This morning, the Fox & Friends crew highlighted a Washington Post report about back taxes owed by federal employees. As with everything on Fox & Friends, this was an outrage.
Steve Doocy said that the Post had “discovered that federal employees across the gamut in the United States owe over a billion dollars to the IRS -- these are the people who are in charge of telling us to pay our taxes.” He went on: “And they've broken it down to different categories. For instance, there are a bunch of them at the White House.”
Gretchen Carlson replied, “Yeah. Right under the president's nose. He should be knowin' about this, right? Haha. Forty-one White House employees owe $831,000. And then in parentheses, it says, 'Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names.' ”
I assume she was talking about the teleprompter when she said “then in parentheses, it says, 'Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names.' ” Because that's not what the Post said next.
The very sentence that Carlson was citing in the Post article added some important context:
And 41 employees at the Executive Office of the President owed $831,000 altogether - about the same amount as during the last year of George W. Bush's administration.
See how that works? Read the part you like, leave out the part you don't like.
It's a simple but effective technique, as far as misinforming your viewers goes.
There was plenty of other useful context in the Post story, which focused on back taxes owed by Capitol Hill employees:
From 2004 through 2006, the last three years that Republicans were in power, the total amount of back taxes owed each year by congressional workers hovered just below $9 million. But in 2007, when Democrats took control of both houses, it dropped to $6.8 million. Since then, it has increased by 37 percent.
Jock Friedly, who publicizes congressional salaries on the Web site LegiStorm, said many new staffers come from the private sector, where they worked as lobbyists or in other higher-paying jobs. “They go to a somewhat lower-paying government job and then, over time, debt starts to build up,” Friedly said.
During 2008 and 2009 - when the financial crisis took hold and the economy started sinking - the Senate debt increased 80 percent and the House debt increased 25 percent.
This graphic helped spell it out:
