On the Media interview on scandal coverage

For those who are interested, here's my interview with Brooke Gladstone about my scandal research for this weekend's edition of On the Media (click to play):

Comments

[David in Cal]

There was a fair amount of truth in this interview. Nevertheless, it was morally repulsive.

It's no doubt true that silly stories like the umbrella wrongly get reported as a part of the scandal. OTOH important parts are not being reported as much as they should. E.g., the IRS is not cooperating in the investigation, and there's no sign that the Obama Administration is putting any pressure on them to cooperate. The lack of an independent prosecutor for the IRS scandal is a scandal itself, according to the liberal Washington Post.

BTW the "IRS scandal" is really a more general Administration scandal. E.g., one Tea Party leader claims she was harassed by the IRs and the FBI and her business received unsolicited audits and unscheduled audits. Government harassment to punish political activity should be intolerable in the United States of America.

Based on facts now coming out, it appears that the Attorney General may have lied to Congress under oath about his actions taken against reporter James Rosen. Nevertheless, he's the person in charge of that investigation, including his own possible misdeeds. There should be an outcry and demand for a reliable investigation of what happened.

The point is, the amount of media coverage may relate to the factors discussed by Brendan and Brooke Gladstone. However, it's much more important that the federal government did some terrible things. IMHO it's appallingly amoral for Brendan and Brooke to look only at the subsidiary aspects, such as timing or competition from other news stories.

BTW I was particularly disgusted by the discussion of GHW Bush and the scanner. That discussion implied that using government agencies to punish political opponents was comparable to wrongly blaming the President for supposedly not knowing how about supermarket scanners.

[David in Cal]

Brendan and Brooke call it a "problem" that the tornado didn't do more to deter scandal coverage. Apparently they think that scandal coverage has been excessive. However, that evaluation ignores the seriousness of the actual actions.

E.g., take Watergate. It fits Brendan's profile of factors: occurred during Nixon's second term; opposition didn't like Nixon; there may have been a pent-up demand; etc. However, by far the most important factor driving the Watergate coverage was the awful things done by Nixon and his cronies. I hope Brendan and Brooke would agree that the large amount of news coverage was appropriate, not a "problem."

I think the current Obama Administration scandals involve some very serious matters, so the amount of coverage has not been excessive E.g., USA Today reported that Obama's IRS was not only harassing groups seeking first time non-profit designations, but also sabotaging existing non-profit groups by releasing confidential information. This act alone deserves to be a huge scandal. It hasn't even gotten as much coverage as it deserves IMHO.