When Even Sick Left-Wing Sites Like 'Wonkette' Want Brian Ross Fired, Despicable Hate-Blogger Repsac3 Attacks Michelle Malkin as 'Whiney Wingnut Victim'

Here's Wonkette's entry from yesterday, "ABC NEWS SHOULD FIRE BRIAN ROSS, AND OTHER NOTES ON BEING TERRIBLE."

There are 12 people dead and 50 injured at a movie theater in Colorado, including a baby. It’s not as though you can’t look into a suspect’s history after a massacre and report things as they’re confirmed. That’s what the media should do! What the media, and every idiot on the Twitter, should not do, is first seek out a narrow angle that probably has nothing to do with crazy people going crazy — say, “what political party is this insane person in?” — and then get it wrong out of pure laziness. This matters. Let’s shame some people. First up: ABC News should fire Brian Ross....

Jesus fucking Christ on a hotplate. Brian Ross and his BLOTTER INVESTIGATIVE TEAM googled for a few minutes and didn’t bother trying to confirm anything and wow, huh, look at that, he was wrong....

Tea Party people on the Internet are furious over this, and they have every right to be, because it’s an egregious, early error that will color the impressions of people no matter how frequently or aggressively it’s retracted. Can Brian Ross! Put him in the goddamn street. He is constantly wrong, at reporting on national television.

Exactly.

The decent, human thing to do would to be to gather facts, and especially not go looking around the Internet to see "what party is this insane person in?", or what tea party organization, as did No More Mr. Nice Blog did. That is, the decent, human thing would not be going all gonzo trying to score partisan points to destroy your enemies.

But despite the universal condemnation of the left's attempts to politicize the Aurora massacre, Walter James Casper III decided to take to Twitter to --- wait for it! --- slam conservative Michelle Malkin as a "whiney wingnut victim":

Whiney Wingnut Victimhood -michellemalkin.com/2012/07/20/bla… via @michellemalkin The prob isnt partisanship, it's unsubstantiated speculation as news.
— J. Casper (@repsac3) July 21, 2012

And for reviled hate-blogger Repsac's claim that it's just "unsubstantiated speculation as news," let's go to a veteran newsman who writes a column on news reporting, James Taranto, at the Wall Street Journal, "With Extreme Prejudice: How ABC News "investigates" a horrific crime." Picking up on ABC's retraction and apology, Taranto writes:

This strikes us as insufficient. Simply as a matter of journalistic craft, the report was appallingly shoddy. Ross pointed the finger at an innocent man based on nothing but the coincidence of a common name and the man's residence in the same city of 325,000 where the crime took place.

Let us amend that. There was one other factor, and this is what makes the ABC error not just amateurish but sinister: the innocent Jim Holmes's involvement with the Tea Party. For more than three years liberal journalists have falsely portrayed the Tea Party as racist and potentially violent. After the January 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., speculation immediately began that the suspect was a Tea Partier. Even after it was proved that he was not, the New York Times published a despicable editorial blaming conservatives anyway.

Ross and ABC were out on this limb alone. Either other journalists learned their lesson from Tucson, or it didn't occur to them to look for a political motive this time (it was a more plausible hypothesis in a shooting that targeted a politician).

It is reasonable to interpret Ross's hasty unsubstantiated report as an expression of hostility--bigotry--toward the Tea Party and those who share its values, which are traditional American ones. ABC's carelessness here is in sharp contrast with the way the mainstream media treat criminal suspects who are black or Muslim. In those cases they take great pains not to perpetuate stereotypes, sometimes at the cost of withholding or obscuring relevant facts such as the physical description of a suspect who is still at large or the ideological motive for a crime.

Oikophobia is no less invidious than other forms of bigotry. ABC and Ross have apologized for their irresponsible reporting, but they have something more to answer for here. Their careless and inadvertent falsehood was in the service of a big lie.

See more on that bigotry from Taranto: "Oikophobia."

And actually, Ross and ABC weren't out on a limb alone. Walter James Casper III jumped out on that limb too, the asshole. So, once again, this whole sordid episode demonstrates the deep, vile wellspring of bigotry erupting from the warped mind of hate-blogger Walter James Casper III.