So . . . as soon at ABC News’ Brian Ross and his peeps learned the name of the Denver movie theater shooter, their first impulse was to check the name against the rolls of the Aurora Tea Party. And when he found a similar name, he went immediately onto to national television to announce it.

It became clear almost immediately that Ross had made a egregious, inexcusable mistake. The shooter was a twenty-something. The innocent Tea Party member was a Hispanic gentleman in his fifties.

It’s a telling incident. The postmodern liberals who staff the mainstream news organizations as well as write today’s television dramas and sitcoms are abject slaves to their preferred narratives. By that I mean, they’ve adopted a preferred, self-flattering view of the world and no avalanch or facts or reality will move them out of it.

In that view, the “occupy” protesters are noble, peace-loving, principled altruists.  While the Tea Party activists are dangerous, angry, selfish and ill-informed. Psychological projection, anyone?

Brian Ross and his staff live and work in a comfortable echo chamber in which all the right people “know” all the same things. They “know” that Sarah Palin is a dunce. All evidence that supports that narrative is noted and filed. All evidence that refutes it is ignored. All ambiguous evidence is spun and interpreted to support the narrative.

They “know” that conservatives are mindless, uninformed drones tuning in to Rush Limbaugh daily to find out what they’re supposed to think. They also “know” that they and their fellow postmod libs only tune into the Jon Stewart and Bill Maher for erudite, enlightened observations.

Conservatives aren’t immune from cognitive biases that lead to selective filtering of information. But as I mentioned in a previous post, conservatives don’t have the luxury if living in a media culture that is constantly reinforcing their preferred narrative.

It’s no surprise to any intellectually honest person paying attention that the major mainstream news organizations are slaves to the liberal narrative. But in the last few days Brian Ross and ABC News made that strikingly, unforgivably undeniable.