IRS Targets Tea Party

A staple of establishment press reporting is to attribute a contention to a limited group of people to either place the truth of a statement into doubt, or to make it appear that only the group involved holds that opinion. Examples taking this to the absolute extreme could include: "Conervatives say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west," and "Republicans believe that abortion takes a…

On Friday's Morning Joe program, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough complained about the absence of media attention to the fact that IRS commissioner John Koskinen, in charge of an organization currently embroiled in an investigation into whether it has unfairly targeted conservative groups during the Obama administration, is himself a "big Democratic donor" who has donated to President Barack Obama…

MRC president Brent Bozell appeared on The Kelly File on Fox News Channel on Thursday night to discuss the ongoing media effort to downplay or ignore Obama scandals. Kelly began by showing video of the president claiming in Minneapolis that the scandals are fabricated: “Sometimes the news that's being reported on is really important. I mean what's happening in Iraq is relevant. But sometimes…

NBC justice correspondent Pete Williams this morning refused to answer queries from Dan Joseph of our sister site MRCTV.org regarding the peacock network's lack of coverage of the ever-deepening IRS scandal, including Lois Lerner's missing emails. "I cover the Supreme Court. You're asking the wrong guy," Williams protested, insisting that while he "[has] a lot of power at NBC... deciding how…

A new Fox News survey tested Team Obama’s credibility: "The Internal Revenue Service says that two years of emails from IRS employees about targeting conservative and tea party groups were accidentally destroyed because of a computer crash and cannot be recovered. Do you believe the IRS that the emails were destroyed accidentally or do you think they were destroyed deliberately?" The answer…

[See update below.] The New York Times’ motto is “all the news that’s fit to print” but in their eyes it seems as though the IRS scandal isn’t worth printing all that much.  Research conducted by the Media Research Center found that in the past 6 months (183 days) the New York Times has published only 13 news items on the IRS’ targeting of Tea Party groups.  The study focused on the dates of…

Wednesday afternoon, Huffington Post's Sam Stein, whose track record of fundamentally dishonest reporting and refusing to admit the obvious even when caught red-handed goes back at least six years, used a tweet to promote an excuse even a six year-old wouldn't dare try to use on his or her parents. Behold Stein's tweet, which, modified to defend the indefensible in the Obama administration,…

Halfway through the Wednesday edition of her eponymous program this evening, CNN's Erin Burnett turned to her colleague Joe Johns for breaking news regarding a fresh development in the IRS scandal: email evidence suggesting Lois Lerner may have pushed for an audit of Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.  Immediately afterwards, in a panel discussion, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin endorsed…

In the June 24 edition of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, the Comedy Central host spent the first 10 minutes of his show mocking the blatant incompetence of the IRS. Even though Jon Stewart did say Republicans were “d***s” to the IRS commissioner during the hearing, he spent most of the segment making fun of the IRS’s “unacceptable” behavior which “borders on criminal idiocy.” While Stewart…

Chuck Todd, NBC’s Political Director, Chief White House Correspondent, and host of The Daily Rundown on MSNBC did his best to deflect from the IRS scandal by wondering if “there are any actual real victims’ of the IRS targeting of conservative groups.” Appearing on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown on Wednesday morning, Todd insisted that “the question at hand is whether explicitly political…

Yesterday, David Ferriero, the head archivist for the U.S. government, testified before Congress and insisted that the IRS had not followed the law requiring the agency to notify his office three years ago that Lois Lerner’s hard drive had crashed containing official records and emails.  Despite these new details, only CBS has bothered to report on the latest in the IRS scandal with both ABC…

On June 23 and 24, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held multiple hearings surrounding the revelations that the hard drive of former IRS executive Lois Lerner had been destroyed containing thousands of emails pertinent to the investigation of their targeting of conservative groups.  Despite the new details and the subsequent congressional hearings, the CBS Evening News with…

"The email scandal, and it is a scandal, it is a crime, broke 11 days ago, and it took six days, it took Paul Ryan erupting at the IRS commissioner six days later for the media to cover this [on] the evening news," Media Research Center founder and president Brent Bozell reminded Fox News Channel (FNC) substitute host Stuart Varney on the June 24 edition of Your World w/Neil Cavuto. Yes, a…

After ten days of ignoring the June13 revelation that the IRS mysteriously lost two years worth of Lois Lerner's emails related to the scandal plaguing the agency, Tuesday's network morning shows finally took notice of the development only to tout Democrats dismissing the latest congressional hearing on the government abuse as a "farce." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump…