MSNBC Host Rips New York Times for Ignoring IRS Scandal: 'This Is Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Print Media\

Joe Scarborough has had enough of the Grey Lady burying the investigation of the Internal Revenue Service.

"This is unbelievable,” declared "Morning Joe" host Scarborough on his show Tuesday. “The Washington Post and the New York Times are not putting on the front pages of their newspapers that an internal investigation has been launched by the IRS on the most shady behavior."

Instead of any mention of the investigation into the suspiciously missing emails of former IRS official Lois Lerner, the New York Times prominently displayed a story about a possible new bridge scandal involving New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“You know, if George W. Bush or any Republicans had an IRS member that went after Democrats and then there was an internal investigation launched, you would not have time or space on the front page to talk about [other] issues,” Scarborough said. “This really is a scam!”

While the Times ran a story on the IRS investigation on A19, the Washington Post print edition apparently ignored the story entirely, leading Scarborough to fume:

This is why conservatives don’t trust national newspapers. It’s why they don’t trust broadcast news. It’s because there’s a double standard, and you can see it on every broadcast newscast, you can see it on the front page of every major newspaper. This is a scam.

It’s not the news that they run — even though this is a joke of a story they put on the front page. It’s the stories they don’t run. It’s the omissions, the act of omissions when Democrats are in power. It’s stunning.

The Washington Post, for its part, published a defense of the Times' Tuesday front page online soon after Scarborough's segment aired:

“Joke” is one way to refer to the New York Times’s A1 story on Christie’s problems. “Scoop” works too. The story is the work of three reporters — Matt Flegenheimer, William K. Rashbaum and Kate Zernike — and packs the revelations of a genuine investigative effort. The Manhattan district attorney and the Securities and Exchange Commission, notes the story, are looking into “possible securities law violations stemming from a $1.8 billion road repair agreement in 2011″ relating to the Pulaski Skyway connecting Newark and Jersey City.

More from the story: “The inquiries into securities law violations focus on a period of 2010 and 2011 when Gov. Chris Christie’s administration pressed the Port Authority to pay for extensive repairs to the Skyway and related road projects, diverting money that was to be used on a new Hudson River rail tunnel that Mr. Christie canceled in October 2010.”

To abridge the factors at play here: The New York Times has an original, investigative scoop about an inquiry against a sitting New Jersey governor with presidential potential. What page other than A1 does that formula yield?

(H/T: the Daily Caller)

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