In an August 9 opinion article printed on its website, headlined “The Divisions in the Democratic Party,” ABC News failed to identify Lanny Davis as a campaign supporter of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman. In the article, Davis decried the “assault on Lieberman” by “certain extremists among the liberal bloggers” and characterized Lieberman's primary loss to Ned Lamont as indicative of a “division” in the Democratic Party “between progressive Democrats who care about holding the center of American politics to reclaim the Congress and the White House from conservative Republican dominance vs. purist ideological Democrats who care more about one or two issues rather than assessing Democratic leaders by the sum of their work and helping them to win elections and reverse Republican conservative policies.”

At the end of the article, Davis was identified only as “former special counsel to President Clinton from 1996-98,” and “the author of 'Scandal: How ”Gotcha" Politics Is Destroying America,' forthcoming from Palgrave in September." But a caption for an August 6 Associated Press photo on ABC News' own website, showing Davis's appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, identified Davis as “a supporter of Sen. Joe Lieberman.” Additionally, an August 6 New York Times article referred to Davis as “a supporter of Mr. Lieberman” and called Lieberman Davis's “friend.” And in his August 8 opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Davis mentioned the “last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.”