NewsBusters Archive

   The reporters at Good Morning America on Friday continued White House damage control efforts on the growing scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative groups. Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos insisted that Barack Obama is "trying to turn the corner after a tough week fending off controversy."

Talking to Jon Karl, he wondered, "Are some of [the GOP] leaders worried that some of the Republicans may be overplaying their hand?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Karl lectured, "There's real concern about this." The journalist added that certain Republicans are talking about "impeachment." Instead of focusing on political rhetoric, Karl could have mentioned that the IRS official in charge during the Tea Party targeting is now running Obama's health care office. He skipped this development.

Call it Luke Russert's version of "bitter clingers" on steroids . . . In Russert's world, there are apparently two kinds of Republican congressmen.  The "smart" ones—to be found on the Ways & Means Committee—and the others, whom he calls the "God, guns and guts people," presumably in reference to this book.

Russert made his statement on today's Morning Joe, responding to Joe Scarborough's question as to whether Republicans would overplay their hand over the current scandals.  According to Russert, Republicans chose well in holding today's hearing of IRS officials before the Ways & Means Committee because that's where the GOP puts its stars: "it's not the God, guns and guts people on the Ways & Means Committee: it's the smart people." View the video after the jump.

During Wednesday's edition of MSNBC's weeknight program “The Last Word,” host Lawrence O'Donnell responded to a statement made earlier in the day by President Obama about the Internal Revenue Service's discrimination against conservative groups seeking non-profit status: “Across the board, everybody believes” what was revealed in the report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is “an outrage.”

“Everybody but me,” O'Donnell insisted. “I believe that the IRS agents in this case did nothing wrong.”

On Wednesday's The O'Reilly Factor, liberal FNC political analyst Kirsten Powers again accused President Barack Obama of speaking "lies" in claiming that he called Benghazi a terrorist attack early on. Host Bill O'Reilly introduced the segment by playing a clip of Powers from Monday's Special Report with Bret Baier. Powers, from Monday:

As the Obama administration’s Benghazi narrative begins to crumble, they’ve decided to recycle old talking points in the hope that the news media won't fact-check them.

On May 13, during a press conference, President Obama said, “The day after it [Benghazi] happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler – in this instance – should be commended for calling Obama’s statement for what it is: a lie.  Kessler listed three instances after the attack where Obama failed to call it a terrorist attack:

On Wednesday's All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes boosted the efforts of convicted felon Tim DeChristopher as he interviewed the environmental activist who served two years in prison for making illegal bids in an oil lease auction that he had no way of honoring.

Hayes gave the activist a forum to encourage more law-breaking as part of the environmental movement as DeChristopher suggested that only "civil disobedience" would be effective.

Chris Matthews’ toxic anti-conservative vitriol has spread onto other MSNBC shows, infecting them with his slanderous language. It is no secret that Matthews opposes the Tea Party as extremists, often times accusing them of outright racism towards President Obama.

Appearing on PoliticsNation with racist host Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews disgustingly claimed that a full 10-20 percent of this country:

 Well, that was quick, and sadly predictable. A day after MSNBC’s Morning Joe panel criticized President Obama for his lack of transparency on the three scandals plaguing his administration, the panel kicked off their Thursday show by heaping praise on the president for yesterday’s news conference.

Co-host and liberal activist Mika Brzezinski "felt good about" the conference, lauding the president’s courage for "doing the thing he doesn’t like to do" and promising that things would "get done" (in other words, his job). Panelist Willie Geist chimed in with his agreement, gushing over how the president "encountered" and "took action" on all three of the scandals in one day. There was no word from Geist about President Obama’s silence on both recent scandals up until yesterday, and his refusal to address the Benghazi attacks for more than eight months.

CNN's senior legal analyst thinks there's too much "hysteria" over the IRS scandal and that it really may not have been that big of a story to begin with. He argued thus on the 11 a.m. ET hour of Thursday's Newsroom.

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin's spin went as follows: "the IRS is required by law to investigate these organizations," and "it's not clear that there were liberal organizations applying, certainly, in the numbers that the Tea Party were," and "A lot of these organizations that are complaining wound up getting approved for 501(c)(4) status. So what are their damages?" Ergo, "we need to know a lot more, but we need perhaps a little less hysteria, too." [Video below the break. Audio here.]