* A note on measurement: I searched LexisNexis Academic for stories in which both IRS, I.R.S., or Internal Revenue Service and audit, exempt, target, or conservative appeared in the headline or lead between May 11 and July 28. I restricted the New York Times results to those that appeared in the A-section and were written by the national desk. The Washington Post search was restricted to A-section stories that were attributed to the print newspaper rather than its website or blogs. Front-page articles for Politico were classified using time-stamped snapshots taken by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine when available. Articles were coded as appearing on the front page if they were primary headlines in the first three rows of content when the top headline was a full block (example) or in the first four rows when the lead story was smaller and had two vertically aligned stories to its right (example). This area typically included approximately the same number of stories as a newspaper front page.
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It seems that you are brushing over what I believe are credible reports that the targeting of tea party and other conservative groups occurred with higher frequency and severity than the targeting of progressive etc groups.
Has your close reading of the newspaper given you any insight into that?
If there was an effort by high IRS officials (eg Lois Lerner or the IRS General Counsel) to screw over tea party groups, wouldn't it have been obvious to them that they had better include at least a *few* liberal groups?
It looks to me like the press dumped this story largely because they don't like doing anything that hurts Obama. Initially they could hardly avoid covering it, but as soon as any thin pretext for dismissing it appeared, they ran away.
And you are basically spinning for them by not grapping seriously with the topic.
#1 Posted by Jason, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 03:28 PM
Something is wrong with the graphs.
The NYT graph shows one-and-two-thirds A-section stories in the week June 9-15 and one-and-a-third in the week June 16-22. Story counts can't be fractions.
It looks like data points were inappropriately connected across weeks without data. Unfortunately, Excel will blindly do this for you if you choose a line graph.
What are the actual NYT article counts for those two weeks? If they were zero (a strong possibility, since it appears no data was present for those weeks), the actual picture of news coverage is slightly different than portrayed.
A line graph without data-point markers isn't a good choice here. The data is discrete (there is nothing "in between" consecutive weeks where the height of the line connecting the dots makes sense), so a bar chart is a better choice.
#2 Posted by Steve Kass, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 05:50 PM
It seems your timeline highlights have overlooked a few recent ones.
The chief counsel’s office for the Internal Revenue Service, headed by a political appointee of President Obama, helped develop the agency’s problematic guidelines for reviewing “tea party” cases, according to a top IRS attorney. In interviews with congressional investigators, IRS lawyer Carter Hull said his superiors told him that the chief counsel’s office, led by William Wilkins, would need to review some of the first applications the agency screened for additional scrutiny because of potential political activity.
The journalistic community made its mind up on this once they could cobble together a semi-coherent talking point that there was no way anyone from the administration could have anything to do with this. Minds made up, talking points accepted ... time to circle the wagons. Hell, this very publication has spent the past 3 months wetting its panties anytime someone attempts to dig a little too deep into this topic.
Come on, you personally know how this works. Apply what happened to you at the American Prospect to the newsrooms of the NY Times, Wapo and Politico. Liberals really dont take well to their own oxes being gored by the media machine they have built.
#3 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 06:01 PM
the evidence on the Internal Revenue Service scandal is clear
How can the evidence be clear when so much of the evidence is missing? Lois Lerner refused to testify under oath. I believe that the IRS General Counsel and some other IRS personnel have also not testified under oath.. The only investigation is being conducted by the Obama Administration. The Obama Administration is investigating itself, with a seeming lack of diligence. E.g. I have read that the investigators haven't even interviewed the conservative groups that believe they were discriminated against. A great amount of IRS material subpoena'd by the Darrel Issa hasn't been provided.
We can't be "clear" about what all this missing information would tell us without looking at this information..
#4 Posted by David in Cal, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 07:32 PM
That sucking sound you hear is Brendan on his knees for the Obama administration.
This "article" is ridiculous. Let's see the IRS chief visits the White House 157 times, during the Bush Administration for a comparable period the IRS Chief visits.... 1 time.
Also, not a single progressive organization was kept from gaining tax exempt status, yet tea party and conservative groups were stone walled for 2 years.
But nothing to see here, no real scandal, keep moving on sheep.
#5 Posted by Dan in DC, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 07:49 PM
Thanks to Steve for noting the error in the NYT data - there was a bug in my Stata code. It has been corrected above.
#6 Posted by Brendan Nyhan, CJR on Thu 1 Aug 2013 at 09:22 PM