Leave it to taxpayer-subsidized NPR to subtly shade its reporting on a federal government data breach in a way that softens the blow for our ever-so-kindly civil servants bureaucratic overlords at the federal Internal Revenue Service.
Randall Holcolme of the libertarian-leaning Independent Institute observed the subtle bias and blogged about it here. I've also excerpted from it below (emphasis mine):
This story’s headline reports, “Hackers Stole Data From More Than 100,000 Taxpayers, IRS Says.” The headline is wrong. Hackers stole data from the IRS, not from taxpayers. This is an example of the subtle kind of media bias that minimizes government shortcomings, in this case by pointing the finger at taxpayers. This particular headline was reported by NPR.
The story reports that the hackers gained access to taxpayer accounts through the Get Transcript online service. Again, notice the use of language. The story does not report that hackers gained access to IRS computers. It said they gained access to taxpayer accounts, as if they were gaining access to something owned by taxpayers rather than something owned by government.
Holcolme is on to something. When a private enterprise, say a major retailer like Target, has a data breach, the liberal media focus, and rightly so, on whether the company took necessary safeguards to protect data in the first place. It's a fair question to ask, even though there is and probably never will be a completely ironclad way to prevent data breaches and with them instances of identity theft.
All the same, if the liberal media are going to excoriate private enterprises from which we can always walk away and take our business to competitors, surely the same scrutiny should be applied to the government, where there's a compulsory dynamic to the interaction between it and we the taxpayers/citizens.
