Poor 'Liberal Leaning' ACORN: AP Plays 'Pin the Blame on GOP'

September 18th, 2009 12:34 PM
acorn_rotten

Leave it to the Associated Press to drive the establishment media's attempt to portray ACORN's serious impairment as almost entirely the product of the Republican Party.

Never mind that Democrats control the Senate, which voted 83-7 to pull HUD funding from the group earlier this week, meaning that the vast majority of Democrats supported the measure. Never mind that the House, including about 70% of Democrats, yesterday voted to totally defund ACORN by 345-75.

In the world of Jim Abrams and the Associated Press, it must be almost all the GOP's fault that this happened. Check out the headline (frequently used elsewhere, as seen in this Google Web search on the exact title in quotes) at the reporter's story:

APonHouseACORNvote091809at140am

In AP's partial defense, the headline without the final six words is at links such as this one with the same time stamp of 1:40 a.m. this morning. In AP's complete non-defense, what's with the word "strike" in the first sentence, even if it's not in the headline? It was a GOP "move," because the Republican Party can't "strike" anything, let alone get the majority indicated, without getting a lot of Democrats to throw their weapons (i.e., votes).

Abrams waited until the 5th paragraph to describe the video undercover work of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles. To the AP reporter's credit, he didn't reflexively tag O'Keefe as conservative, instead going with O'Keefe's self-description as an "activist filmmaker."

A big miss by Abrams is in this later paragraph:

ACORN said Wednesday that it is ordering its own independent investigation of the incidents, while stressing that they were isolated cases.

Isolated, schmisolated. After the ACORN announcement, the BigGovernment web site released similar O'Keefe/Giles vids out of San Diego (teased on Wednesday evening; fully released very early Thursday). ACORN's contention crumbled further, and Abram's failure to report it Thursday evening is pathetically weak journalism.

Make that two big misses by Abrams. O'Keefe and Giles have been so relentless, I almost forgot to mention their adventure in San Bernardino, California. Abrams totally forgot.

But look at the bright side: AP is only 36-48 hours behind in the news cycle. That's better than the five days of ignorance Charles Gibson displayed earlier this week.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.