Missing The Target Entirely

In a week filled with fake scandals and hyperventilating politicians, we've often found it good practice over the years to step away during the worst of the media frenzy to see what effect the actions of those in the media, like us, are having on "regular" Americans - and what stories we and others in the media are missing.

What the media at large is missing is a lot.

The budget cuts from sequestration keep rolling on, with states cutting back both efforts to prepare for wildfire season, and for flood warning systems across the U.S. Older Americans are still suffering too, as the hits to programs like Meals on Wheels keep coming. Even the IRS is getting hit with a five day shutdown in the middle of their current mess - though you're unlikely to hear most of our colleagues even mention one of these stories.

E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post seems just as frustrated as we are about all of the clearly important issues being buried under the rubric of the "scandal" narrative.

The fact is, right now, many of the "villagers" of the DC media elite are no better than the politicians they consistently denounce, on either side of the aisle - effectively killing those they're supposed to protect, while entirely missing their target.

Take the self-aggrandizing team of Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Politico, for example.

The two men wrote a piece for Politico on Wednesday, denouncing President Obama, and falsely claiming that the entire DC media corps was "turning on President Obama."

As Greg Sargent - definitely not a hack - points out at The Plum Line, the VandeAllen piece makes abundantly clear how out of touch and self-obsessed folks like Allen and VandeHei really are. Obviously, VandeHei and Allen must have forgotten about Fox News, blogs like RedState, right-wing talk radio, and notorious right-wing rags like the Washington Times, which all are part of that Washington media corps. None of those media organizations ever turned toward President Obama in the first place - so how could they be "turning on President Obama" now?

The bigger point, though, is that the kind of professional navel-gazing Allen and VandeHei engaged in tends to lose the real news in the fake, and turns potential news media consumers into people who've tuned out the entire media industry.

Real stories like the unprecedented rise in sexual assaults in the U.S. military, or the firing of acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller by President Obama last night get lost in the narrative of "scandal" and the petty politics of revenge.

If the source you turn to for news didn't also point out the growing number of fast food worker strikes across America - including the one in Wisconsin yesterday - or the win against austerity that opened schools back up in Saginaw, Michigan on Wednesday, or all the other stories we've mentioned here today, you might want to reconsider your support of those "news sources."

If they can't even hit what they claim to be aiming at, what kind of mess are they really creating?

The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight

It's good to be right, and we're more than happy today to cram our right-ness down the throats of those who told us the IRS "scandal" just couldn't possibly be incompetence, as we noted it to be early Tuesday morning. While we can't take full credit for the idea that the IRS kerfuffle was just incompetence and not malice, as of publication time today, it appears that our analysis of that non-scandal was fairly spot on.

Of course, no matter what the obvious facts and official investigations find, we can almost guarantee the tea bagger extremists won't accept the results - or the fact that the tea party's own extremism appears to be what made them the target of the IRS in the first place.

CNN's Jake Tapper added further insult to the already wounded pride of the tea partiers on Tuesday afternoon, when he effectively shot down whatever tatters of the Benghazi "scandal" remained, and most of the media moved on.

There are, in fact, real, true, and very serious scandals going on in both the IRS case and the AP case - though both point nowhere near the White House or President Obama, which is making the tea party extremists bitter, to say the least.

In the IRS case, the Inspector General's report came out last night, and it proves the White House did not drive that investigation. The report further stated that the behavior of the IRS staffers responsible for the categorizing of 501c4 applicants was "not politically biased."

The real scandal in the IRS case is that the legal standards for which groups are allowed to file for - and are granted - 501c4 tax exempt status are incredibly vague. The culprits responsible for that failure in judgment shouldn't surprise anyone - the corporate-friendly Roberts Court and the politically constipated Congress. Thanks to their irresponsible actions regarding the Citizens United case, those individuals at the IRS who were stuck with the responsibility for judging whether a 501c4 applicant was involved with politics are people who have little to no political experience - and in fact, are supposed to be apolitical. As the Inspector General's report made clear, the IRS workers who made these decisions had little to no idea their actions were against their own agency's rules.

In the AP case, Attorney General Holder recused himself from the decision to seize the AP's phone records, in order to keep the case as unbiased as possible. Further, as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed, the President hadn't even been notified of what the Justice Department had been doing on the AP case until the past few days. The White House Council's office was only notified themselves a few weeks ago of what the DOJ has found - and according to Holder, the person leaking information to media organizations is a serious threat. There IS definitely a problem - both with how the DOJ dealt with the AP, and a definite security leak. To the dismay of Republicans, though, the facts prove neither problem originated in the White House.

So now, while the tea party sulks, and Republicans in Congress desperately cling to talking points that have already been debunked, real scandals remain to be dealt with.

For example, the major sexual assault problem in the U.S. military, where the coordinator of the Army's sexual assault prevention office joins his colleague from the Air Force - where both men have been arrested and legally accused of sexually assaulting different women within the last ten days.

Somehow, we doubt you'll hear the Tea Party faithful crying out for immediate justice to be done on that issue.

Zombies And Scandals

With all the non-scandals popping up in Washington, DC, not to mention the potentially real ones, we'll forgive you for thinking the far right is in some sort of climax of sedition, with all their anti-Obama scandals lined up in a row.

As one of our staff members was reminded on Monday, "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." Even Napoleon knew the difference between a scandal and a bunch of fools running loose.

Sadly, the nutcases in the right-wing media and currently in control of the GOP don't seem to understand such subtleties - nor do they seem to care. Apparently, they'd rather drag around the same old zombie lies about Benghazi, than take a look at what the real problems and potential scandals are in our government.

For example, the IRS "scandal" that blew up over the weekend, may not be much of a scandal at all if, like us, you believe Rick Ungar of Forbes. As Ezra Klein noted on Monday, there are some very legitimate reasons for the IRS's dumb mistake. In short, over the last few years - since Karl Rove began flaunting the tax code loophole - massive numbers of political groups have been applying for status as tax-exempt 501c4 groups. The IRS must review thousands of these applications, and needs some shortcuts to try to determine which organizations are legitimate, and which should be subjected to greater scrutiny.

The key, as Greg Sargent and Jamelle Bouie both pointed out on Monday, is that we now need a serious probe of what happened at the IRS - and the media needs to handle all of these "scandal" stories with caution, instead of racing to unsupported judgments.

Of course, Monday afternoon also saw yet another "scandal," as the AP admitted the Justice Department has obtained a large number of phone records tracking AP reporters and editors, for an as-yet unknown reason. As journalists, and members of the media, we certainly believe the Department of Justice needs to answer why they subpoenaed the phone records of the AP, and what their reason is for their highly unusual actions.

What we do not believe, specifically, is that it is President Obama's job to rein in his Attorney General. While Americans may have become accustomed to a White House directing the actions of the DOJ during the first eight years of this century, that kind of relationship is specifically contrary to the proper rules of independent conduct between the President and the AG's office.

As Jonathan Bernstein pointed out at The Washington Post's Plum Line blog on Monday, if the media really, truly wanted a scandal, they should try "the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans." What Bernstein is talking about, in a word, is sedition. Some of the delays now being forced upon the Federal government by Republicans in Congress may even pass the Brandenburg test soon, in certain circumstances - though in a broader sense, Congressional Republicans have long ago passed the basic hallmarks for seditious behavior.

There's no question that the current American media and political atmosphere is currently ripe for scandals aimed at the White House - both real and perceived - as political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently calculated.

However, as Joan Walsh and Jill Lawrence both remind us, if Republicans just keep dragging around their zombie all-scandal playbook from the 90s, the heads that will roll in the 2014 and 2016 elections will most likely have an "R" stamped at the base of the skull.