FIRST, ABC NEWS CONNECTS THE COLORADO SHOOTING WITH THE TEA PARTY, now Brian Ross says oops, sorry about that.

Reaction: “Brian Ross must be fired by the end of the day.”

What’s pathetic is that every time, they so clearly want to blame tragedies like this on the Tea Party. I don’t generally like these calls for firings, and Ross was no doubt just reading what a producer sent him, but . . . They know how to be exquisitely sensitive and non-prejudgey when it might be a Muslim or some other protected minority, so maybe the only way to encourage them to show better judgment the rest of the time is to cost some people their jobs. Who was the producer? Meanwhile, I look forward to the libel suit. . . .

UPDATE: ABC News goes into “Damage Control Mode.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Treacher on Twitter: “It’s not even about @BrianRoss. It’s about a subculture with a view of the world in which @BrianRoss’s assumption there is only natural.”

MORE: Here’s an interview with the man ABC News libeled.

MORE STILL: A roundup of “progressive” scapegoating, some of it racist.

STILL MORE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “Yes, but ‘subculture’ suggests a smaller group than it actually is. The condescension implicit in these repeated attempts by the likes of Ross is widely shared. And though observed frequently, these acts highlight one of the great cultural divides yet to be fully examined. Academics like Haidt have only scratched the surface by shining a light on the divide.”