Ever wonder where the idea of what passes for news in the media is just fiction? It is taught that way!
Also, these people a just fools. What kind of idiots want to give the government more money to waste by supporting the power of its totally corrupt tax collection bureau? m/r
The Campaign to Wish Away the IRS Scandal | The Weekly Standard
Mark Hemingway August 2, 2013
Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, political scientist Brendan Nyhan has a piece dismissing the IRS scandal out-of-hand and gently scolding the media for for acting irresponsibly in their coverage. You get the thrust in the first two paragraphs:
At this point, the evidence on the Internal Revenue Service scandal is clear. Contrary to the initial hype, there is no credible evidence of White House involvement in targeting conservative groups or even evidence that Tea Party or other conservative groups were targeted exclusively. It turns out that the keyword lists used by the IRS to target groups applying for tax-exempt status for additional scrutiny also included terms like “Occupy” and “Progressive” as well as “occupied territories” and “open source software.”
Nonetheless, the scandal could have serious consequences for the IRS. As The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis argued this week, Peggy Noonan’s comparisons to Watergate may be hyperbolic but the reputational damage to the agency that she describes could be real.
Nyhan goes on to produce a series of graphs showing that after the initial reporting on the scandal, newspaper coverage of the revelations of additional developments in the IRS scandal, such as the revelation the IRS's BOLO (Be On the Lookout) list included terms targeting left-wing groups, didn't recieve much coverage at all.
Alas, Nyhan's framing of the IRS scandal and the subsequent developments hovers somewhere between obtuse and misleading. It's true that no credible evidence of White House involvement in the IRS's targeting of Tea Party groups emerged. But as far as I know, no one asserted any credible evidence to begin with. Was there some irresponsible speculation to that end? Sure, but I don't see how you keep a lid on that -- especially when there's the historical precedent of White House occupants using the IRS to target their political enemies.
As for Nyhan's assertion there's no "evidence that Tea Party or other conservative groups were targeted exclusively," where does that come from? That seems like a bit of sophistry -- there's a huge chasm of meaning between "exclusively" and the more accurate "disproportionately." No one was under the illusion the IRS targeted no other nonprofit groups other than conservative groups over a period of years. The issue is the relative amount of scrutiny.
-go to link-
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