ACORN

Networks Pounce on ‘Louisiana Watergate’ Story After Only 17 Hours, Buried ACORN Scandal
By Scott Whitlock | January 27, 2010 | 12:08 PM EST

All three morning shows on Wednesday highlighted the revelation that a conservative activist had been arrested in connection to an attempt to tamper with the phones of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. Despite jumping on the "Louisiana Watergate" story only 17 hours after it was first reported, the networks took five days to file full reports on the same James O’Keefe and his undercover footage exposing corruption at ACORN.

On ABC’s Good Morning America, reporter Pierre Thomas recounted O’Keefe’s previous expose, charitably describing ACORN as "an advocacy group which helps the poor." On NBC’s Today, Pete Williams found sinister motives in right-wing outrage at the organization. He sneered, "Because ACORN helped register thousands of low income voters, Republicans pounced." (Could the illegal activities and voter fraud associated with the group have been another reason for GOP attacks?)

Bozell on Breitbart.tv Discussing Media 'Omitting for Obama'
By NB Staff | January 27, 2010 | 10:19 AM EST

Yesterday, Media Research Center (MRC) President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell sat down in the MRC studio for a Skype interview with Breitbart.tv's "B-cast." [see video embed below the page break]

The topic: the latest MRC special report, "Omitting for Obama," which is a study of four stories --- Van Jones, Anita Dunn, ACORN, and ClimateGate -- "highlighted by the New Media in 2009 that were damaging to the Obama 'brand'" but were avoided like the plague by the old guard mainstream media.

 

On Law & Order's Persistent Leftward Lurch
By Michael Moriarty | December 14, 2009 | 1:45 PM EST

<p><i><b>Managing Editor's Note</b>: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's <a href="http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmoriarty/2009/12/14/the-increasingly-... target="_blank">original December 14 post to Big Hollywood</a>. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama &quot;Law and Order.&quot;</i></p><p>Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098844/" bluelink="yes">&quot;Law and Order&quot;</a> for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one. Out of sight, out of mind. &quot;Law and Order&quot; has, for years, been just a press of the remote away from non-existence.</p> <p>However, recent events have &quot;Law and Order&quot; just begging for my reassessment. I hardly expected my old television series to be the clown act that leads the American viewing audience into an increasingly predictable pile of hard left propaganda.</p> <p>Why?</p>

Schultz Uses Questionable Foreclosure Data Generated by Agenda-Driven Newspaper to Blast Bachmann Voting Record
By Jeff Poor | December 3, 2009 | 9:19 AM EST

The seemingly creepy fixation some MSNBC on-air personalities have with Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann just continues to persist on the cable network.

The latest installment involves MSNBC's "Ed Show" host Ed Schultz relying on a left-wing publication, The Minnesota Independent, which found a high rate of foreclosures relative in Bachmann's district relative to the rest of the state of Minnesota. Schultz, on his Dec. 2 program, contended Bachmann was spending too much time as a conservative activist and not enough time focusing on the problems of her district. But it turns out the data might not be at all accurate.

"One last page in my playbook tonight," Schultz said. "It looks like Minnesota congresswoman and ‘Psycho Talk' regular Michele Bachmann needs to spend a little bit more time riling up the right-wing nut job partiers out there and focus on her own back yard." 

ACORN Controversy Provides Case Study in Combating Media Liberalism
By Lachlan Markay | November 20, 2009 | 2:11 PM EST
The scandal surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has provided a number of case studies in liberal media bias. The initial silence of the vast majority of media outlets on the story, the attempts by leftist commentators to excuse ACORN and discredit the group's critics, and Andrew Breitbart's strategy of rolling out video exposes periodically to counter those commentators, all speak to the liberal media paradigm, and activists' efforts to combat it.

Breitbart and his filmmaking proteges James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles have released another video showing an ACORN employee volunteering her help in establishing an underage prostitution business. This employee, Lavelle Stewart, had been trumpeted by liberal pundits as a shining example of ACORN's refusal to aid in criminal deeds. Stewart, they claimed, had refused to help Giles and O'Keefe as many other employees had.

But the new videos (Part 1 video embedded below the fold) tell a different story. "There are ways, people do it all the time," Stewart told O'Keefe when asked if he could launder prostitution money into his congressional campaign. "Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California," she added. Stewart, who works in an ACORN office in Los Angeles, was the latest staffer of the organization to volunteer her services in smuggling underage girls into the country, setting up a prostitution ring with those girls, and laundering the proceeds into a political campaign.

Networks Ignore SEIU's Alliances, Thuggery and Presidential Lobbying
By Julia A. Seymour | November 19, 2009 | 11:42 AM EST

Members of the self-proclaimed fastest-growing union in North America have started fights at town hall meetings, share office space with ACORN and spent over $60 million to elect President Barack Obama.

The left-wing, 2.1 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its president, Andy Stern, spent much of 2009 campaigning for health care reform that would include a government-run insurance plan, and for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier to unionize. Critics of EFCA say it would result in worker intimidation (not something that would bother SEIU, if its recent history is any guide).

Well-connected, Stern was the most frequent White House visitor in the first six months of Obama's presidency.

But ABC, NBC and CBS haven't reported any of those things. In fact, a search of Nexis transcripts for all of 2009 only turned up one story mentioning either SEIU or Andy Stern. That was an Aug. 20 story from Jake Tapper of ABC which identified Stern as "a close ally of the President's and the leader of a major union."

Beck Rejects 'South Park' Criticism about Questioning Government Officials
By Jeff Poor | November 16, 2009 | 7:37 PM EST

Fox News' Glenn Beck isn't catching a break anywhere - from "Saturday Night Live," The New Yorker, Al Gore's Current TV and Comedy Central's "South Park." They have all taken shots at the popular TV host.

On his Nov. 16 program, Beck responded to the "South Park" interpretation of him - that he wasn't making accusations, but phrasing them in the form of a question. The show's character Eric Cartman played a spoof of Beck in which he railed against his school's president, Wendy Testaburger. Beck maintained he wasn't making the "accusations" in the form of a question - but playing the words of the "accused" themselves.

"Have we gotten to a place you can't ask questions?" Beck asked. "What were my crazy accusations or questions? Well, the accusation was that Van Jones was a communist revolutionary," Beck said. "I didn't describe him that way. In his own words he described himself that way. He was a 9/11 Truther. He was forced to step down. Was it that the administration was using NEA as a propaganda arm for the administration? That was a question. We played tapes of the call with Yosi Sargent and Yosi Sargent had to step down."

AP, Covering ACORN La. Raid, Acts As If Only One Office Was Videotaped by O'Keefe and Giles
By Tom Blumer | November 6, 2009 | 11:23 PM EST
acorn_rottenDid you know that activist filmmaker James O'Keefe and partner Hannah Giles made only one undercover video showing ACORN employees willing to assist them in illegal and human rights-violating activities?

Absent prior knowledge, that's the impression you would have upon reading the Associated Press's coverage of the latest development in the ACORN saga, namely the raid on the organization's New Orleans office by Louisiana state investigators.

AP writer Cain Burdeau only mentions O'Keefe's and Giles's videotaping efforts in Baltimore. The fact is that the pair have thus far presented the results of their efforts in five other locations, and may have more episodes in inventory for other opportune times.

Here are the first five paragraphs of Budreau's coverage (bold is mine):

Hannah Giles, Co-Star of ACORN-Busting Videos, Poses Some Great Questions the Media Aren't Asking
By Seton Motley | October 28, 2009 | 8:11 PM EDT

Nearly everyone now knows of the reform whirlwind kicked up by the Dynamic Duo of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe - with a big follow-up assist from BigGovernment.com impresario Andrew Breitbart.

Unless of course you rely solely on the Jurassic Press - the traditional media - for your information.  If so, you may to this day remain blissfully ignorant - of this and a whole host of other important stories.

Giles pretended to be a prostitute, O'Keefe her pimp, and they together visited with hidden video camera (at least) six Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) offices (with more to be revealed soon???). 

In each instance, the two spun continually wilder tales of home purchase for use as a brothel, not just for Giles but for a group of underage Central American girls the two intended to illegally smuggle into the country.

In every instance, ACORN officials were more than happy to assist with every aspect of their illegal and immoral endeavors, often in creatively evasive ways.

Top 25 Newspapers' Year-Over-Year Circ Drop Is 'Largest in Decade'
By Tom Blumer | October 27, 2009 | 3:10 PM EDT
newspaper_X_225It's a variation on the old riddle, "What's black and white, but read all over?"

If you change one word and add two others, the answer to the resulting question -- "What's still mostly black and white, but red all over?" -- would be, based on just-released information about their daily circulation, "all but one of the nation's top 25 newspapers turning in comparative numbers."

The figures come from the newspaper industry's Audit Board of Circulations (ABC), and cover the April-September 2009 time period.

Here are a few paragraphs from Michael Liedtke's coverage of the carnage at the Associated Press, which depends largely on newspaper subscription fees for its lifeblood. Note the "so far" reference in Liedtke's third paragraph:

ACORN-y: LAT Runs Op-Ed by ACORN Consultant Without Disclosing Relationship; Patterico Pounces
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2009 | 11:55 PM EDT
LATimesWithACORNEither LA Times op-ed writer Peter Dreier lives in a cave, or he's all too willing to spread falsehoods to defend an organization where he once served as a consultant. Perhaps it's a little of both.

In that Thursday op-ed ("The war on ACORN; Conservatives are distorting and playing up the community organizing group's so-called scandals"), Dreier parroted ACORN CEO's now-discredited claims that "not a single person who signed a phony name on a registration form ever actually voted," and that undercover filmmakers James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles were only able to get help from two ACORN offices in starting up their proposed prostitution enterprises involving the importation of immigrant girls.

In running Dreier's op-ed, the Times miscalculated at least twice:

  • First, the paper failed to disclose Dreier's past relationship with ACORN as a consultant, something that is right there in his Occidental College bio, and that readers had a right to know.
  • Second, the Times somehow thought Dreier's propaganda would get past LA blogger and certified Times nemesis Patterico aka Patrick Frey. That was the far more serious blunder.
Here are key paragraphs from Dreier's drivel:
In the Wake of Philly ACORN Vid, BigGov Calls Out Big Media's Follow-up Failures, Even at Its Own Press Club
By Tom Blumer | October 22, 2009 | 1:56 PM EDT
ACORNfibulousFour1009

As noted early this morning, BigGovernment.com posted James O'Keefe's and Hannah Giles's latest video yesterday.

That video totally nuked claims by ACORN National and ACORN Philly that O'Keefe and Giles had been "shown the door" and "kicked out" after a "few minutes" in their Philly Office visit -- claims that establishment media outlets continued to repeat even, as shown in the excerpt that follows, after ACORN was proven to have lied about what happened in New York City and San Diego.

Billy Hallowell at BigGovernment.com has a great recap of the not well-known ACORN and media goofs that have occurred since James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles released their first two sting videos (links are in original):

The mainstream media were complicit in their coverage of the ACORN scandal. Their behavior was and continues to be an insult to democracy and journalistic responsibility as the Fourth Estate has ignored facts, engaged in one-sided sourcing, and avoided basic and inherently important journalistic questioning.