News Selection: Whose Ox Is Gored

Don Surber, editorial writer and columnist for the Charleston Daily Mail, posted at his blog how the Associated Press referred to the National Legal and Policy Center as “a conservative group” when investigating Democrat Congressman Alan Mollohan, and as “a government and ethics watchdog group” when investigating Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Similar emphases also occur in selection of what news to report.

The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times, ran the Associated Press story on the 28-page letter about tax abuses by tax-exempt organizations by the IRS Commissioner to the Senate Finance Committee.

The New York Times did not run the story.

Instead, the New York Times ran a story about a “Tax Break Used by Drug Makers Failed to Add Jobs.”

In the first case, according to the Congressional Budget Office, “In 2003, 38.6 million tax returns claimed $145.7 billion in itemized charitable deductions.” On top of that are the tens of billions of receipts each year not taxable to tax-exempt organizations. The AP story reports that,

The tax-exempt and government entities world comprises some 3 million groups controlling over $13 trillion in assets and ranging from small volunteer community organizations to sovereign Indian tribes and large pension funds.

Among the problems noted by the IRS Commissioner:

--"Many tax-exempt hospitals are difficult to distinguish meaningfully from for-profit hospitals; many tax-exempt credit unions may be hard to distinguish from for-profit banks; and many tax-exempt and for-profit nursing homes may meet the same standards."
--A review of executive compensation found that almost one-third of organizations reported compensation incorrectly or incompletely.
--A February 2006 report on the political actions of some tax-exempt organizations found that nearly three-fourths of the 82 examinations completed uncovered some level of prohibited political campaign activity.

A New York Times, apparently more concerned about private industry, particularly one it dislikes (pharmaceuticals), instead focuses on a one-time legislated return of foreign profits by multinational companies to be taxed in the U.S. – with a break in rate, to incent the return and payment of otherwise legally avoidable taxes.

Drug makers are not the only American multinationals using tax loopholes to declare large portions of their income beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. The Brookings Institution estimates that multinational companies are using overseas tax shelters to lower their payments to the Treasury by about $50 billion a year.

Now, tax-exempts that abuse tax exemptions are of a different order of compliance problem than multinationals that legitimately use tax codes to avoid more taxes. Both are appropriate concerns. But, the NYT’s chooses the latter and not the former.

Does the higher proportion of contributions that go to Democrats from tax-exempts' employees or via allied political action committees, or the causes supported, affect the NYT’s perspective of what is news and what is a matter of tax equity?