According to the Media Research Center, the Christie scandal has received 34 minutes and 28 seconds of coverage. But the networks presented just two minutes and eight seconds of coverage of the IRS scandal since July 1.
Obviously, both scandals matter -- and both signal a government that lacks respect for the citizens who are supposed to be its masters, not its pawns (thanks to Rush Limbaugh for discussing it yesterday). But there can be no dispute that the IRS scandal is much worse than the Bridgegate matter.
In the former, the government knowingly and deliberately targeted individual, innocent Americans for the political opinions they were exercising in accordance with the First Amendment, after Tea Partiers had been denounced by the President himself. In the latter, as wrong as it was, innocent Americans were inconvenienced incidentally as, it appears, the result of a feud between politicians and/or their staffs (resembling more closely the disgraceful decision of the President to close national monuments to the taxpayers subsidizing them).
Recommended
Both the IRS and the bridge scandals are unacceptable -- but one is scarier and much more wrong than the other. Don't expect the media to grasp the distinction, though. For them, any scandal that implicates Republicans is infinitely worse than any Democrat scandal.
They have their priorities, you know.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member