Conservative Movement to Liberal Media: IRS Scandal Deserves "Constant, Merciless Scrutiny"
RESTON, VA – Today, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh, Citizens United President David Bossie, Tea Party Patriots Co-Founder Jenny Beth Martin, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins joined Media Research Center (MRC) President and Founder Brent Bozell to demand that the liberal broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – stop censoring coverage of the ongoing IRS targeting scandal.
According to the MRC, when news first broke that the IRS was targeting conservative groups – particularly the Tea Party – the Big Three news networks jumped to cover the story, filling their evening and morning shows with a total of 96 stories in the first two weeks (May 10 through May 23). But after those two strong weeks, the broadcast networks predictably lost interest in the scandal, and the coverage slowed to a crawl – just 32 stories in the subsequent weeks (May 24 through June 17). From June 18 through June 28 there were a total of only 11 stories on the Big Three evening and morning shows about IRS abuses. There were zero stories from June 28 until July 24, when CBS Evening News gave the scandal a minute and a half -- the only network coverage for the entire month of July so far.
And during all this time, the IRS scandal has actually been growing.
Multiple new IRS scandals emerged to feed the news cycle, such as $70 million in bonuses to IRS agents, hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts granted to a business owner with a friend inside the agency, and agents abusing IRS credit cards to pay for such things as diet pills, romance novels and even online pornography.
Last Thursday during the latest Congressional hearing, it was revealed that the IRS chief counsel’s office appears to have been directly involved in the IRS’s scheme to target Tea Party and conservative groups. This shatters the story that this was a scandal orchestrated by two IRS agents in Cincinnati.
This scandal has now reached the Obama Administration. The IRS chief counsel is one of only two Obama appointees in the agency. Neither ABC nor NBC has uttered a single syllable about it. Only CBS’s Scott Pelley has mentioned this connection on air during an interview with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.
The conservative leaders react:
“This IRS scandal is worse than Richard Nixon using the IRS to punish his powerful political enemies. This is an unprecedented abuse of IRS power perpetrated by liberals to persecute and harass ordinary American citizens – the same ordinary American citizens who rely on ABC, CBS, and NBC to report the news fairly and accurately.
“Our friends and neighbors have been targeted by their own government for special mistreatment because they don’t agree with the Obama Administration, and the liberal media elites simply don’t see anything wrong with that. The broadcast networks could use their immensely influential platform to tell the truth and hold the powerful accountable for their misdeeds. But instead, they’ve turned their back on their own professional responsibility.
“The liberal media’s refusal to cover the IRS scandal – more than the NSA scandal, more than DOJ’s surveillance of journalists, more even than the tragic loss of life in Benghazi – cuts to the very heart of their corruption. No fair, objective journalist can look at the facts of this flagrant abuse of power and not conclude that it is a massive political scandal deserving of constant, merciless scrutiny.
“Any ‘so-called’ journalist who says otherwise is at best an ethically bankrupt shill for the administration and at worst thinks conservatives should be persecuted by the government for their beliefs.”
L. Brent Bozell, III, president and founder, Media Research Center
David N. Bossie, president, Citizens United
Rush Limbaugh, nationally syndicated radio talk show host
Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder, Tea Party Patriots
Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council
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