{"id":14666,"date":"2014-05-09T11:20:30","date_gmt":"2014-05-09T18:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14666"},"modified":"2014-05-09T11:32:46","modified_gmt":"2014-05-09T18:32:46","slug":"npr-doesnt-often-outrage-but-when-it-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=14666","title":{"rendered":"NPR Doesn’t Often Outrage, but When It Does …"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NPR\"NPR’s\u00a0Morning Edition news hour today\u00a0featured\u00a0a four-minute segment titled “Debate Endures Over Tax Exempt Status Of Crossroads GPS<\/a>.” NPR correspondent Steve Innskeep introduced the piece with these words:\u00a0“Tomorrow marks a year since the IRS admitted it had given excessive scrutiny to Tea Party and right-leaning patriot groups that had wanted tax-exempt status.”<\/p>\n

The report itself, presented by NPR correspondent Peter Overby, takes\u00a0as a given that\u00a0the IRS applied\u00a0special scrutiny to a conservative group’s request for tax-exempt status, never mentioning\u00a0that the IRS investigates all such requests, from liberal and\u00a0conservative groups alike.<\/p>\n

Overby flatly labels Crossroads GPS a social welfare organization. It is not. It’s a political action committee run by GOP operative Karl Rove. Its purpose is to\u00a0raise money to produce and air partisan attack ads, as Overby himself demonstrates a few seconds into his piece\u00a0when he plays one of their ads. Overby doesn’t mention\u00a0that under US law political action groups\u00a0are not eligible for tax-exempt status, nor does he point out\u00a0the IRS is required by law<\/em>\u00a0to review applications for tax-exempt status to determine whether groups claiming to be social welfare organizations actually are.<\/p>\n

Steve Innskeep, in his introduction,\u00a0misleads listeners when\u00a0he says the IRS admitted to concentrating on conservative groups. What the IRS admitted to was scrutinizing\u00a0“political action type organizations” trying to disguise themselves as social welfare organizations in order to gain\u00a0tax-exempt status, and that equal scrutiny was applied to applications from liberal and progressive groups.\u00a0The IRS maintained\u00a0all along it was doing its job by\u00a0scrutinizing tax-exempt status applications. This\u00a0information is\u00a0public record,\u00a0confirmed\u00a0by FBI investigations and congressional hearings, and has been widely reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

WTF, NPR? Anyone listening to today’s Morning Edition\u00a0could be excused for\u00a0thinking your correspondents\u00a0are reading from\u00a0a list of GOP talking points. Nice Polite Republicans is supposed to be a joke. You don’t have to live up to it literally, do you? Or are you in fact now just another arm of the Republican Party? Peter Overby\u00a0and Steve Innskeep certainly seem to be in the\u00a0GOP’s\u00a0employ, and their\u00a0reports should rightly be presented as editorial opinion. You did your listeners … and objective reality … a real disservice today, NPR.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the heck, NPR? Anyone listening to today’s Morning Edition could be excused for thinking your correspondents are reading from a list of GOP talking points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,8],"tags":[1536,1276,41],"class_list":["post-14666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics","tag-crossroads-gps","tag-irs","tag-npr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14666"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14674,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14666\/revisions\/14674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}