New York Times Is Only Interested in One President’s Tax Returns
It says something about today’s corporate media that one almost has to regard their coverage as “anti-matter.” In other words, what the press chooses not to report matters more than what they say explicitly.
That maxim applies to a recent New York Times story alleging that President Trump may owe more than $100 million in taxes related to his harvesting of tax losses on the Chicago skyscraper he developed around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. As with many Times stories, the elements the paper chose to omit speak volumes.
Tax Returns Obtained Illegally
As part of its reporting, the Times article referenced an “obscure” 2019 Technical Advice Memorandum issued by the Internal Revenue Service and noted that such “memos are required to be publicly released with the taxpayer’s information removed.” The Times claimed that this memorandum, “along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of” the dispute discussed in the 2019 memo.
But the Times conspicuously omitted the source of those “tax records previously obtained.” Specifically, last fall, a former IRS contractor pled guilty to leaking Trump’s tax records to the Times and ProPublica (which collaborated with the Times on the most recent tax harvesting story). At that time, the Times declined to comment, and ProPublica claimed it “doesn’t know the identity of the source” who leaked the tax return information.
These media outlets may not definitively know whether the contractor leaked Trump’s returns, for instance, if he mailed the returns anonymously. But the Times could certainly have reported in its article that the contractor had pled guilty to doing so. That they made no mention of the criminality associated with the leak, and the possibility that their reporting was made possible because of someone else’s criminal acts, suggests that the Times does not want to focus on the story’s entire context.
Willfully Ignorant of Biden’s Conduct
Likewise, while the Times wants to talk about the former president’s tax situation every day of the week and twice on Sundays, it seemingly has no interest in exploring the current president’s tax shenanigans. For years, Joe and Jill Biden have used a loophole — one that Barack Obama tried to close and one that Biden’s own administration says it wants to end because it allows “those with high incomes to avoid paying their fair share of taxes” — to dodge over $500,000 in Medicare and Obamacare taxes.
The Bidens exploited said loophole in such an egregious manner that the (leftist) Tax Policy Center believes the Internal Revenue Service should have pursued them for a tax repayment. And they did so while spending millions of dollars buying one mansion in Delaware and renting another luxury retreat outside Washington. But you wouldn’t hear about any of this from The New York Times.
In December, Adam Entous of the Times wrote a lengthy piece claiming that a text from the president’s son, Hunter, does not hold the negative connotations congressional Republicans have attributed to it. The story argued that Hunter’s text talking about giving his father half his salary did not refer to a bribery arrangement but to an oft-told family story about Hunter Biden paying half of his college earnings to Joe Biden to cover room and board costs.
To support this interpretation of the text in question, Entous went into detail about “the family’s conflicted relationship with money and class,” with Joe Biden having champagne tastes but a beer budget. He noted that the senior Biden “was drawn to grand estates,” and purchased a 10,000-square-foot mansion in Delaware while a senator, but that “to save money, Joe Biden did most of the home repairs and improvements himself, and in winter closed off large sections with drywall to save on heating costs.”
The overall picture emerges of someone cutting financial corners — packing his own sandwiches on trips to Vail to save on meal expenses — to live above his means. This cheapskate behavior would arguably follow him decades later when he left the vice presidency.
In December, Entous and the Times employed the “Biden is a cheapskate” argument to explain away Hunter’s text about his father. But would the Times use the cheapskate angle to explore whether and why Joe Biden deliberately underpaid his taxes while living a luxury lifestyle? Of course not.
Culture of Corruption?
For many years, the media have attempted to portray Joe Biden as a choirboy compared to Donald Trump. But in reality, Biden more closely resembles Diamond Joe Quimby, “The Simpsons’” perpetually corrupt machine politician, more than any sainted figure. Too bad the media won’t report on it.
To borrow an old phrase, the Times and the corporate media provide information on a “need to know” basis. If information harms the left’s preconceived narratives, then the public doesn’t need to know and the media will dutifully censor it. Such is the level of corruption one has grown accustomed to expect from the Fourth Estate.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.