The American Broadcasting Company first hit the airwaves back in 1943, and has been a
steady presence on both the TV and radio ever since. Over the years, however, ABC has endured
a number of foul-ups and controversies. These are the massive scandals that rocked ABC hard.
Project Veritas is a controversial far-right organization that is notorious for going
after traditional news outlets and politically liberal candidates and organizations. In 2019,
they released a video that seemed to cross political lines in a rare moment of solidarity.
The video depicted an ABC News anchor candidly complaining that her bosses had prevented
her from publishing the now-infamous Jeffrey Epstein story for three years.
With cameras rolling -- but not broadcasting, anchor Amy Robach said:
"The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened
us in a million different ways. [...] It was unbelievable what we had. [...] I tried for three
years to get it on to no avail and now it's all coming out [...] And I freaking had all of it."
Robach later walked back her comments,
saying she had been, quote, "caught in a private moment of frustration." She said:
"In the years since no one ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein."
A separate statement released by ABC claimed:
"At the time, not all of our reporting met our standards to air,
but we have never stopped investigating the story."
Matt Gutman joined ABC in 2008. Since then, he has reported from 40 different countries
around the world, garnering multiple awards for his journalism, and for the last several years
has been chief national correspondent for some of ABC's most important news programs.
Gutman is based in Los Angeles and was one of the first to report on the sudden death of basketball
legend Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash in January 2020. As the news was still breaking and
details about the tragedy were still trickling out, Gutman reported that Bryant and all four
of his children were among the dead. Social media was already awash with grief for the Lakers star,
which quickly turned into outrage over Gutman's erroneous report. He later apologized on the air.
"The coroner is going to make the final determination of
who exactly was on that plane, but again I apologize for those remarks earlier."
Gutman apologized again on social media the next day. Then, a few days later,
he apologized yet again, accepting personal responsibility in a statement to the media.
But that didn't stop ABC from issuing their own affirmation. The company said:
"Reporting the facts accurately is the cornerstone of our journalism. As he acknowledged on Sunday,
Matt Gutman's initial reporting was not accurate and failed to meet our editorial standards."
Roseanne was an ABC sitcom chronicling the middle-class crudities of the titular heroine
and her family. One of the network's most popular shows in the '90s, it was revived
in 2018 with most of the original cast, including Roseanne Barr. Barr has always been something of
a controversial figure, however, both in and out of the show. The show regularly courted
controversy with episodes on hot-button topics like homophobia, racism, and abortion. But Barr
also has a history of controversy, having made a number of troubling comments over the years.
Still, the show made a triumphant return to ABC in 2018, attracting an unprecedented 18.2 million
viewers with its first episode and becoming the most-watched series of the broadcast season.
However, about a week after ABC's announcement that another new season had been ordered,
Barr sent a racist tweet to an advisor to former President Barack Obama. She later deleted the
tweet, apologized profusely, and said she had been, in her words, "ambien tweeting."
But Barr's apologies didn't do her much good.
Not only was the next season of Roseanne canceled, but ABC launched The Connors,
a spin-off series, soon after — and had her character killed off for good measure.
George Stephanopoulos is one of ABC's most prominent news personalities.
He joined the network in 1997, coming directly from the White House, where he
was President Bill Clinton's senior advisor for policy and strategy. But Stephanopoulos'
relationship with the Clintons would become a source of embarrassment for ABC in 2015,
when it was revealed he had been donating $25,000 a year to the Clinton Foundation.
Stephanopoulos later apologized on his show, saying he, quote,
"should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict."
"I should have made additional disclosures on air when we covered the foundation.
And I now believe that directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake."
CNN described the reactions to his apology as mixed.
Many critics noted that the scandal was made all the worse as Stephanopoulos was
personally covering the Clinton Foundation at the time. One writer for Politico wrote:
"The donation corrodes much of the journalistic credibility
Stephanopoulos has labored so carefully to accumulate."
Nonetheless, Stephanopoulos seems to have weathered the scandal.
While many Republicans and conservative commentators predictably demanded that
ABC ban Stephanopoulos from anchoring political coverage in the 2016 election,
their efforts amounted to nothing. He remains ABC's chief anchor to this day.
Breaking stories are notoriously difficult to cover accurately,
especially when the event in question is violent and chaotic. Take the July 2012
mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, for example. During a midnight
showing of The Dark Knight Rises, a man opened fire on hundreds of movie-goers, killing 12.
During ABC News' initial report into the shooting, the company claimed that it had
correctly identified the suspect because their reporters had called his mother,
who had confirmed it. The mother subsequently disputed the report, however, saying that the
reporters had misunderstood her when she said, quote, "you have the right person" — which was
actually a reference to her identity over the phone, not her son's as the killer.
ABC's mistake was compounded by yet another misidentification as part of their initial report,
basing their assumption off a web profile of a separate man with the same name.
Both the network and the reporter involved apologized the same day.
In 1995, Disney acquired ABC for $19 billion, making it the third largest corporate merger
in history at the time — and kind of a win/win for everyone involved. But by 2002,
a bad economy and low ratings had prompted Disney executives to shake things up at ABC.
To do this, they replaced the long-running news program 20/20 with a Disney show,
inserted entertainment programs into news hour slots, and even tried to lure David
Letterman from CBS, effectively ending the more than 20-year run of Nightline.
Replacing a hard news program with The Late Show may seem like a strange decision,
but the two programs had actually been competing in overlapping time slots for 20 years,
with Nightline frequently coming out on top. The problem was that Disney's offer was a violation of
Nightline anchor Ted Koppel's contract, as well as a hugely unpopular move with the general public.
In fact, Letterman was so embarrassed by ABC's attempt to court him that he
even offered to be the first guest on Koppel's new interview show.
In April 2004, America was three years into the Afghanistan War and one year into the war in Iraq.
Especially in light of the year's coming presidential election, both conflicts
weighed on voters' minds — so, in their last broadcast of the month, Nightline devoted the
entire hour to reading the names and showing the pictures of all 721 United States service members
killed in Iraq since the war began. Anchor Ted Koppel closed the broadcast by saying:
"The reading tonight of those 721 names was neither intended to provoke opposition to the war,
nor was it meant as an endorsement."
Sinclair Broadcast Group prevented the episode from airing on its local affiliates, prompting a
stern rebuke from Republican Senator John McCain. Sinclair is well known for being a conservative
leaning media group, so their actions certainly seemed politically motivated. The program was
actually far more successful than ABC's producers had expected, which led to Fox News airing their
own alternative list — listing what America had apparently accomplished in Iraq. ABC then repeated
their stunt a month later, with Koppel reading out the casualties from Afghanistan, and then a year
after that, reciting the names of the soldiers killed in Iraq since the previous broadcast.
For years, the American freelance journalist Nate Thayer had been hunting for the former Cambodian
dictator, Pol Pot. He finally tracked him down in 1997 and wrangled his way into conducting
what would be the last ever interview with the mass-murdering architect of The Killing Fields.
Thayer met with ABC News star Ted Koppel [COP-ull] about broadcasting the interview on ABC,
for $300,000 and full credit. It subsequently aired on Nightline as an "ABC News Exclusive."
which isn’t what they allegedly agreed to - Thayer in turn sued ABC News for stealing his work.
According to the lawsuit, ABC did the exact opposite of everything
the company had agreed to. Thayer later said:
"[Koppel] returned home with a copy of my videotape. I gave it to him in
exchange for his strict promise that its only use would be on Nightline. However,
once he had the copy of the tape, ABC News released video, still pictures,
and even transcripts of my interviews to news organizations throughout the world."
And they didn't even pay him. When Thayer was later nominated for a Peabody Award
for the video — credited as an "ABC News correspondent" — he turned down the award
in anger. Koppel called to congratulate him on the award, but Thayer wasn’t having it:
"I am going to go to the Peabody awards ceremony and refuse the award and tell the
planet what unethical thieves ABC are and how you, Ted Koppel, acted as their pimp."
He was banned from the awards ceremony as a result. The lawsuit was later settled
by both parties — but Thayer wouldn't receive his money until 15 years later.
Brian Ross was a veteran ABC reporter of 24 years. Since joining ABC, Ross had been awarded multiple
Peabody Awards, a half-dozen Emmys, and over a dozen other awards for excellence in journalism
and broadcasting. A longtime colleague at ABC even told the Washington Post that Ross and his
decades-long partner, Rhonda Schwartz, quote, "were the star investigative team of ABC News."
The president of ABC News, in a memo printed in The New York Times, once said:
"Their work has led repeatedly to real changes in policy in the U.S. and around the world."
Unfortunately, a single mistake brought Ross and Schwartz's careers crashing down.
In December 2017, Ross failed to fact check a piece in which he reported that Lieutenant
General Michael Flynn said that then-candidate Donald
Trump had instructed him to contact Russian officials during the 2016 election campaign.
This was a massive scoop that, for a while, set the world of American
politics on fire — but turned out to be largely baseless. ABC were aghast,
and the network issued an official apology and retraction, explaining the story, quote, "fell
far short" of their news standards. Ross had made mistakes with his work in the past,
but this is the one that got him fired. He and his partner later moved to the Law & Crime Network.
In 2019, two of ABC's premiere shows had to issue retractions and apologies after airing a truly
embarrassing error. An October Sunday edition of World News Tonight broadcast a video that
the ABC anchor described as showing Turkey's military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian
border town. The segment was then replayed on Good Morning America the following morning.
However, the video was quickly cast in doubt by a Gizmodo report that afternoon. It turned out that
the Knob Creek Gun Range in Kentucky holds night-time public shoots twice a year — and
that the explosions in the video were identical to those seen in a video filmed at the range.
Within a few hours, both Good Morning America and World News Tonight tweeted:
"CORRECTION: We've taken down video that [...] appeared to be from the Syrian border
immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. ABC News regrets the error."
That evening, Knob Creek Gun Range posted on Facebook that it was, quote, "marked safe from
the Turkish invasion in Kentucky today," and thanked ABC News for the "free advertising."
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