Seeing Yellow

ABC's Brian Ross is reporting on his blog The Blotter that Speaker of the House Denny Hastert is the target of an on-going FBI corruption investigation:

Federal officials say the Congressional bribery investigation now includes Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, based on information from convicted lobbyists who are now cooperating with the government.

Part of the investigation involves a letter Hastert wrote three years ago, urging the Secretary of the Interior to block a casino on an Indian reservation that would have competed with other tribes.

There's just one problem with that theory: The FBI denies the story, and Hastert himself is demanding a full retraction.

Despite the denials and request for a retraction, Ross is sticking to his story… sort of:

ABC's law enforcement sources said the Justice Department denial was meant only to deny that Hastert was a formal “target” or “subject” of the investigation. "Whether they like it or not, members of Congress, including Hastert, are under investigation," one federal official said tonight. The investigation of Hastert's relationship with Abramoff is in the early stages, according to these officials, and could eventually conclude that Abramoff's information was unfounded.

Gentlemen, start your parsing.

In the original article, Ross was quite careful to only say that Hastert was “in the mix,” a vague, rather nebulous statement that most readers would interpret to mean that Hastert was most likely the target of a criminal investigation. Indeed, the Reality-Based Community (an oxymoron if there ever was one) seems to be exactly under that impression in their update, and the ambiguous wording is also apparently interpreted in a similar fashion at Booman Tribune, The Carpetbagger Report, and Washington Monthly, all leading liberal political blogs.

But these blogs were hardly alone. Mainstream news sources such as Bloomberg were also taken in by Ross's too-perfect parsing, declaring:

U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is under investigation by the FBI in the corruption scandal involving former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ABC News reported. ABC News, citing unidentified Justice Department officials, said the information involving Hastert was provided by lobbyists who are now cooperating with the investigation.

Reuters and even local ABC stations were also apparently taken in.

Ross provided an initial report with carefully constructed sentences that are phrased in such a way that even the best of minds inferred that Hastert is most likely the target of the investigation.

Bravo, Mr. Ross. Very well played.

So what is occurring here? Are professional journalists (Richard Esposito and Rhonda Schwartz also contributed to the ABC reports) ginning up excitable bloggers and less careful fellow journalists to establish smears they can then plausibly deny as being mere misinterpretations?

Ross's own sources seem to think so:

You guys wrote the story very carefully but they are not reading it very carefully," a senior official said.

Hastert may be a number of things, but he is not the focus of a Congressional corruption probe.

Ross's purposefully misleading, barely justifiable reporting seems to be a classic case of sensationalism, and would appear to cross into the ethically-challenged world of yellow journalism.

Denny Hastert may or may not be found to be of interest in Congressional corruption investigations, but one thing we now know to be true: the reporting of Brian Ross, "ABC News' Chief Investigative Correspondent" is not to be taken at face value.