Steve Benen has written an excellent article about media coverage of the supposed IRS scandal, When the Media’s Attention Span Turns Reckless. As we all remember, the media was all over the story originally when the Republicans were making big allegations about the supposed scandal and how it reached all the way to the White House. Remember how IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times? Oh yes, those were the days of big media attention—the days when they didn’t know what was going on and so just passed on talking points.

But as facts came out, the media lost interest. On one level, this is nothing new. The media is only interested in exciting stories. But there are two reasons why we should care in this case. Benen discusses the first reason at some length: media outlets didn’t stop covering the “scandal” when nothing was happening; they stopped covering it it when things were happening, just things that pushed against the original narrative. He links to a paper in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Scandal Attention Cycle. It provided the following graph of scandal coverage in Politico, Washington Post, and New York Times:

One thing I find really interesting is that there is no increase in coverage on 18 July 2013, when Inspector General Russell George testified that his report was in fact one sided and focused only on what the IRS had done to conservative groups. In fact, there were no front page articles from the two newspapers that whole week. The New York Times managed only one article at all in its A section; the Washington Post managed two. That to me was the real scandal. George claimed that Darrell Issa never told him to only look at targeting of conservative groups, but all indications are that this was the case. Now that’s a scandal that a young and ambitious journalist might grab onto. And that brings us to the second reason you should care about the initial media freak out and subsequent disinterest.

The media is not doing its job. There is no journalism going on. When there were spikes in coverage, it is because the Republicans were making allegations. The original peak in coverage reflected only that Republicans said that there were bad goings on and Democrats were cowed. No one (other than a few bloggers) dug into what was known even at that time. While the mainstream press were still ramping up their coverage of this supposed scandal, I was writing that there was no scandal—and this was hardly a major issue for me! So why was it that someone as far outside the loop as possible could get this right while the professionals at major news agencies treated this nonsense like it was serious? That’s because most journalists really are nothing but reporters: they report what the two sides say and don’t dig any deeper. After all, finding the truth might lead to bias because as everyone in the mainstream media knows, the truth is right in the center between what the Republicans say and what the Democrats say.

The study puts the situation as bluntly as you will ever see in such an article:

The press may be enshrined in our Constitution, but at this point I hardly think it matters. For every courageous reporter like Glenn Greenwald, there are hundreds who are ready to run him down for the sin of not pandering to power. It reminds of the time right before George W. Bush went to Ireland. He was interviewed by Carole Coleman for Raidio Teilifis Eireann, the Irish public service broadcaster. He was clearly shocked that a reporter would ask real questions of him. But the issue wasn’t (as many liberals thought) that Bush would never allow real journalists to interview him. The issue was just that any president could assume he would be handled with kid gloves by the American press. And that’s more true now than ever.

Afterword

Before I get some push back on that last sentence, let me explain. The mainstream press are always more harsh with Democrats. There are two reasons for this. First, Democrats are generally more capable of holding their own. No reporter wants something like Sarah Palin not being able to mention any Supreme Court cases. Second, people in the mainstream press are paranoid about having liberal bias. I assure you that if Romney had been elected president, the American press would treat him with even more deference than they did Bush.