Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I took the Arizona Republic's cog in the right-wing noise machine of GOPropaganda, Doug MacEachern, to task earlier this week for his post on the IRS "scandal." MacEachern: Hard to like big government.
MacEachern is shamelessly back at it again today with The IRS scandal: When a "scandal" is actually a scandal, playing his role in the GOPropaganda "IRS Scandal Week."
Democrats have realized it is time to stop criticizing IRS misdeeds that apparently didn't happen, and it's time to start mocking Republicans relentlessly for making baseless allegations with no foundation in reality. Steve Benen writes, Putting the nail in the phony-scandal coffin:
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released this video [below the fold], which is just a brutal takedown of Republican claims. This week, instead of doing real work, House GOP leaders are eager to hold "message" votes related to the IRS story, but as the video makes clear, there is no IRS story. Republicans raised specific questions, which have been answered. They raised specific allegations, which have been discredited.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer dismissed the so-called controversy as a manufactured outrage based on nothing. "The allegation was, by many Republicans, that the White House was directing the IRS to target Tea Party groups," he said. "That was the allegation. And that has turned out to be completely false. There is no evidence to suggest that. And now it has turned out that the IRS was not just targeting conservative groups but also looking at a large number of progressive groups as well."
The op-ed pages of the Arizona Republic(an) have no credibility as long as this guy works at the paper.
Fire him. Chattanooga Free Press Editor Terminated Over ‘Shove It, Mr. President’ Headline.
UPDATE: Steve Benen makes a salient point about our pathetic GOPropaganda media. When the media's attention span turns reckless:
If the political world took a keen interest in this controversy when it first came to public light, then moved on when there were no new developments, it'd be fairly routine. But that's not quite the case here -- rather, the IRS story broke, news organizations pounced, and then proceeded to ignore new developments that undermined the legitimacy of the story itself.
Outlets didn't move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened -- things that made the story itself appear baseless.
In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false. The political world was obsessed for weeks with the questions, then found the answers boring and not worth sharing with the public.
When the right screamed bloody murder, major news organizations followed the herd. When the left said, "You know, maybe the public would benefit from hearing about the evidence that the administration didn't actually do anything wrong," the political world shrugged its shoulders and found some new toy to play with.
Liberal media, indeed.
And why does this matter? Aside from the fact that accountability should still have some meaning in American politics? Perhaps because misguided coverage of a phony controversy led the public to believe President Obama, the White House, and the IRS itself were responsible for serious misdeeds. The taint of "scandal" remains, for no reason other than the political world told the public about allegations, but decided the evidence to the contrary wasn't important.
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