-By Warner Todd Huston
There has been much speculation in the media on why Obama’s current scandal of the IRS targeting conservative groups for attack didn’t come out last year when the initial flurry of reportage on the incident was seen. Well, The New York Times thinks it has the answer: it was Rush Limbaugh’s fault.
When the IRS finally admitted these last few weeks that it had, indeed, unfairly targeted conservative groups–most especially during the 2012 election cycle–many pointed out that this targeting was being complained about for some time. But why did the scandal just break big now, in May of 2013, when stories about it go back several years?
The paper of record pondered this very question in a May 21 piece by Michael D. Shear that places the blame on Limbaugh. It’s all because of “slutgate,” Shear claims.
The Times points out that in March of 2012, Representative Charles Boustany, Jr. (R, LA) held a hearing on the IRS targeting but the story got little traction. Shear quotes several parties to the effect that it was a “dog-bites-man story” in that the media wasn’t interested in talking about Tea Party groups complaining about the IRS.
So, what stories did hold the media’s attention during Boustany’s 2012 hearing? Rush Limbaugh’s media manufactured “slutgate.”
It was during the first week of March that Rush Limbaugh ridiculed abortion mill supporter Sandra Fluke for being a “slut” because she wanted the U.S. government to pay for her contraception.
The media, of course, went into a feeding frenzy on “slutgate” to the point that Rush eventually apologized for his over-the-top characterization of the abortionist. It was all the media could talk about at the time.
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New York Times: IRS Scandal Ignored Because of Rush Limbaugh”
A new poll conducted jointly by The Washington Post and ABC News revealed some interesting trends. Among other findings, more Americans feel that Obama and his administration are lying about Benghazi, a majority feel that the IRS acted inappropriately by targeting conservative groups, and the media is still distrusted with a majority feeling that the Justice Department’s seizure of the AP’s phone records was justified. Despite all this disapproval, Obama’s approval rating is still just over 50 percent positive.
On the heels of reports that “half” the staffers at the L.A. Times would resign if the paper was sold to conservative billionaires the Koch brothers, the Newspaper Guild–Communications Workers of America, a journalist labor union, have issued a statement declaring the pair unfit to own a newspaper.
There is a confluence of events over the last few weeks that perfectly proves the essential anti-Americanism of the Old Media establishment in this country today. It is evinced in two separate stories, one wheret the left is excoriating the Koch brothers for wanting to buy the L.A. Times and a contrasting story where journalists are falling all over themselves to get hired by the new news network being started by Al Jazeera, the jihad-supporting, anti-American, Muslim-owned news agency.
The White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) has been a mainstay Washington to-do for years. Lately, however, it has come under fire for turning Hollywood–literally. In the wake of the event, some outlets continued the bashing but most lavished attention on the dinner or at least lauded it as harmless fun.
Before the dust has settled, before any idea of who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing and why is determined, the Boston Globe is fretting for the city’s Muslims claiming that there will surely be a “backlash” if the bombers are found to be Islamic extremists. This despite that even after 9/11 there was never any real backlash against Muslims in this country.
In shades of the Nuremberg Trials, an April 12 article from the Associated Press seems to excuse away the actions of the assistants of accused criminal abortionist Kermit Gosnell as “only following orders.”
In an interesting break from reality, Roll Call posits that Obama has now “given up” on Republicans as partners for helping him get some “governing done” in Washington DC. Of course, the Capitol Hill newspaper fails to show when it was that Obama ever consider the GOP to be his governing partner in the first place.
The Des Moines Register courted controversy on Wednesday by posting on the Internet an interactive map featuring the locations of Iowa schools that didn’t have security guards. But after a wave of criticism, only hours later the newspaper pulled the map down and reworked it to eliminate the names and addresses of the specific schools. The map was re-launched later that evening.
The Old Media has been looking for ways to attack the new Pope, Francis I, since he was introduced to the world. Initially, the media attempted the needle the new Pontiff into “reforming” the Church or face failure, but this week it seems that there is a new line of attack: he is an advocate for dictators.
The Washington Post has announced that it is adding Hilary Rosen, a long-time Democrat operative, attorney, and lobbyist, to its editorial pages.
In yet another effort at reading tealeaves, a newspaper in Australia claimed that Pope Benedict “may” have stepped down because of the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed the Catholic Church for decades.
Koch Industries recently published a response to the work of UK Independent journalist Steve Connor whose work, Koch says, “misled readers.” The two articles accused Koch Industries of secretly funding attacks on climate change.
If Hillary really doesn’t run for president in 2016, it is so hard for the Washington Post to “imagine the presidential field without a woman contender” that the paper has decided to look at who might replace her. And the paper has arrived at… Janet Napolitano?
Rocket launchers roaming our city streets and being turned in at gun buyback programs is a fake story the Old Media establishment has repeatedly promulgated as real and I am getting a bit sick and tired of it.
It was bad enough that a New York newspaper published the names and addresses of thousands of New York’s legal gun owners putting many of them in danger, but now it has been discovered that much of the information on the map was wildly inaccurate. Worse, the Journal News didn’t make any effort to verify the information it published.
There are reports that Donald Trump is looking at a new way of influencing the media, this time by trying to buy The New York Times. If he pulls it off it’ll be huuuuge. 
Fox News recently reported that ex-crooks are denouncing the New York paper that published the names and addresses of thousands of the state’s gun owners saying that publishing the information was nothing less than a road map for criminals planning home invasions and burglaries.
The Journal News is in the center of controversy again. In December the Westchester, New York area paper politicized the names and addresses of thousands of New York’s legal gun owners then threatened to publish even more in the near future. But now a hacker group has hacked into the newspaper’s database and is disseminating the names, addresses, and passwords of thousands of the Journal News’ own customers.
The Journal News of West Nyack, New York, doesn’t want fellow New Yorkers to be allowed to own guns and what better way to show support for its stand against guns than to hire armed guards to patrol its offices? 
In perhaps an unsurprising move, the Chicago Tribune has announced that starting in January, the Chicago-based paper and several other Tribune-owned papers will be 
As we mentioned early on December 15, 
Nate Silver, who shot to political media stardom for successfully parsing the election polls, has been on a bit of a tour of various media outlets since his successful prediction of November’s election results. One of his recurring themes is that “journalism” is important but “punditry is fundamentally useless.”