The American Spectator

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia
During her Friday night speech at the Smart Girl Summit, Dana Loesch raged against the way the mainstream media reported the massacre at a Colorado movie theater. “They’re creating new victims,” Loesch told women gathered for the conference at the Westin Hotel here.

Editor of Breitbart.com’s Big Journalism site, Loesce singled out Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who mistakenly named a memeber of the Tea Party movement as a suspect in the shootings in Aurora that killed 12 people at a showing of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. After police named James Holmes as the accused gunman, Ross appeared with Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America:

Stephanolpoulos: I’m going to go to Brian Ross. You’ve been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.
Ross: There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.
Stephanolpoulos: Okay, we’ll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much.

Colorado Tea Party activist Jim Holmes is a 52-year-old former law enforcement officer, not the 24-year-old grad school dropout James Holmes, a native of San Diego who was arrested for the Friday shootings that killed a dozen people and wounded 70 more.

Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller interviewed Jim Holmes, who blasted Ross’s haphazard reporting: “What kind of idiot makes that kind of statement? … I do understand what making a mistake means… But is it really worth the person’s reputation, the potential ruining of the person’s reputation?” Holmes, who said he was inundated by phone calls after Ross’s mistake, said ABC News never contacted him.

ABC’s carelessness has been widely excoriated online, including by such liberal outlets as Mother Jones, Gawker and Wonkette. Conservatives are outraged, with some bloggers demanding that Ross and/or Stephanopoulos be fired, and at least one blog calling for a boycott of ABC and its parent company Disney.