The question is: Is there anything that Brian Ross and ABC News wouldn’t run?

If ABC News and Brian Ross learned that the U.S. had a team of agents close to bin Laden and were scheduled to grab him tomorrow, would they run the information?

If ABC News and Brian Ross learned that the U.S. intended to bomb facilities in Iran dedicated to the production of nuclear weaponry on Tuesday next, would they post the story?

If ABC News and Brian Ross learned that the U.S. had been covertly conducting surveillance on a suspected international terrorist in the U.S. as he contacted his network and laid his plans, would they post the story?

Late on Tuesday, ABCNews.com and Brian Ross posted a story that began:

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

Either the story is a pile of garbage or it is the disclosure of a classified and highly sensitive operation, the success of which is fraught with difficulty and peril, the outcome of which could prevent a rogue regime run by religious fanatics from acquiring nukes.

Either way, ABC News and Brian Ross did damage to MSM’s already threadbare reputation. Either they joined Dan Rather and Mary Mapes in the “easily played” category or The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in the category of self-serving, and clueless or treacherous dangers to the national interest.

We can’t know, and probably never will. But we do know that Brian Ross has become a pipeline willing to carry anything into the MSM. On May 14, The Blotter proclaimed that “[a]s many as five or six U.S. air marshals are now assigned to each U.S.-bound flight from airports in Frankfurt, London and Manchester, England, because of fears terrorists might attempt a coordinated series of mid-air explosions, law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.” Now, if you were a terrorist planning to blow up a plane, do you suppose you might pick a different flight?

Again, is there anything ABC News and Brian Ross won’t run?

Yesterday Mitt Romney used the platform his presidential campaign gave him to deliver a very useful message, one which every candidate ought to deliver again and again, and not because it is good politics, but because the American media has lost its way and is actively giving aid to the countries enemies via the repeated and indiscriminate publication of national security secrets. The people making these decisions are typically life-time inhabitants of the cloisters called newsrooms. They have zero national security experience –or many experiences of any sort other than MSM culture-- and, truth be told, most of them aren’t particularly bright, and they don’t impress you close up as the sort of people on whose judgment you would rely in a crisis. They have a Pavlovian response to information of any sort, whether a killer’s videotape or the announcement of a super-secret program the disclosure of which helps terrorists elude capture. Continued...