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The Internal Revenue Service has led all three newscasts on all three days this week. This time, the Story of the Day came from the White House, where President Barack Obama fired Steven Miller, the IRS Acting Commissioner. Yet the firing came so late in the day that, funnily enough, none of the White House correspondents covered the IRS; all were assigned to the President's other newsmaking, his publication of the e-mail back-and-forth last September on how to word the talking points that members of Congress could securely use in the aftermath of the attack on the Benghazi Consulate.

CBS, as it has done all week so far, continued with the double team of Nancy Cordes and Wyatt Andrews on the Tea Party and the IRS. Cordes filed from Capitol Hill on the prospects for investigation, discipline and prosecution of misbehaving taxmen: watch out for the Hatch Act. Andrews visited the Action for a Progressive Future to find out if liberal social welfare organizations received as strict scrutiny as the Tea Party (they did not, and no one knows why not). On NBC, Lisa Myers filed on the IRS for the third straight day, as Chuck Todd assessed the potential political damage to the Obama Presidency. ABC's Pierre Thomas threw in a complaint by Franklin Graham, the son of the famous evangelist, that the IRS' motive for its audit of his Christian charity was his opposition to same-sex marriage. Is the Rev Graham's complaint was justified? Thomas did not tell.

As for the Benghazi e-mails, instead of advancing the story, ABC's Jonathan Karl spent most of his report reassuring us that the details of his Exclusive on Friday about the twelve different draft wordings of the talking points were accurate. NBC's Peter Alexander, too, focused on the al-Qaeda-related details that were omitted as the drafts were iterated.

On CBS, Major Garrett took a different angle: not only how the talking points were changed, but also why. Garrett reported that the CIA's changes were not a consequence of the State Department's requests, but coincidental with them; the CIA's concern was to keep the FBI's investigation uncompromised. Karl was less forthright than Garrett, using a little post hoc, propter hoc sleight of hand: Karl confirmed that the CIA's wording was changed after the State Department expressed concerns, without reporting, one way or the other, on whether the changes were in response to those concerns.

Those two major stories aside, this ABC newscast was remarkably more tabloid than those of its two rivals: Neal Karlinsky brought us the 65-year-old OJ Simpson's Las Vegas courtroom testimony; Rebecca Jarvis purchased a $2 lottery ticket for the $360m Powerball jackpot; Paula Faris brought us Angelina Jolie' ovary removal, complete with a completely unrelated clip of Jolie sitting down with anchor Diane Sawyer seven years ago -- presumably simply to demonstrate that Sawyer did indeed get that Get. The only one of those three stories to be mentioned on either of the other two newscasts, was a brief Jolie-related stand-up on ovarian cancer by NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman.
Andrew Tyndall 5/16/13 10:10:30 pm

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