At hearings yesterday before the House Judiciary Committee, conservatives found themselves defending the press when they hammered away at Attorney General Eric Holder over the Justice Department’s secret gathering of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors.
Pity the AP didn’t show similar vigor when conservatives were hollering about their own mistreatment by overreaching government officials. That was roughly two years ago, when conservative groups complained the IRS was singling them out in its partisan treatment of their applications for tax-exempt status.
Now that the IRS has admitted guilt and the acting commissioner has resigned, the complaints are getting full coverage. But a Factiva search of news stories for the words “IRS” and “tea party” at the time the complaints were raised found only a handful of AP stories on the subject. They date from 2012, and two are short: one about a letter from GOP senators to the IRS raising the issue, and one about the commissioner’s subsequent denial before Congress.
The one substantive AP story we found on the IRS-tea party battle ran March 1. And it did detail complaints from several conservative leaders about an IRS “witch hunt.” But it also included a sentence saying accusations of partisanship, whether liberal or conservative, are “usually without merit” — citing unnamed “tax experts.” Of the two experts named, one was a former IRS official who suggested the IRS was just doing its job, while the other attributed delays to the volume of applications.
You be the judge.