A short New York Times piece by Ian Urbina (4/2/10) serves as an update of sorts on the future of community organizing group ACORN, which says it will continue to have a national presence. Urbina includes this description of the now-infamous right-wing video hoax that did much of the damage to the group:
ACORN has faced a drastic drop in federal money and foundation support after a video sting was publicized last fall. In at least one of the undercover videos, ACORN employees were shown advising a young conservative activist, who posed as a prostitute, how to conceal her criminal activities in the course of trying to buy a house.
It’s worth noting how farthe Times is from where it started on this story; see the list below,culled fromFAIR’s March 11 alert.
No matter what, a story about ACORN seems to require an over-the-top accusation from a right-wing figure. In this case it’s Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), who says that state offices that have severed ties to ACORN”are like career criminals who adopt aliases without changing their criminal lifestyles.” As a reader pointed out to the Times, Issa seems to have been convicted of more crimes–in the form of a misdemeanor gun-possession charge (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/2/03)–than ACORN has.
You would think that reporters would be wary of letting right-wing sources spin them on ACORN–that’s how the Times got into trouble in the first place. Remember, the Times used to tell readers that ACORN workers eagerly helped the undercover activists devise their criminal schemes:
–(9/16/09)
“…amateur actors, posing as a prostitute and a pimp and recorded on hidden cameras in visits to ACORN offices…. Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing ACORN workers, who appeared to blithely encourage prostitution and tax evasion.”
Videomaker James O’Keefe “was dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risque high school play. But in the footage made public–initially by a new website, BigGovernment.com–ACORN employees raised no objections to the criminal plans. Instead, they eagerly counseled the couple on how to hide their activities from the authorities, avoid taxes and make the brothel scheme work.”
— (9/19/09)
“Their travels in the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of ACORN, the national community organizing group, caught its low-level employees in five cities sounding eager to assist with tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution.”
— (9/27/09)
“a video sting had caught ACORN workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes.”
— (10/4/09)
“To recap: Two conservative activists with a concealed video camera, posing as a prostitute and her pimp, visited offices of ACORN, the community organizing group, and lured employees into bizarre conversations about how to establish a bordello, cheat on taxes and smuggle in underage girls from Central America.”
— (1/28/10)
“Mr. O’Keefe is a conservative activist who gained fame last year by posing as a pimp and secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel.”
— (1/31/10)
“Mr. O’Keefe made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group ACORN–eliciting advice on financing a brothel on videos that would threaten to become ACORN’s undoing.
I think the NYT thinks that the more they report their bs on ACORN the more they think it will be true. We’ll probably be hearing about ACORN in th NYT a year from now reporting the same thing.
It has been subsequently shown that Mr. O’Keefe did not enter the ACORN offices dressed as a pimp, and that in at least one instance, ACORN staffers called police. Following his arrest in the Landrieu break-in, O’Keefe had to turn over his unedited tapes to California Attorney General Jerry Brown. these showed that O’Keefe rarely — if ever — told ACORN employees that he was running a prostitution ring.
Shown in videos entering and leaving ACORN offices dressed as a pimp, O’Keefe actually addressed ACORN employees dressed in a suit and tie. He edited out clips of all of the ACORN employees whose first reaction to his story was to summon police.
A lot of mainstream media swallowed O’Keefe’s BS hook, line & sinker.
I’m not thrilled to say it, but I think this whole sorry episode illuminates the failings of some “progressive” media sources as well as the duplicity of the corpress.
I’ve been trying to figure out just what the hell did happen at the various ACORN offices, and why folks were canned for how they dealt with these bastards. To be honest, it’s been damn confusing – and I’m not referring to the MSM’s megaphonics for O’Keefe’s agitprop.
Now, it would seem no one at ACORN did anything illegal, else the gendarmerie would’ve been all over them, don’t you think? So what precipitated their firing? As I’ve said before, if in some way errors were made, that’s a case for retraining, not the unemployment line, isn’t it?
And, again, was ACORN management sacrificing these persons to try to turn down the heat on themselves?
Is there a reliable chronology of all this I can access, that goes blow-by-blow on who said what to whom when? I feel like much of what I’ve read about this in “alternative” circles has been a sort of knee-jerk reaction to corpress chicanery without really looking at what precisely occured, and the morality of how ACORN has handled the fallout.
I hope that makes sense. I just want the straight skinny, and I can’t say I’ve seen it yet.
This from today’s DEMOCRACY NOW! Headlines:
ACORN Staffer Reported Prostitution Claims to Police
Details continue to emerge on the extent of the false claims in the controversy that led to the collapse of the community organizing group ACORN. ACORN disbanded as a national organization last month after months of legal and financial difficulty largely stemming from the release of undercover videos taken inside its offices. The right-wing activists behind the videos claimed they showed staffers offering advice to two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute. But their story continues to be discredited piece by piece. A recent probe by California Attorney General Jerry Brown undermines a key claim that an ACORN staffer in San Diego offered advice on smuggling a group of prostitutes from Mexico. Brown’s probe verified that the staffer, Juan Carlos Vera, in fact called the police right after the meeting to report what he had heard. Vera has long maintained he called the police, but his claims have gone largely ignored. He was fired from his position at ACORN as the controversy reached a peak last fall.
—
I think this amply illustrates my point, don’t you?
The lesson to be learned here is, in my opinion, that the New York Times is a criminal organization. It has repeated lies even after being presented with proof that they were lies. It has still not issued a formal retraction or correction of its many published lies, and what appeared to pass for an apology was nullified when their slanted coverage continued.
I know that if anyone had presented the Times with allegations about Bush, they would have fact-checked before publishing, but they didn’t fact-check to ensure that O’Keefe’s videos hadn’t been edited. And their most recent item, since they can no longer claimed that O’Keefe posed as a pimp, which he did not, stresses that his female companion posed as a prostitute. But since they don’t fact-check, how do they know that she was merely posing? We know that she was taking part in a deliberate and nefarious scheme to hurt poor people, we know that she was paid, we know that she lied numerous times–why does the Times assume that she was merely “posing” as a prostitute? Have they consulted any D.C. madams to see if she is on their call-girl lists? Have they had her investigated to make sure that she wasn’t free-lancing? Maybe she was posing, or maybe prostitution is another of her immoral sources of income, but since the Times doesn’t fact-check, nobody should take their word for anything or assume that any information presented in the Times as fact is actually true.
What I’d like to know is why are New York Times staff members posing as editors and reporters when they are incapable of fulfilling those job descriptions?
We’re in deep doo doo if any lie told by the right, ultra-right or whomever becomes ‘truth’ because of the scared-of-their-shadow democrats or lefties who are not willing to stand and be counted until all charges are proven. As it is, when these lies are bared as lies, those who should have the upper hand in the debate are equally guilty of believeing and therefore supporting the lie. Who advises these democratic fools? I could come up with better responses to charges, criticisms, etc. than they do. How much of this effect that we see due to who owns the media? So why aren’t our democratic “leaders” taking up the issue of Anti-Trust and the Fairness Doctrine?!
Doug, I wondered the same thing you did. I don’t know why ACORN fired people who did nothing wrong, but to me it looks very similar to how many (most?) Democrats in Congress voted to defund ACORN (unconstitutionally) even though there was no proof they had done anything wrong. They are both scared of the right-wing media and politicians. Democrats were afraid of looking like they were protecting their allies, or like they were “weak on crime”. ACORN was probably afraid if it did nothing, the attacks would get worse, or maybe they thought if they fired the employees, Congress wouldn’t take away their funding.
This seems very similar to the way many Democrats voted to censure Bill Clinton for having an affair, yet would not vote to censure GW Bush for committing war crimes and continually violating the Constitution (much less impeach him). It’s very similar to how NPR had a rabid right-winger criticize Howard Zinn in its obituary, yet did not have a left wing person criticize William Buckley in his obituary. It’s similar to how the media often gives global warming deniers as much credibility as climate scientists. It’s similar to how Obama made concession after concession to the Republicans even though he knew they would not vote for his health care bill.
Do you see a pattern here? It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is, but all these things seem to have similar causes. It might have something to do with a warped sense of fairness. Some people on the left try so hard to be “fair” that they are much harder on their allies than on people on the right. Most people on the right are the opposite. That is why Faux News is biased to the extreme yet constantly boasts about its fairness. That is why organizations like NPR and PBS bend over backward to always give right-wingers a say, but does not always do the same for left-wingers. That is why the Democrats took single payer off the table before the health care discussion even began, yet gave in to Republican demands throughout the whole process.
Brian, I honestly don’t think it has to do with a skewed sense of “fairness”, nor do I think it can be explained by the fear of rightist and corpress castigation.
I think it has more to do with an acceptance of the rules of the game, in which, after all, the Democrats are major players, aren’t they, as is public broadcasting as regards the media structure in this country.
(Okay, maybe not major in the latter case, but part and parcel of it.)
If we’re waiting on these folks to stand tall on principle, and say the things that need to be said, and that I think would find a receptive audience among much of the population, we’re going to be sorely disappointed.
To do so would be to take on the status quo, of which they are a vital part, as there has to be a “liberal” alternative to maintain the fiction of true electoral or informational choice. But the fact that, well, the facts go begging, even though they’re obvious to anyone willing to seek them out here or elsewere, I think shows there is no real choice to be had.
The fiction must be maintained at all costs, and facts have no place in that fiction.
I hope that doesn’t come across as facile. I think the bottom line is that any commitment to real change would be evidenced by a fealty to the factual, by simply adhering to just the facts, ma’am, and time and again we see nothing of the sort from these parties.
As for ACORN, regardless of their motives, they should have known that firing these persons would do them no good, for the reasons stated above. No one was going to stand up for them – no one with any real power, at least. So they caved for nothing.
Now, a moral stand would’ve been to stick with their people, regardless of the consequences, for to not do so betrays the essence of what they say they’re committed to, doesn’t it? And I think they had the ability to do that, but, again, for whatever reason, they didn’t fight back tooth and nail against these lies, and we see the fallout from that.
And we have to consider the possibility that, for all the good the group’s done, that doesn’t necessarily translate into being mensches 24/7, does it? I’ve run across many “progressives”, folks who’ve done important work, whose commitment to that whole Golden Rule thing is considerably less than I might have imagined. You may have, as well.
So, I don’t know that the above’s very cogent, but what I’m trying to convey is that, as the man said, blind faith in anything will get you killed. Never make anyone or any group into Jesus on a stick. Criticize what you find fault in, even as you praise the good that’s done, and be as uncompromising with yourself as you are with others.
All together now …
Do what your conscience demands and your courage allows, and never be satisfied with the limits of either.
I do go on.