In-mid May, new Obama scandals piled up at the White House. A portrait emerged of a president whose Internal Revenue Service was harassing his enemies, a State Department that lied to the world about the fatal debacle in Benghazi and a Justice Department spying on reporters who might leak anti-Obama information.
But several national journalists announced that Obama had been scandal-free for the first four years-and-change of his administration.
On NPR’s “Morning Edition,” anchorman Steve Inskeep asserted to Cokie Roberts that “this administration has been described — I don’t even know how many times — as remarkably scandal-free.”
On ABC’s “World News,” reporter Jonathan Karl proclaimed “a White House that takes pride in being scandal-free has been hammered by a series of controversies.” On MSNBC, Rana Foroohar of Time magazine lamented, “What’s so sad about it is the President has been very rightfully proud of the lack of scandal in his administration so far.”
These journalists suffered from complete, mentally paralyzing amnesia about the first term, with the deadly “Fast and Furious” gun-running fiasco, the embarrassing decline and fall of Solyndra and other solar energy companies funded by Energy Department loans and Benghazi-gate, to name a few.
Now, several months after a brief flurry of scandal coverage in the national media, journalists have gone numb enough that President Obama is shamelessly campaigning around the country attacking the Republicans for dwelling on “phony scandals.” He’s formed such a close bond of collusion with reporters that they tell him his second-term ideas are all great: “A lot of reporters say that, well, Mr. President, these are all good ideas, but some of you’ve said before; some of them sound great, but you can’t get those through Congress,” he said Wednesday.
Obama makes it sound like the reporters are all thinly disguised Democratic strategists who advise him on how to succeed, but they all worry about those horrid Republican obstructionists in Congress who hate Obama (perhaps because they’re racists) and want him to fail as a president.
Reporters aren’t embarrassed enough by the president’s boasting of his chummy reporter-advisers to sound like independent journalists. The networks engage in outright censorship of information that could damage Obama’s gloriously, prematurely decorated place in political history.
That’s become especially obvious on the IRS scandal in targeting Tea Party groups. The real Americans who have been targeted don’t think this is a “phony scandal.”
On July 18, a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing destroyed the early spin that all the onerous delays and intrusive inquiries were contained to one office in Cincinnati, and not in the DC offices of the Obama administration.
Witnesses inside the IRS found it peculiar that supervisors demanded Tea Party applications for nonprofit status be reviewed by the office of IRS chief counsel William Wilkins — one of two Obama appointees to the IRS. Where were the networks on this unfolding story of political corruption at the IRS? Nowhere. Not one report. House Speaker John Boehner worked the term “IRS scandal” into an answer on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That was it.
Then, in a mere three days, the Big Three network morning shows devoted more news coverage to the birth of the British royal baby then they gave to news of the IRS scandal since that story broke in May. ABC, CBS, and NBC deluged American viewers with 187 minutes worth of hype about another country’s monarchy. In contrast, the same programs provided only 157 minutes, over 10 1/2 weeks, for a scandal that would be hyped as another tidal wave of Watergate if it happened under a Republican president.
From June 18 through July 23, there was a total of 11 stories on the Big Three evening and morning shows on IRS abuses (CBS: 9, NBC: 2, ABC: zilch). This dreadful record comes despite disclosure of new IRS scandals to feed the news cycle, such as $70 million in bonuses handed out to IRS agents; hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts granted to a business owner with a friend inside the agency; and agents exploiting IRS credit cards to pay for such things as diet pills, romance novels and even online pornography.
During the entire month of July, the IRS scandal — which creeps ever closer to the White House — received about a minute-and-a-half of network news coverage. That 92 seconds came when “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley broke the blackout with a few questions for Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on July 24. He asked Lew “Has any political appointee had oversight of the decisions that were made around the Tea Party applications?”
Lew would only deny, deny deny. “There has been no evidence of anyone in a political position having been involved in any of those decisions.” But CBS stuck to royal-baby news and other nonsense the next morning, skipping that Cabinet interview.
The national media are writing a presidential fairy tale. And no matter what happens, what scandals surface, the media will ignore it, so that they can give Obama a warm, fuzzy “happily ever after.”
L. Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham are, respectively, the founder and president, and the director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and co-authors of “Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election — and How to Stop Them from Doing It in 2016,” available from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.