We’ve long been telling you that ABC News utterly and royally muffed up the telling of the “DC Madam” story in May, and may have even covered up aspects of the story because the phone numbers of Sam Donaldson, a longtime ABC newsman, and other past or current ABC news personalities appeared in her escort records.

Now comes word that Brian Ross, the network’s lead DC investigative reporter on the Deborah Jeane Palfrey story, has conducted questionable journalism — and some of his past and current news peers are speaking out.

While several of Ross’ competitors say he’s a reporter who’s capable of breaking big stories, he also has a tendency to overplay smaller ones, they say. Jim Stewart, who recently retired from CBS News, has told the New York Observer that he has reservations about some of Ross’ work on ABC’s Web site, The Blotter. “Were they wrong some of the time? Yes,” said Stewart. “I’d rather be right than be first.”

A former ABC news employee also told the publication that there is intense internal pressure from ABC News execs to create page hits for The Blotter. Also, some reporters said they have been unable to retrace Ross’ scoops.

The Blotter was the first mainstream news outlet to break the Mark Foley tawdry IM story in 2006. While that story hasn’t been called into question, several other Ross stories, including those surrounding the “DC Madam,” continue to receive more scrutiny.

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A press release sent this evening by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt confirms that a phone number belonging to ABC newsman Sam Donaldson appeared in the records of the alleged “DC Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, as Big Head DC first revealed some time ago. Radar magazine and the Huffington Post have both falsely claimed that the Big Head DC story was somehow factually inaccurate. We have long claimed that the existence of Donaldson’s number in Palfrey’s records - combined with the existence of phone records of one or more other news personalities from the ABC network in the records - prevented ABC News from revealing a fuller report on the spectrum of politicos and others within Palfrey’s records when the network released their exclusive Brian Ross interview with Palfrey in May of this year. In essence, there was a cover-up by ABC News. Palfrey has confirmed as much to Big Head DC.

The full release follows: Read more…

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Some wacky stuff happened in our media world over the past several days, and we’re still trying to sort it all out. A friend suggested that writing our thoughts down in a list form might help. After pondering the top stories at Digg (”ten pen tricks to do when you’re not jacking off” and “five ways to make your chest bigger” ), we figured everybody likes lists anyways, so why the hell not:

1) Why did MSNBC bail on reporter David Shuster for asking Rep. Marsha Blackburn a simple question?

The net’s soon-to-be former General Manager Dan Abrams made Shuster issue an apology to Blackburn on-air after he asked the congresswoman to name the last soldier to die from her district. When Blackburn didn’t know the answer, Shuster said that Jeremy Bohannon was that person — which soon became a source of controversy, with some conservatives saying that Bohannon was not from Blackburn’s district. Before that important detail could be sorted out, Abrams made an unhappy Shuster apologize because he thought Shuster had gotten it wrong. In the end, it turned out that Bohannon was from Blackburn’s district.

Hopefully Abrams made it up to Shuster in private — not that he has much incentive to do so, since he’s in the process of leaving his management job to become the permanent host of the network’s 9 p.m. hour, which was vacated by Joe Scarborough earlier this year.

Media Madness Ranking:  (3) Patrick Gavins  Read more…

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