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Leaving the breasts aside for one moment, NBC had Lisa Myers walk us through the report of the Inspector General of the Treasury Department, which blamed the taxman's targeting of applications by Tea Party groups for tax-free social-welfare status on "ineffective management." On CBS, Nancy Cordes previewed the oversight of the House Ways & Means Committee, and the suspicion that Acting-Commissioner Steven Miller was lying when denied the existence of extra Tea Party scrutiny.
ABC's Jonathan Karl traced the growing political pressure on the White House arising from the scandal, as did Meet the Press anchor David Gregory on NBC. Karl showed not only the criticism of conservative media activists -- Rush Limbaugh and (an unidentified) Glenn Beck -- but also presented a montage to demonstrate how TV journalists, too, are turning the IRS into a cause celebre. Spot the odd man out among Karl's representatives of the political press corps: George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, Brett Baier on FOX News Channel, Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
As for the merits of the Tea Party applications for tax-exempt 501(c)4 status, Wyatt Andrews on CBS checked in on campaign finance reform maven Fred Wertheimer at the pressure group Democracy 21. First, Wertheimer minced no words in contradicting the applicants' claims of social welfare, not political activism. Second, he lashed out at the IRS for their focus on the small fry. The big 501(c)4 fish were Crossroads GPS and Priorities USA -- Political Action Committees in everything but name.
As for the luminous Jolie, NBC and CBS went through the motions of covering her decision to have her breasts cut off as a medical story. Both networks assigned the story to their in-house physicians, Nancy Snyderman and Jon LaPook. Snyderman offered a cost estimate of $3,000 for the test for the BRCA1 gene, whose presence raised the odds so high that the 37-year-old Jolie would develop cancer in her breasts that she decided to take such a drastic preventive measure. LaPook walked us through a diagram of the mastectomy surgery, which preserves the nipple, while removing the surrounding breast and replacing it with implants -- yet he could not resist the celebrity angle too, showing 60 Minutes file footage of the star's profile by correspondent Bob Simon.
ABC also had its in-house physician Jennifer Ashton on hand for a brief consultation (at the tail of the Faris videostream), but only after Paula Faris filed her report. Faris did not beat around the bush. The reason that Jolie is so newsworthy is because she is so ridiculously photogenic. In Faris' report, which lasts 133 seconds, she packed in 24 separate images of that beautiful face, plus a couple of movie clips.
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