Which would be fine if she had been identified as a liberal Obama supporter. But she wasn’t. Mellody Dobson, who was brought on to discuss the downgrade, was identified simply as a financial contributor to ABC News. She ended up dismissing S&P’s downgrade as political and suspect. Yet apparently it was okay for her to neglect to mention the fact she has a horse in the race.

DAN HARRIS: America’s credit rating has now been knocked down a peg by Standards [sic] and Poor’s. This morning a question a lot of people are asking: who are these people who have sat in judgment of America?…

DAVID CURLEY: Who is Standard & Poor’s? One of the three major rating agencies which highlight investment risk. S&P is considered the gold standard among these. But that standard has was tarnished when all the rating agencies said those mortgage-backed securities, which brought down the economy, were solid AAA investments. Hauled before Congress, some now question that agency’s credibility.

MELLODY HOBSON: Now they come in, and they flex. As if they’ve been, you know, this bastion of, of correctness, when they’ve completely been wrong. So now, everything that they do is suspect, in my view.

But of course. She’s financially backing President Downgrade’s campaign. Bloomberg:

“I see more energy from the CEO community and the business-leader community than I have ever seen,” said John Rogers, 53, chairman of Chicago-based Ariel Investments LLC and someone who raised more than $500,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign. “The support here is really, really deep.”

Ariel, which provided Obama with office space the first three days after his election, employs another Obama friend and fundraiser, Mellody Hobson. She’s the company’s president, a personal finance contributor on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and filmmaker George Lucas’s girlfriend.

Lucas himself donated more than $33,100 to Obama’s 2008 campaign. Hobson donated $28,500. She and her boyfriend have $61,600 already invested in Obama’s political career. But did ABC News disclose any of that before asking her to analyze the S&P downgrade? Of course not. They wanted her to shill without disclosing the fact she’s a political partisan. They wanted people to believe she was simply an analyst providing a fair and balanced view of the development. It’s misleading and sleazy.