Fox News pushed falsehood that the Inflation Reduction Act adds 87,000 new IRS employees more than 200 times

MATT GERTZ/Media Matters

 Fox News has promoted the false claim that the Inflation Reduction Act adds 87,000 employees to the Internal Revenue Service at least 203 times since Senate Democrats announced the bill’s framework on August 5, according to a Media Matters review of the network’s programming. That false talking point fuels Fox’s incendiary smear that President Joe Biden is turning the IRS into a “new Gestapo” that will “hunt down and kill middle-class taxpayers.”

The IRA, which Biden signed into law on August 16, includes $80 billion over the next decade in additional funding for the IRS. A portion of those funds would support tougher tax enforcement targeted at Americans making more than $400,000, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would raise $204 billion. The net gain of $124 billion, along with prescription drug pricing reform and tax increases on billion-dollar corporations, helps the bill fund investments in clean energy and health care while also reducing the deficit by over $300 billion over 10 years. 

Republicans and their right-wing media supporters oppose increased funding for the IRS; they prefer to hobble tax enforcement so that wealthy people can continue to cheat on their taxes with impunity. GOP politicians spent years defunding the tax police and have focused their IRA criticism on this provision, deceptively warning that the bill creates a “new army of 87,000 IRS agents” who “will be coming for you,” in the words of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). 

Fox has played a key role in stoking right-wing ire against the IRS, including by spreading the false claim that the bill would lead to the hiring of 87,000 employees at least 203 times. The talking point has been commonplace both on “news side” programs like The Faulkner Focus (20 instances), America’s Newsroom (15), and America Reports (12), and on “opinion side” shows like Fox & Friends First (23 instances), Fox & Friends (16), The Ingraham Angle (15), Tucker Carlson Tonight (12), and Hannity (10). The purported 87,000 new hires were specifically described as “agents” at least 169 times.  

But it is false to claim that the IRA provides for 87,000 IRS hires, agents or not. The IRS has not announced any hiring plans in response to the IRA — the figure comes from a separate Treasury Department proposal from 2021 detailing what the IRS could do with additional funding, which predates that bill. That proposal includes 87,000 new hires across all positions, including secretarial and IT staff, not strictly auditors or “agents.” GOP-driven budget cuts in recent years have reduced the IRS headcount to near-1974 levels, and the hiring plan is meant to address a major loss of employees to retirement and “simply maintain current levels,” according to PolitiFact.

Fox has also regularly promoted the wildly inflammatory and false claim that the new IRS hires would all be armed, doing so at least 40 times over the same period, 9 of which came on Fox star Tucker Carlson’s program. That’s a conflation of a separate talking point the right has used to fearmonger about the IRS. In fact, as the network’s White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich has noted on Twitter, only a tiny fraction of the service’s employees belong to the Criminal Investigation division, a century-old unit whose special agents carry firearms because they handle dangerous cases involving crimes like public corruption, narcotics, and money laundering.

These Fox falsehoods are part of a wave of right-wing demagoguery targeting the IRS. As I noted last week after Carlson alleged that the Biden administration is hiring “87,000 armed IRS agents to make sure you obey”:

Carlson’s falsehood follows a week of unhinged demagoguery from Fox and others in the right-wing media that links the new IRS funding with the Mar-a-Lago search as dark signs that the Biden administration has weaponized the government against Americans. Fox pundits have described the potential wave of IRS hiring as an “economic, financial militia against regular people” deployed by those who “want to control you”; a “new army” that will “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers”; a “new Gestapo” Biden will use in an “abusive, corrupt manner”; “a Praetorian Guard that will be unleashed again” to “grab all the cash they can by any means necessary”; and “part of an orchestrated campaign to target Americans and have the federal government be at war with those Americans.”

The virulence of the right-wing attacks on the IRS has triggered concerns that its employees may be subject to violence. On Tuesday, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig announced “a full security review of its facilities nationwide” in light of staff safety concerns, The Washington Post reported. Rettig, a Trump appointee, suggested that Republican criticisms of the service are fueling far-right extremism and threats.

That isn’t giving Fox hosts a reason for pause. On Tuesday, Laura Ingraham once again falsely claimed that the IRA funds “87,000 IRS agents,” and described Rettig’s statement as “preemptive action against its critics” by the Biden administration.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original programming on Fox News Channel for any of the terms “Internal Revenue Service,” “IRS,” “Inflation Reduction Act,” or “IRA” or any variation of the phrase “tax enforcement” within close proximity of any of the terms “hire,” “employee,” “personnel,” “agent,” “armed,” “87,000,” “87000,” “87 thousand,” “eighty-seven thousand,” “80 billion,” or “eighty billion” from August 5, 2022, through August 23, 2022.

We counted segments, which we defined as instances when the Internal Revenue Service funding provision of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) was the stated topic of discussion or instances when we found significant discussion of the provision. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in the multitopic segment discussed the provision with one another. We also included passing mentions, which we defined as instances when a speaker mentioned the provision in a segment about another topic without another speaker engaging with the comment, and teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about the provision scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We then reviewed all segments, mentions, and teasers for any claims suggesting that the IRA funding for the IRS would result in the hiring of 87,000 new employees. Within those claims, we also noted when speakers described the employees as “agents” or “armed.”

We split Fox programs into “news” and “opinion” sides. We defined “news” programs as those with anchors, such as Bret Baier or Martha MacCallum, at the helm, while we defined “opinion” programs as those with hosts, such as Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham. We used the designations from each anchor or host’s author page on FoxNews.com. We also considered the format of the program; we defined those using a panel format, such as Outnumbered and The Five, as opinion programs.

Fox repeatedly mentions Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton after FBI search Trump's Mar-a-Lago

 

• From Media Matters by ROB SAVILLO

• Since news broke that the FBI executed a search warrant at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Fox News has incessantly invoked Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton in its reporting.

  The network has mentioned Biden at least 58 times and Clinton at least 46 times since 7 p.m. ET yesterday while MSNBC and CNN each mentioned Biden at least once and Clinton at least 13 and 8 times, respectively.

  Fox contributors and guests were quick to bring up Biden and Clinton in conversations about the breaking news. Appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox contributor Lara Trump ignorantly claimed that “nobody bats an eyelash about” Clinton deleting emails. On Fox & Friends, former Trump acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker complained that there is “a continued two-tiered system of justice where people like Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, and others get away, it appears, with nothing for consequences for their activities.” 

  The FBI investigation reportedly centers on the mishandling of presidential records, and possibly classified documents, brought to Trump’s home after his presidential term ended. The National Archives, which handles all such material, previously recovered 15 boxes from the estate.

• 

• Methodology

Fox's Katie Pavlich Accuses Hillary Clinton Of "Race-Baiting" For Support Of Expanded Voting Access

From the June 8 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:

 

 

Previously:

Fox Kept Cutting Away From Democrats During Benghazi Hearing

 EMILY ARROWOOD/Media Matters For America

Fox News repeatedly cut away from live coverage of a House Benghazi hearing when Democrats held the floor. 

Former deputy CIA director Michael Morell testified on April 2 before the House Intelligence Committee about the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Fox afforded extensive live coverage to the hearing, beginning with opening statements from Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI), Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-CA), and Morell.

For nearly an hour, Fox stayed live on the hearings without interruption, airing over 20 minutes of questioning from the Republican chairman. But when Rogers yielded the floor to Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (CA) to question Morell, Fox cut away to hear "analysis" from a network contributor, breaking live footage for the first time.

As the hearing went on, a pattern emerged -- out of the five Democrats who asked questions at the hearing, four saw Fox break live coverage less than a minute into their time, with the network choosing instead to air commentary or go to commercial break. Fox allowed the questioning of only one Democrat, Ruppersberger, to air for over 60 seconds. In contrast, the network aired a majority of Republican congressmen's questions, cutting away from only one Republican, Rep. Joe Heck (NV).

In all, Republicans were granted live coverage for an average of 5 minutes of questioning, while time given to Democrats averaged 3:16 minutes (an average heavily helped by coverage of Ruppersberger's questions). 

Fox has repeatedly campaigned for more Benghazi hearings, no matter their efficacy, and celebrated when their demands were answered. It only follows that the network would politicize its coverage of these repetitive hearings as well. 

Fox News guest: Felons should buy guns, but helping people buy Obamacare is too far

By David Edwards/Raw Story

Conservative National Review writer Charles Cooke told Fox News on Thursday that criminals should not be able to assist people using the government’s website to buy health insurance, but they should be allowed to own guns.

During a “breaking news” segment about new dropping public support for President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, Fox News host Gretchen Carlson pointed out that the National Review had a new report that was going to “scare some folks.”

According to the report, “convicted criminals” have been hired as Obamacare navigators in California, “including three individuals with records of significant financial crimes.”

“I should just say at the outset that I think as a rule, I do think sometimes we do over-punish people for crimes they’ve committed in the past,” Cooke opined. “We take away their vote, we take away their guns, and we can sometimes ruin their lives for too long.”

“But this is an issue where privacy is of paramount importance,” he continued. “There’s a lot of personal information and financial information that is being pushed through the system. And some of the people who are working in the system really have some developed skills of fraud and corruption.”

Dana Howard, the spokesperson for Covered California, told National Review that the employees had not been disqualified from the Navigator program because their records had been clean for an extended period of time.

“People make mistakes,” Howard said. “They paid their debt to society. They rehabilitated themselves. And so they apply, and they meet the qualifications. We do not see them as a threat.”

Watch this video from Fox News’ The Real Story, broadcast Jan. 30, 2014.

Fox: Wendy Davis And Her "Stilettos" Are More Scandalous Than Chris Christie

HANNAH GROCH-BEGLEY/Media Matters For America:

Fox News is now suggesting that minor contradictions in Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis' life story constitute a more important political "scandal" than accusations of corruption and political retribution by NJ Gov. Chris Christie's administration.

On the January 23 edition of Fox News' Happening Now, co-host Jon Scott accused "op-eds and pundits [for] tearing into [Christie's] character," while ignoring the "political scandal in Texas." This scandal, according to Scott, was that Davis' life story had "holes" in it, partly because she didn't pull "herself up by her stilettos" and instead relied on some financial help from her second husband in order to attend law school:

Scott: The interesting thing about Wendy Davis is this story that has propelled her to state-wide stardom, maybe even national stardom. She says she was married at 19, teenage mother, divorced, lived in a trailer, made it through Texas Christian University and Harvard Law School, and now she is where she is today, a state senator and maybe the next governor of Texas. The problem is, there are some holes in that story.

[...]

The suggestion that she pulled herself up by her stilettos and made it through Harvard Law School doesn't exactly jive with the fact that her husband, her then-husband, paid for it all, then as soon as it's all paid for, she left him, and he got custody of the two girls.

Michael Barone, a Fox News contributor, argued during the segment and in a Washington Examiner piece that Christie's record as governor of New Jersey was being scrutinized by media "because he might be a successful presidential candidate," and that Davis should come under similar media scrutiny for these details of her life because her run for governor could potentially "turn Texas blue," a move which would have national significance.

But the reason to scrutinize Christie's record is not that he might run for president. It's that he has been accused of corruption and petty political retribution in his position as the current governor of New Jersey. At no point during the segment did either Scott or Barone delve into the details of "Chris Christie's problems," but they are far more than minor contradictions in a timeline of life events.

Christie has admitted that his administration caused a massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, in what is alleged to have been political payback against a local mayor. Though the governor claimed he was unaware of his staff's actions, and later removed two top aides, his administration was subsequently accused by a different mayor of holding Hurricane Sandy relief funds hostage for political reasons.

There are at least three separate legal investigations examining the accusations launched against the Christie administration.

In contrast, Davis is not currently under investigation for possibly abusing the power of her office as state senator. There are some small, legitimate questions about her presentation of her life story, but those questions have been blown out of proportion by conservative media, who have launched an absurd and often sexist campaign against her. Right-wing radio hosts and Fox contributors have implied she is an unstable and unreliable mother, unfit for public office, and have attacked her for defying gender norms by leaving her spouse to pursue her career (a move many male politicians have made, with little media fanfare).

Scott's sexist joke about Davis' stilettos is just the latest example of these demeaning attacks, and furthers the network's desperate attempt to bury the Christie scandal by deflecting attention to unrelated stories.

Fox has previously attempted to compare Christie's scandal to the September 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and to the IRS scandal, in which bureaucrats largely based in Cincinnati allegedly devoted inappropriate scrutiny to conservative groups. The network also devoted less than 15 minutes of coverage to Christie on the day the scandal broke, and mentioned the revelations about Hurricane relief only once the day they emerged.

Cropped images via The Texas Tribune and Gage Skidmore, using a Creative Commons License.

Fox News Doesn't Care About The "Bloody Senate Report"

OLIVIA KITTEL/Media Matters For America:

"I don't care about the bloody report!"

With that, Bill O'Reilly delivered the climax to a night of Senate report denialism on Fox News.   

This week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the results of its investigation into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi. The report dispelled many of Fox News' favorite conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks, including the myth that the Obama administration engaged in a cover-up by suggesting the attacks may have grown out of protests outside U.S. facilities in Benghazi over an anti-Islam video, an idea then-U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice suggested in a series of interviews on the broadcast Sunday shows three days after the attacks.

And yet, Fox hosts Bill O'Reilly and Bret Baier continued to push these myths, even when covering the Senate report that debunked them.

On the January 16 edition of Special Report, guest A.B. Stoddard pointed out that the report found no evidence of a cover-up, and Baier responded, "You said no cover-up, but there's clearly an open question about this story about the protests, and about where that all came from."

Bill O'Reilly went even further, peppering guest James Carville with questions about the origins of Rice's suggestion that the attacks may have originated from a protest over the film. Carville attempted to explain that the Senate report answered O'Reilly's question, but the Fox host repeatedly interrupted him, finally yelling, "I don't care about the bloody report":

The Senate report makes clear where reports of a protest were born -- from the intelligence community. The report noted that the intelligence community (IC) received and disseminated an account in the immediate aftermath of the assault that there had been protests against the anti-Islam video at the diplomatic facility prior to the attack, based largely on press accounts that made that claim. The report also revealed that it took days for eyewitness statements by U.S. personnel indicating that there had been no protests to make their way into CIA assessments -- this information was not reviewed or disseminated until after Rice's statements.

What's more, the Senate's findings specifically dismissed the notion of a cover-up, stating:

The Majority concludes that the interagency coordination process on the talking points followed normal, but rushed coordination procedures and that there were no efforts by the White House or any other Executive Branch entities to "cover-up" facts or make alterations for political purposes.

Fox News' heavy coverage of the Senate report has consistently ignored the facts in the report in order to smear the administration's response.

Fox: Where The Chris Christie Scandal Is Really Just About Benghazi

EMILY ARROWOOD/Media Matters For America:

Fox News can't seem to talk about the Chris Christie bridge closure scandal without invoking Benghazi.

Fox & Friends devoted five segments during its January 10 broadcast to the growing scandal surrounding Republican Gov. Chris Christie and his administration's involvement in deliberate traffic gridlock across the George Washington Bridge as political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ.

But in every segment purporting to discuss Christie, the hosts and guests used the story to attack President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by bringing up the September 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.  

Right-wing media figures have attempted to deflect from the Christie saga by attacking Obama and Clinton with tired myths, a tactic Fox's coverage took to new heights today. But the network's dogged determination to tie Benghazi to the Christie story is contextualized by new revelations about Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and his focus on influencing national politics.

Ailes has long expressed a love for Christie and reportedly lobbied hard for him to throw his hat in the ring for the 2012 presidential race. As a New York Times article on the upcoming biography of Ailes explained, he aimed in 2012 to use Fox News to "elect the next president."

Media critics have already begun speculating that Fox's scant coverage of the Christie scandal the day it broke is evidence of a motivation to protect Christie's political brand before the 2016 election. The network's attempt to hide Christie behind Benghazi only strengthens that view. 

Suck Dynasty’? Reality stars fizzle in awkward Fox New Year’s interview

By David Ferguson/Raw Story

Anyone looking for important revelations came away disappointed by a New Year’s Eve interview with “Duck Dynasty” star Willie Robertson and his wife Korie on Fox News.

Fox Anchors Bill Hemmer and Elisabeth Hasselbeck struggled gamely to pull some interesting answers out of the formerly streaked-and-tipped University of Louisiana at Monroegraduate and his wife, but both cast members stuck with bland, A&E-contract-friendly platitudes and exhortations to watch their new season, coming up on A&E.

What are the Robertson family’s plans for the new year? They’re going to “stick together” and “have fun.”

What is your controversial father doing on New Year’s Eve? “I don’t know, he’s probably asleep.”

And what are your New Year’s resolutions? “Oh, I’m not a resolutions type of guy.”

The most interesting thing about the back and forth ended up being the contrast between Hasselbeck and Hemmer’s increasingly wild-eyed, manic frozen smiles as they shivered in the icy air of New York City and the Robertsons’ dazed, lackluster expressions as they appeared to have no real clue what these cameras were doing in front of them and why they were being interviewed to begin with.

In all, we have to congratulate the foursome on packing more awkwardness into five uncomfortable minutes than Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin managed to generate in their whole night on CNN.

Watch the interview, embedded below via Fox News:

Megyn Kelly's Non-Apology And Fox News' Race Baiting

 JEREMY HOLDEN/Media Matters For America

Megyn Kelly is insisting that critics who took her to task for insisting that Santa Claus is a white man were motivated by a "knee-jerk instinct" to "race bait," a hollow claim given Kelly's own history of using race to stoke fears of minorities.

Kelly triggered outrage on December 11 when she insisted that Santa was -- and is -- a white man, comments that came in response to a Slate column arguing that the universal portrayal of Santa as white can alienate and ostracize minority children. On December 13, Kelly responded to her critics by accusing them of race-baiting and targeting her simply because she worked at Fox:

Kelly's claim that her critics were motivated by a desire to use racially provocative language to trigger an emotional reaction is not just self-serving, it also underscores Kelly's own history of using race to stoke fears of minorities.

In 2010, Kelly was one of the loudest voices at Fox News pushing its aggressive campaign to exploit racial tensions over a voter intimidation case in Philadelphia.

During a two-week stretch in July of that year, Kelly's daytime show devoted a staggering 45 segments and 3.5 hours to hyping politically motivated and completely discredited allegations that President Obama and Eric Holder were manipulating the Justice Department in order to protect the New Black Panther Party from prosecution over charges that it intimidated white voters during the 2008 election. Kelly's over-the-top race baiting led Gawker to ask whether she was "obsessed" with the New Black Panthers. Dave Weigel wrote, under the headline "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show," that Kelly was exploiting racial tensions in a dangerous way:

Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder's DOJ.

Her own Fox colleague, Kirsten Powers, even called Kelly out for what she called "doing the scary black man thing" by dishonestly hyping the case.

When Kelly transitioned from her daytime "news" show to a prime-time slot, she told the Los Angeles Times that she was a journalist, not an ideologue. So it's telling that in addressing her critics, Kelly claimed that she was simply asking whether the depiction of Santa Claus as a white man should change.

In reality, Kelly was not only adamant that Santa remain white -- settling the debate in a manner more in line with an ideologue rather than a journalist. She also protested against the very idea that society would change its icons in order to accommodate minority groups who find those images to be alienating:

KELLY: Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change. Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure. That's a verifiable fact -- as is Santa.

That conclusion, which highlights the way Kelly uses her position of power to assert and defend her cultural dominance, led Jon Stewart to point out the oppressive nature of Kelly's stated position.

In a lengthy profile just before her white Santa comments, The Washington Post referred to Kelly as "queen" of television news who, unlike Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, whose opinion shows appear before and after The Kelly File, "markets herself as a break in the clouds, an interlude of lucidity, a host who protects her viewers by condensing complex issues into digestible bits, by cross-examining news analysis with zero tolerance for guff."

But the reality is that Kelly's brand of ideological demagoguery is very much in line with the race-baiting that has been central to the culture wars that have always been fought on Fox News.

Here's how Kelly justified her insistence that Santa Claus is white while lashing out at her critics:

KELLY:  Well, this would be funny if it were not so telling about our society. In particular the knee-jerk instinct by so many to race bait and to assume the worst in people, especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News Channel. Contrary to what my critics have posited, neither my statement nor Harris's, I'm sure, was motivated by any racial fear or loathing. In fact, it was something far less sinister. A lifetime of exposure to the very same, quote, commercials, mall-casting calls and movies Harris references in her piece. From "Miracle on 34th Street" to the Thanksgiving Day Parade to the national Christmas tree lighting, we continually see St. Nick as a white man in modern day America. Should that change?

Well, that debate got lost, because so many couldn't get past the fact that I acknowledged, as Harris did, that the most commonly depicted image of Santa does in fact have white skin.