American Broadcasting Company (ABC)

ABC is a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company via Disney-ABC Television Group. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, Dow Jones Industrial Average Component and the S&P 500 Component. ABC and Disney merged in early 1996. The subsidiary includes ABC Entertainment Group, ABC Family, ABC News, ABC Owned Television Stations Group, Disney/ABC Television Group Digital Media and Disney/ABC Domestic Television. Disney also owns sports channel ESPN. During the second quarter of 2015, the media networks posted revenues of almost $5.8 billion, divided between cable networks ($4.1 billion) and broadcasting ($1.6 billion). Of that total revenue, $3 billion came from affiliate fees, $2.1 billion from advertising and $695 million from TV and subscription video-on-demand distribution rights.

ABC, originally created in 1943 as a radio network, started broadcasting on TV in 1948 with its affiliate WFIL-TV in Philadelphia. ABC’s news division went on air in 1945, but really only flourished in the 1980s. Its name attracted attention after its coverage of the Iran hostage crisis and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. ABC’s major news programs have been on-air since the mid-1970s, beginning with Good Morning America in 1975. Despite trying to remain politically impartial, ABC News is often perceived as having a liberal bias. ABC focuses on both US domestic and international events. Currently, the company has eight owned-and-operated stations as well as affiliation agreements with 238 stations across the country.

ABC News’ chief anchor and long-time political correspondent was the communications director for Bill Clinton’s election campaign in 1992, later becoming the White House communications director. He co-hosts Good Morning America, the country’s most influential morning news show. Despite this busy workload, Stephanopoulos finds time to participate in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think tank which focuses on US foreign policy and international affairs.

Stephanopoulos @ABCWorldNews is "Covering" Obama Scandals just like he Covered For Bill Clinton. pic.twitter.com/SQb1ifLV37

— Tom in Orlando (@tjm0072003) July 23, 2014

Despite grabbing an impressive collection of awards throughout his long career, Brian Ross is seen as one of the most controversial investigative journalists in the whole of America. For a series of blunders, he has unceremoniously been dubbed with the title, ‘America’s wrongest reporter’. In 2012, during ABC’s Breaking coverage of a fatal Colorado shooting, Ross went live on-air to present millions of viewers with quite a sensation — the shooter James Holmes may have had connections to the Tea Party. But the sensation turned out to be a reckless false allegation, which Ross based on a single web page listing Aurora-based "Jim Holmes" as a member of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots.

Brian Ross and ABC are mostly famous for explosive 2001 reports which falsely linked Iraq and Saddam Hussein to anthrax attacks in the US.

The network falsely described footage of Gaza homes which were destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on July 8 — the first day of Operation Protective Edge — as belonging to Israelis.

The wrongly-attributed footage accompanied a report by veteran ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer entitled ‘Under Attack,’ describing how rockets were "raining down on Israel today."

The footage, of course, showed the opposite; the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.

Sawyer would later apologize for the mistake.

In 2012, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel ran a skit which featured a kid suggesting that the US should "kill everyone in China."

"That’s an interesting idea," comments Kimmel in the segment.

Naturally, there was outrage. ABC had to apologize and deleted the segment from subsequent broadcasts. After a petition calling on the Obama administration to force ABC to cancel the show successfully gained over 100,000 signatures on the White House’s ‘We the People’ in 30 days, the administration was forced to comment on the controversy. It waited until January 2014 to release a statement, in which the White House noted ABC’s and Kimmel’s rights to free speech.

In 2010, Toyota, the third-largest carmaker in the US market, was accused of having possible safety defects in the speed control system in its vehicles forcing the cars to accelerate unintentionally. ABC News reporter Brian Ross filed a report on the potential "sticking" accelerator pedals and floor mat entrapment in Lexus and Toyota models in which he featured a test conducted by David Gilbert, a Southern Illinois University professor. Gilbert’s test purported to show how the acceleration issue ‒ nicknamed ‘death rides’ ‒ could be induced without triggering any alerts. Toyota complained that such a test could not be replicated under real-world conditions, and accused him of rewiring the vehicle to perform as he said it would

Ross took one such ‘death ride’ for his story, which included a staged shot of the tachometer racing, recorded while the car was in park. ABC News later edited that section of video out of the story, noting: "We have changed a two second insert shot in the video to the left, showing the tachometer during Professor Gilbert’s demonstration."

Toyota also complained that Ross hadn’t disclosed that Gilbert was a paid consultant for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the company over the potential defect. The automaker claimed that Ross "singularly failed in his basic duty as a journalist to disclose material information about Gilbert that would have directly influenced his credibility with the audience." It also accused the journalist of rushing the report so that Toyota would not have time to view and respond to the test before the story aired.

Other than the two-second video clip, ABC stood by the story as it aired. Toyota settled a lawsuit for the defects in its speed control system for $1.1 billion in 2012, then agreed to pay the US government a $1.2 billion fine for misinforming customers about safety issues.

George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s Sunday morning show ‘This Week’ and former communications director in the Clinton White House, donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation between 2012 and 2014. However, he did not disclose this fact when interviewing author Peter Schweizer about his new book ‘Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich’ in May 2015.

The information, although a matter of public record, did not receive any attention until Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon asked ABC for a comment on why the donations were not disclosed. Instead of responding directly to Stiles, ABC announced to Politico’s Dylan Byers that Stephanopoulos had made the contributions. PJ Media blogger Debra Heine called ABC’s handling of the disclosure "underhanded" and "disgraceful," and said the new organization "should be ashamed."

.@GStephanopoulos office leaked this to Politico after I asked them for comment. https://t.co/jBEZVxpT06

— Andrew Stiles (@AndrewStilesUSA) May 14, 2015