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ABC may have overlooked the Internal Revenue Service scandal when it broke on Friday but after watching all weekend as it gathered steam, it joined the unanimous verdict. All three newscasts led with the IRS picking on the Tea Party, making it the Story of the Day. NBC's Lisa Myers gave us a preview of the report by the Inspector General of the Treasury Department into IRS scrutiny of 300 different tax-exempt applications. CBS offered a twofer: Wyatt Andrews traveled to Richmond to get examples of the taxman's scrutiny of the Tea Party in Virginia and Nancy Cordes on Capitol Hill traced the start of the Ways & Means Committee's response to Tea Party complaints to early in 2011, soon after Republicans regained power. ABC gave the story to Jonathan Karl at the White House.

As for the other travails of the Obama Administration, Tom Costello on NBC covered the Justice Department's clandestine inspection of two-months' worth of telephone records at the Associated Press. This time last year, news broke that a CIA spy had infiltrated an al-Qaeda bombmaking cell in Yemen. This is how the network newscasts covered the spy at the time; here is the foiled plot. The feds are now investigating how that secret leaked to AP.

As for the State Department, accused of organizing a cover-up of the fact that it was an Islamist militia that attacked its Benghazi Consulate last September, two of the three White House correspondents covered Barack Obama's sarcastic defense of his diplomats: Chuck Todd on NBC and Bill Plante on CBS. Plante's report consisted of extensive Presidential soundbites. Todd offered unusual hat-tips to the competition, using soundbites from FOX News Channel and from CBS' Face the Nation.
Andrew Tyndall 5/14/13 9:46:52 pm

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