Letters We Wish We'd Written Dept., Followed By a Sad Trombone

From today's once great Washington Post Kaplan Daily:

Still another article in The Post ["House GOP bills intended to push White House on scandals," The Fed Page, July 10] used the phrase 'the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative political groups."

Notwithstanding IRS official Lois Lerner's disastrous and inexplicable "admission" to the contrary, there has been no evidence yet adduced that the IRS "targeted" conservative groups. To the contrary, the facts so far tell us that the IRS's exempt organizations division did exactly what it is supposed to do.  It must attempt to implement properly a 100-year-old provision of the tax code that requires the service to differentiate between organizations that are primarily "social welfare" organizations, hence properly exempt under the statute, from ones that are primarily political -- conservative or not -- and hence not exempt.

Regrettably, repeated use of phrases such as "targeting conservative organizations" and "IRS scandal" implants those notions in the public consciousness, and subsequent revelations are unlikely to change that.  The only scandal is the way the news media leap on incomplete "facts" and parrot unsupported accusations to churn controversy. Good people's jobs and reputations have already been damaged, if not destroyed.  Words matter.  But then you don't need me to tell you that.

Conrad Rosenberg,
Silver Spring
The writer is a retired branch chief of the exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service.

Regular readers of the Kaplan Daily see this all the time in the reportage, not just with the IRS nothingburger, but with of every bit of undigested barf that it disgorged from the right-wing media and finds its way uncritically into "mainstream" outlets like the Kaplan Daily.   It's all about sales, hits, "winning the morning," whatever you wish to call it -- just don't call it journalism.

Of course, it's not just the print media that engages in this endless, mindless rock-turning.  Sadly, some deranged souls don't even remember rocks they turned over earlier.  Cue the sad trombone.