Can We Make a Commitment to Educate the Public with Facts?

NBC’s evening television news presented a story about a surge in threats to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offices following statements by certain elected officials, media figures, and partisan operatives about the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act and the funds it provides to hire more IRS personnel.  On the August 25th broadcast of the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, the broadcast showed clips of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), and a FOX News anchor excitedly warning Americans that the IRS will hire tens of thousands of new agents to come after them (NBC Nightly News, 2022). Many of those trafficking in such inflammatory statements have dishonestly indicated that the IRS will hire 87,000 new armed agents. In communications to the public, Cruz warned of “Biden’s shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents” and Grassley raised the specter of large numbers of new IRS agents who might come with “loaded AK-15s [sic] …ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa” (Rappeport and Hsu, 2022). The minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has told the American public, “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you” (Cortellessa, 2022). In fact, the small number of new enforcement personnel are supposed to focus almost exclusively on the biggest problem area of tax evasion: noncompliance by corporations and the wealthiest Americans (i.e., the top one percent of Americans by wealth are estimated to be responsible for 36 percent of all unpaid individual income taxes) (Lipman, 2021).

Unfortunately, the NBC News report fell into the pattern that we have seen for years: carrying out a misguided, self-imposed obligation to treat each side in a disagreement as if their statements are equally valid. The NBC News report effectively spread the false statements by Cruz, Grassley, and the FOX News personality, but did not refute those false statements with facts. Viewers were given no information about how the IRS will actually be hiring. The story served as a reminder that the news media should not worry about being accused of taking sides. Instead, they should worry about clearly advancing the only side that matters: the truth, backed up by facts and evidence. Frankly, either the reporter on the story or anchor Lester Holt should have said, “these officials are lying to you” and followed up by presenting the facts about the planned use of the funding to expand the capacity of the IRS.

The political interests in Congress that have sought to incapacitate the IRS and prevent it from enforcing tax laws have largely succeeded over the past decade. The agency has 20 percent fewer employees than it had a decade ago, its rate of audits for corporations and wealthy individuals has fallen precipitously, and its understaffing has rendered it almost completely ineffective in responding to questions from taxpayers in a timely manner (Cortellessa, 2022). The new funding is intended to restore the IRS as a capable agency. The IRS expects as many as 50,000 retirements among its current 80,000 employees in the next five years. Thus, the new funding for IRS hiring, which will stretch over the next decade, will largely be replacing departing workers and adding additional workers, nearly all in unarmed occupations such as customer service, accounting, and information technology. The IRS has a small number of armed law enforcement officers, since they must investigate tax crimes by organized crime, drug traffickers, and others who are dangerous. The new funding is expected to increase the number of enforcement agents from 6,500 to 13,000, but only one-third of those enforcement agents are armed special agents in the Criminal Investigation division (Kelety 2022; Rappeport and Hsu, 2022).

What does this example have to do with the effort to reduce gun violence?

There are two points to highlight here. First, we need the news media to focus on facts and truth in order help the public understand the nature and complexity of gun violence, including the actual meaning of the Second Amendment as defined by the Supreme Court. Too often, news reporters seek quotes from gun rights ideologues and then uncritically repeat false claims about the meaning of the Second Amendment and the nature of gun violence problems. We need news reporters to confront and correct inaccurate statements. We need them to provide better information about the positive benefits of gun safety laws and programs that exist in other states, but not (yet) in Michigan. For example, do we ever see news reports telling the public about research studies that show reduced levels of teen suicides and accidental shootings of both children and adults in those states that have “safe storage laws”? (RAND Corporation, 2018). Typically, news reports take a non-informative and potentially deceptive “balanced approach” of reporting uncritically what one side’s advocates say and what their opponents say. We need journalists to be more self-conscious and assertive in reporting facts as well as refuting falsehoods.

Second, we should recognize a troubling potential effect of news reports spreading false assertions about tens of thousands of armed IRS agents coming after individual families and small businesses. What impact is that likely to have on certain people’s inclination to believe that they need more guns in order to fend off this imaginary threat from the federal government?  Many politicians know that there are segments of the American population who can become preoccupied with fear and that fear can drive their decisions about how to vote. The peddling of falsehood-based fears for political purposes is not cost-free. It can increase people’s suspicions about their fellow Americans, about government agencies, and about civil servants. It can trigger people to make threats against others. It may accelerate some people’s belief that they need more guns to defend themselves. As a result, these falsehoods may contribute to additional gun purchases—that result in additional unsecured weapons in some homes—that result in more possibilities for suicides and accidental shootings—as well as more opportunities for guns to be stolen and used in various kinds of crimes. In sum, risks can be needlessly increased when there is insufficient commitment to illuminating the truth, especially as news reporters—through habit or avoidance of conflict—focus on appearing “balanced” and uncritical in their reporting.

This is what we face in our current era of rampant disinformation spread on social media; misinformation that is sadly complemented by the passivity of too many news reporters. What can we do? There is a void to fill. There is a need to educate our fellow citizens (AND our elected representatives), especially as they contemplate making decisions about how to vote in elections. Thus, all of us who care about policy issues, especially the problems related to gun safety and gun violence, need to educate ourselves and be prepared to share fact-based information with friends, neighbors, and relatives whenever we hear misguided assumptions or see evidence that others have absorbed false information.