Jennings, was quoted as saying the ACORN scandal was a mystery to him. After several days of the undercover ACORN videos having been released, after the Census Bureau announcing it would cut their ties to ACORN and after it being a big enough scandal to instigate the US Senate to cut housing grants to ACORN, Charlie Gibson knew nothing about it saying, "it's a mystery to me."

This is not to mention the fact that this huge ACORN scandal barely made it on to ABC News as well as the other major news networks. These recent major lapses in journalistic excellence makes me wonder if the trustworthiness of ABC News in the days of Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Hugh Downs and 20/20, is over.