James Hirsen, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Oct. 7, 2006

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See what happens when the press becomes a bit too anxious?

The mainstream media can sometimes overlook fundamentals of journalism in their excitement to break a story.

It happened when Dan Rather hurriedly used forged documents during a presidential campaign to televise a report on President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service.

It may also have occurred as ABC news reported on the Foley story.

ABC used Brian Ross' blog to break the story rather than the evening news.

According to Ross, only after ABC initially broke the story were the "smoking gun" instant messages revealed. Those instant messages contained enough sexual content to remove any doubt about the intent of Foley's communication.

Ross indicated on CNN's "Larry King Live" that ABC had posted the first story about the "friendly" e-mails on Thursday, September 28, on the network's Web site. He stated that the salacious instant massages came to him on Friday, September 29, from other pages. Ross told Larry King, "We posted that on the ABC News Web site, The Blotter, and within hours we heard from former pages who said, ‘Foley is not telling the truth. Would you like to see some instant messages?'"

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That same day, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a group financed in part by George Soros, sent a letter to the House Ethics Committee asking for an investigation of Foley and posted some of the e-mails. CREW sent those same e-mails in July to the FBI.

But when ABC initially posted the disgusting instant messages between Mark Foley and his then congressional page, the network exposed the page's identity.

According to the Oklahoman, a blogger on the Passionate America Web site used a URL variation to find the screen nickname of the former page. This ultimately led to the name of the recipient of the e-mails.

ABC also indicated in the initial story that Foley's page in question was under 18. This added a significant dimension to the story that a minor was being victimized.

Yet the page, identified by ABC's Web site, appears to have been over 18 at the time that the Foley "overly friendly" e-mails were sent.

Why would ABC make two such fundamental errors?

Could it be that they were anxious to get a story out that would harm Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections?

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