An earlier post described a hasty, false report linking the Colorado shooter to the tea party.
Bad journalism continues. At MSNBC, Joe Scarborough speculated -- without a scrap of supporting evidence -- that the shooter has Asperger Syndrome.
At Politico, Dylan Byers writes:
Arlene Holmes, the mother of Colorado theater shooting suspect James Holmes, has suggested that ABC News mischaracterized her when it reported that her initial statement to the reporter, "you have the right person," was a reference to her son.
"This statement is to clarify a statement made by ABC media. I was awakened by a call from a reporter by ABC on July 20 about 5:45 in the morning. I did not know anything about a shooting in Aurora at that time," Holmes said in a statement this afternoon, read to the national press by attorney Lisa Damiani. "He asked if I was Arlene Holmes and if my son was James Holmes who lives in Aurora, Colorado. I answered yes, you have the right person. I was referring to myself."
"I asked him to tell me why he was calling and he told me about a shooting in Aurora," she continues. "He asked for a comment. I told him I could not comment because I did not know if the person he was talking about was my son, and I would need to find out."
In the first paragraph of its initial report on Friday, ABC News reported that it had identified the correct James Holmes because his mother "told ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, saying, 'You have the right person.'"
If Arlene Holmes' latest statement is true, it means that she did not tell ABC News her son was likely the alleged culprit, calling into question the reporting of a network that has already been marred by one inaccuracy.HotAir follows up:
Update: ABC says it didn’t happen the way Holmes says it did — and no, there’s no recording of the conversation:ABC News phoned Arlene Holmes at 5am PST, at her home in San Diego, Calif., according to notes and email records by ABC News producer Matthew Mosk, who placed the call…
Mosk said today that he awoke Arlene Holmes and informed her that a man, he believed was her son had been arrested in Aurora and asked to confirm their relationship.
“You have to tell me what happened… You have to tell me what happened,” the woman on the phone said, according to Mosk. Mosk said he told her that ABC News had learned the 24-year-old had been identified by police as the lone suspect in the mass killing in Aurora, Colo and that the details of the events were still taking shape.
“You have the right person,” was her response, he said. “I need to call the police. I need to fly to Colorado.”That contradicts Holmes’s claim that she didn’t know anything about the shooting before her “right person” comment — but even here, according to ABC’s own account, the quote is totally ambiguous. Was she saying that James Holmes was the “right person,” i.e. the shooter, or merely that she was his mother? Why did ABC leap to assume the former instead of the latter?
