NewsBusters Archive

Good Morning America's Jon Karl on Monday exposed new details about the growing scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservatives. The correspondent revealed, "I've obtained a soon-to-be released investigative report that shows the IRS started targeting Tea Party groups more than three years ago." He added that this was "despite [the IRS] publicly claiming otherwise."

According to the journalist, phrases such as "limiting government," "educating on the Bill of Rights" and "criticizing how the country is being run" were enough to have the IRS start tracking them. However, Karl steered clear of culpability when it came to the Obama administration. He explained, "The White House said it had no idea that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups." [MP3 audio here. See video below.]

As NewsBusters has been reporting all morning, the folks on MSNBC's Morning Joe almost unanimously came down on the Obama administration for using the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate its political opponents.

Putting an exclamation point on the outrage late in Monday's program were co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist who shockingly agreed, "This is tyranny" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

It says something about the seriousness of the rest of the news during the past several days when a story about unethical spying by reporters working for a company founded and built by the current mayor of New York City barely makes a ripple.

It has been alleged, and now admitted, that Bloomberg reporters monitored terminal login activity to develop stories about possible Wall Street executive departures before anyone else outside the entities involved knew and for other news-gathering purposes. The practice appears to go back to when Gotham Mayor Michael Bloomberg was still at the helm of Bloomberg LP, as seen in the bolded sections in the excerpt from a Saturday CNBC news story which follows the jump:

It only took four and a half years, but the liberal media finally found something to criticize President Obama for.

After former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw excoriated the administration on MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday for using the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate political opponents, NBC's chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd said, "This story has more legs politically in 2014 than Benghazi" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

When it comes to investigative reporters, how do you change a bulldog into a lapdog? Easy: change the occupant of the Oval Office from a Republican into a Democrat.

Witness Carl Bernstein's pitiful performance on today's Morning Joe.  The man who teamed with Bob Woodward to bring down Richard Nixon now credulously claims that he "can't imagine" that President Obama is possibly involved in the IRS targeting of conservative groups.  Bernstein instead blames the "hyper-partisanship" in Washington.  Yeah, cause politics were so kumbaya in 1972, Carl.  View the video after the jump.

It appears this time it's more official than the last Barbara Walters is retiring rumors in March.

The Hollywood Reporter claimed moments ago ABC's longtime newswoman will announce on Monday's The View that she will retire next summer:

On the supermarket stands, InTouch magazine touts the possibility of an “$8 Million Tell-All” book for former Today show co-host Ann Curry. “An insider tells In Touch that Ann Curry...is being courted by top publishers to pen a tell-all book.”

“The publishing industry is just dying to get their hands on Ann’s side of the story, and the figures being batted around are enormous,” claimed the source. But an NBC representative insisted Curry “is not writing any book.” New York Times TV writer Brian Stelter told the magazine this NBC Curry debacle is still hot a year later because “it was so mismanaged. There are so many unanswered questions.”

Friday's revelation that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups prior to last year's elections was certainly reported but not with nearly the outrage as if a Republican administration went after liberals this way.

Driving home the point, George Will just before reading from the Impeachment Articles of Richard Nixon said on ABC's This Week Sunday, "If the George W. Bush administration had IRS underlings, out in Cincinnati of course, saying, 'We're going to target groups with the word progressive in their title,' we would have all hell breaking loose" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Asked on Sunday’s Reliable Sources if the wider media dismissed the Weekly Standard story, by Stephen Hayes about the Benghazi talking points getting altered to take out any references to terrorism, because of his affiliation with conservative media, The Hill newspaper Managing Editor Bob Cusack agreed.

Then he turned his criticism on his colleagues: “If you look at the time line of how this administration dealt with Benghazi, there’s been a lot of contradictions from the get go. So, the media hasn’t looked at it as extensively as they should have.”