Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor of the New York Times, has a blog post in which she addresses readers' complaints about the Times' coverage of the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS. She writes:

In essence, these readers believed The Times gave too little prominence to the story initially in Saturdays paper and placed emphasis on the wrong aspect of the situation the apology and the politics rather than the problem itself.

Her conclusion:

I agree that The Times seemed to play down the story originally, placing it inside the paper and emphasizing the second-day angle of the apology rather than the misconduct itself. In Mondays paper, the headline, as Mr. Greenfield noted, emphasized the Republicans seizing on the issue rather than the widening problem. A Wall Street Journal front-page headline, by contrast, read, Wider Problems Found at IRS.Many on the right as noted last week in my blog posts about Benghazi do not think they can get a fair shake from The Times. This coverage wont do anything to dispel that belief.

WSJ 1 NYT 0 

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

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