Scandal Crazy

Josh Marshall shows how right-wing media undermines its own credibility with shoddy reporting on Talking Points Memo.

Yesterday I heard word on Twitter that ex-IRS Chief Douglas Shulman had visited the White House a whopping 157 times. The story started at The Daily Caller...Clearly Shulman was there often enough to be in regular contact with President Obama about cracking down on the West Memphis Tea Party...Shulman was actually appointed by George W. Bush and remained in office through most of President Obama’s first term. So presumably he’s not a really strong Democratic partisan.

But now a real reporter (in this case my old friend Garance Franke-Ruta) has looked past the toplines of the White House visitor logs and done frankly just the very basic due diligence that any reporter would do when reporting out a story like this. There are a few problems with the story. First, why on Earth would Shulman need to visit the White House 157 times except to crack down on the Tea Party and other American Patriots? Well, it turns out there’s this thing conservatives have never heard of called OBAMACARE, which actually relies a fair amount on the IRS for implementation. But it gets better. Those 157 visits? Those are times he was ‘cleared’ to visit the White House. The logs only show he actually showed up 11 times. It’s quite possible that the records missed a couple visits. But it seems likely that the story - which originated at The Daily Caller - was off by about ten fold.

Undeterred, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly is calling this story "the smoking gun" of the IRS scandal.