ABC Suddenly Concerned About Impacting Election

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ABC News is very concerned about the effect on the US election of releasing their terror warning videotape: Alleged Terror Tape Gives ABC Pause.

It has all the makings of an incendiary story: a chilling pre-election videotape featuring a supposed member of al Qaeda, declaring in English that “blood will run red in the streets of America.”

The problem, say ABC News executives, is that they can’t determine whether the tape, obtained by a producer, involves a real threat — or even the identity of the figure on it, a man wearing an ammunition belt and a headdress that obscures his face. The network enlisted the aid of the FBI and CIA but still can’t authenticate the 75-minute videotape.

“We’re not quite there to broadcast something that would be quite frightening,” investigative reporter Brian Ross said yesterday. “I’d love to have the exclusive, but first we’d like to get it right.”

ABC was put in the awkward position of defending its insistence on fully checking out the story after the Drudge Report posted a huge online headline: “ABC News Holds Terror Warning Tape.”

A network producer obtained the tape over the weekend from an intermediary in Pakistan — who charged a $500 transportation fee — and ABC’s New York headquarters got a feed of the video Monday, network executives said. They said they sent copies to the FBI and CIA, which have been unable to identify the speaker — who says he is an American and is brandishing automatic weapons — after comparing his voice to those of known terrorists. ABC hired two linguists who concluded that English was not the speaker’s native tongue. For example, he cited the country of Yemen as “the Yemen.”

“The dilemma is that we have an individual identified only as ‘Assam the American’ — we have no idea who that is,” said Christopher Isham, ABC’s chief of investigative projects. The unidentified man addresses his threats to “my fellow countrymen.”

In weighing the evidence, ABC staffers are mindful of the problem at CBS News, which has apologized for rushing on the air with disputed documents about President Bush’s National Guard service.

Ross and other ABC staffers say they believe that a Bush administration official leaked the story to Internet gossip Matt Drudge as a way of pressuring the network into airing the tape, which would heighten concerns about terrorism in the final week of the president’s reelection campaign. They note that whoever gave the information to Drudge had a transcript of the tape.

Interesting, no? They “believe” the Bush administration leaked the story to Drudge to force them to reveal it—which seems to indicate that if the story had not leaked, ABC would have concealed it until after the election.

Does anyone really doubt that if ABC believed the videotape would help John Kerry, it would have been shown already?

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Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
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