Photography by Blacktie-Missouri
After a fine career spanning 37 years in St. Louis, TV anchor Larry Conners exited the stage in May playing a new role.
He became a political martyr. Strangely.
Conners was fired from KMOV-TV over a May 13 Facebook post in which he wondered aloud whether the Internal Revenue Service might have targeted him for asking what he fancied as tough questions of President Barack Obama during a 2012 interview.
Here’s how Conners presented his conspiracy theory: “I don’t accept ‘conspiracy theories,’ but I do know that almost immediately after the interview, the IRS started hammering me… Can I prove it? At this time, no. But it is a fact that since that April 2012 interview…the IRS has been pressuring me.”
Just a day later, Conners had to ’fess up on the air to another, less convenient fact: The IRS had been pressuring him about his taxes since 2008. (Predictably, liberal “fact-checkers” are trying to blame that year on the Bush administration.)
Still, Conners had every reason to believe that his Facebook post would give him his rightful place in that spicy story out of Cincinnati about how the IRS was persecuting conservatives. It certainly fit the talking points du jour and even had the potential for a cheesy station promo: “Hometown anchor who interviewed President Obama may be victim in national IRS Tea Party persecution scandal! A News 4 exclusive at 10!”
Instead, it was KMOV-TV that would hammer him. The station’s press release implied that someone with openly stated opinions like Conners couldn’t possibly deliver the news with the proper air of feigned objectivity. It tried to make this all about journalism. Just like most local newscasts, it isn’t.
Personally, I don’t think Conners deserved to be fired over the Facebook post. He served the past 27 years as an anchor for the station with much loyalty, and by any measure of his industry, he’s had an extraordinarily successful career, with all kinds of local Emmys and recognition to prove it. He’s a decent guy.
Throw in the fact that stations like KMOV expect their on-air talent to communicate regularly via social media, and it’s beyond unfair that Conners would be jettisoned for expressing a simple opinion, however bizarre. He didn’t break any laws. He didn’t ridicule or attack his station. He just took a little stroll out to deep right field. At the very least, a second chance would seem to have been in order.
From afar, it would appear that Conners’ Facebook caper was more of an excuse to fire him than a reason to do so. Just a few weeks prior to Conners’ Facebook post, it had been announced that Steve Savard was replacing him as anchor in the prized 10 p.m. time slot. At age 66, Conners’ career trend line wasn’t pointed upward.
I have no speculation as to the station’s motives, and it may well be that management had really planned to keep Conners as the 6 p.m. anchor indefinitely, as it suggested. But it’s hard to fathom that one Facebook post was truly a hanging offense. One has to believe that if he were some dashing, young rising star with untouchable ratings, Conners would still be reading the news, IRS stories and all.
That said, what’s too easily glossed over in the aftermath of the Conners IRS narrative is that it—like so many Tea Party conspiracy theories—is built upon such a tower of babble. The IRS has more than 100,000 employees, of which precisely two (the commissioner and chief counsel) are chosen by the president. Like them or not, IRS employees are career professionals, not political loyalists.
Yes, President Richard Nixon wanted to use the IRS to punish those on his infamous Enemies List, but even he couldn’t pull it off. His IRS commissioner refused to do it, anti-Nixon congressional investigations couldn’t prove it happened, and Nixon eventually received an article of impeachment for his trouble. The lesson probably hasn’t been lost on Nixon’s successors—in either party.
There still needs to be diligence about the IRS maintaining a strictly nonpartisan profile, and it should have been outrageous to everyone that agency employees used a keyword-search technique that certainly had the appearance of targeting some small conservative groups unfairly. But it’s an Olympian leap of paranoia that Obama was going Nixonian on some Tea Party folk in the boondocks.
In the deafening noise of IRS-gate coverage, it has been easy to overlook the fact that both liberal and conservative groups routinely abuse tax laws by trying to provide 501(c)(4) tax deductibility to blatantly political activities. The scandal wasn’t that the IRS was “targeting” people unfairly—enforcing tax laws is its job—but rather that it went about its research in the wrong way.
That hardly means that every IRS investigation or audit of a conservative individual or political group is unjustified, no more or less than if the same fate were to befall liberals. But the media door is now officially open to the grandest of conspiracy theories.
If anything, it’s far more likely that a president would abuse an IRS connection to protect a friend rather than to go after an enemy. But even if you really believe that black helicopters are circling your house for the purpose of taking your guns and inflicting healthcare on your children, do you really think Obama-administration scoundrels would waste an IRS bullet on a journalist they’re likely never to see again?
In the real world, the IRS does not deliver the auditor’s equivalent of a horse’s head to the bed of some obscure Midwestern TV guy (sorry, Larry) because he offended the president with an unpleasant question or two.
Besides, one small detail that has been overlooked locally is that it didn’t happen. The notion that Conners somehow got to Obama resides largely with Conners.
Like about 300 million other Americans, I hadn’t viewed Conners’ presumed journalistic destruction of the president, so I went online for some excerpts. Conners did just fine, but nothing happened.
Obama is a man accustomed to vicious questions challenging his birthplace, religion, patriotism, competence, sincerity, and every minute aspect of his character. And that’s before FOX News shows up.
Now consider the bold “gotcha” question that Conners thinks might have drawn him an IRS hammering: “The economy is a big issue and concern for folks. I mean, the unemployment, trying to make ends meet, gas prices, food prices going up. Some of our viewers are complaining, they get frustrated, even angered, when they see the first family jetting around, different vacations and so forth, sometimes maybe they think under color of state business and that you’re out of touch, that you don’t really know what they’re experiencing right now.”
This wasn’t actually a question, as much as it was a statement of indignation about the president’s vacation time (hardly breaking new ground, by the way). But while Conners wrote that “the President’s face clearly showed his anger,” it didn’t look to me like the exchange rose past the level of mild annoyance to Obama. I don’t believe it elevated a single beat of his Kenyan Muslim heart.
It looked like Conners was channeling Mike Wallace, and Obama was seeing Ted Baxter.
Here’s how their exchange went:
Obama: “Well, I don’t know how many viewers you’re talking about that say that.”
Conners: “We do hear from some.”
Obama: “I hear from all kinds of viewers about everything.”
Conners: “I’m sure you do.”
Obama: “But the fact of the matter is, I think if you look at my track record, I’m raising a family here. When we travel, we’ve got to travel through Secret Service, and Air Force One—that’s not my choice. I think most folks understand how hard I work and how hard this administration is working on behalf of the American people.”
And that was that. On camera after the interview, Conners editorialized that the president had “sidestepped” his question. Through my skewed liberal eyes, “I think most folks understand how hard I work” was a pretty direct response to the “jetting around” question, and the Secret Service reference addressed the fact that there’s taxpayer cost to any activity by any president.
Conners, of course, viewed it differently, which is his right. But whatever your politics are, ask yourself this: Do you really think this interview would have caused someone in the administration to place an IRS hit on Conners? Really?
Conners claimed on his Facebook post that “the Obama interview caught fire and got widespread attention because I questioned his spending.” Again, with no disrespect intended, my search engines beg to differ. Conners’ work got a respectable minor buzz in blogs and media columns—with a predictably mixed response (including a brief mention on The O’Reilly Factor). But it certainly didn’t generate major coverage anywhere. It wasn’t the hottest of journalistic fires.
By contrast, Conners’ allegations of possible IRS harassment—and subsequent firing—caught fire and got widespread attention.
My guess is Conners will have plenty of journalistic opportunities, and that’s fine. He has every right and reason to go forward as a commentator, and here’s a guess that he’ll find a niche as a conservative voice, unconstrained by the need to appear moderate or unbiased as an anchor. I’d even guess that nothing he might say would exacerbate his IRS difficulties.
I think the role of conservative pundit would fit Larry Conners well.
But the role of martyr? Not so much.
SLM co-owner is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
