Brian Ross' sensational  report (and I mean that in the strictest, non-fawning sense)  on the growing dangers to President Obama's safety thanks to the rise of white supremacist militia groups is mainly based on a report issued last week by the left leaning Southern Poverty Law Center.

I don't want to dive into critiquing the validity of the report, but I do want to point out that toward the end of Ross's segment on ABC News he let Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, get away with saying this:

"I think that the President has, in effect, triggered fears among fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country." (emphasis added)

Fairly large numbers. Really? Is there any valid statistical evidence anywhere to support Potok's claim? If so, I haven't seen it. Yet Ross and his editors decided to keep that specific quote in the piece.

I would also add that Ross immediately followed that mistake with another: after hyping the SPLC report and raising fears about the President's safety, Ross admitted to viewers just before signing off that, "Officials tell my colleague, Pierre Thomas of ABC News, that the President's daily threat matrix has yet to reflect a sharp increase in threats."

Give Ross points for honesty, I guess. But from where I sit it seems like one of those cases where a reporter already has the story written in his or her head, and any facts that pop up running counter to that story end up getting buried at the end lest they spoil the effect.

For the record, I don't doubt that having a half black president has inflamed feelings of racism and grievance among a certain slice of white America.  How big is this slice? Nobody knows for sure, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say that it's pretty darn small.  What I do know is that it's irresponsible, absent any evidence, to go on national television and characterize it as "fairly large numbers" of people.

More to the point:  if you're a journalist who's going to run a segment hyping white racism as the reason our first black president's life is increasingly in danger, it's best to just stick to the facts.

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