USA Today's Rick Hampson has a piece today (12/7/11) on Occupy Wall Street's Occupy Our Homes actions, which include efforts to move families into vacant housing. This coverage is a good sign if you think there is still something happening with this movement after the evictions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

But why does the article include commentary from right-wing scam artist Andrew Breitbart? The paper reports:

Conservative online publisher and commentator Andrew Breitbart said the movement's new focus demonstrates that Occupy Wall Street is not "an authentic grassroots movement" but a political maneuver backed by organized labor and remnants of the ACORN community-organizing group aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election campaign.

"This is AstroTurf" rather than grassroots, he said. "This isn't about helping little old ladies.… This is about fomenting civil unrest, fomenting class warfare."

Breitbart's work is totally unreliable. He's been sounding the ACORN/SEIU alarms about Occupy Wall Street almost from the beginning--just like (at least) one Fox News host. The point is to try and link the movement to an array of progressive institutions and, apparently, the Obama campaign. It's nonsensical paranoia. Is he included for the sake of "balance"?

That's not my opinion-- that's what I learned reading the New York Times today (6/27/11). Jeremy Peters profiles the right-wing scam artist, telling readers (emphasis added):

Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of ACORN workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to ACORN, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

That wasn't the lesson of the ACORN videos at all. After  a long battle, the Times admitted that much of its coverage of the Breitbart/James O'Keefe videos was misleading. The paper told readers that O'Keefe actually went into ACORN offices dressed in a ridiculous "pimp" get-up. He did not.

What the Times would not concede, though, was that the actual videos show very little in the way of tax evasion and prostitution advice. But that's the story Breitbart and O'Keefe were pushing; watching the actual videos doesn't provide much, if any, support for those claims. But they're still being made in the New York Times--which might be Breitbart's greatest triumph.

Peters goes on:

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his websites--which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood--tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don't, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

This is absurd.

If you think that Breitbart distorts the facts, that's because HE DOES. To suggest otherwise is to assert that there's no way to ever know the truth about anything.  Is that the standard in "objective" journalism?

From Wednesday's NBC Nightly News (3/9/11), courtesy of reporter Lisa Myers:

We last saw O'Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN.

No we didn't.

As should be well-known by now, O'Keefe used footage of himself wearing a "pimp" costume in his ACORN videos--but didn't wear the ridiculous costume during his "undercover stings." Media accounts acted as though he did, though--it took a lot of effort to get the New York Times to finally admit its errors on this count.

If reporters don't know these facts, they're bound to get fooled by O'Keefe again.

After his fraudulent ACORN videos, the lesson media should have learned about right-wing "citizen journalist" James O'Keefe is not to trust him. But they didn't, so here we are with his NPR stunt, which allegedly shows NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller saying mean things about the Tea Party in a meeting with phony Muslim Brotherhood-connected donors.

But it appears that, once again, O'Keefe's videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck-affiliated website. Over there, Scott Baker pointed to a few problems (3/10/11). In one part of the video, NPR's Schiller seems to laugh about the phony Muslim group's position on Sharia law. Baker says it's out of context:

So after saying that the MEAC website advocates the "acceptance of Sharia," the video cuts to the NPR exec saying, "Really? That’s what they said?" The cadence is jovial and upbeat and the narration moves on.  The implication is that the NPR exec is aware and perhaps amused or approving of the MEAC mission statement. But when you look at the raw video, you realize he was actually recounting an unrelated and innocuous issue about confusion over names in the restaurant reservation.

But more important than that is the part of the video regarding Schiller's comments about the Tea Party--the words that generated much of the current controversy. According to Baker, elsewhere in the video Schiller talks fondly of his own Republican roots. As for the racist, xenophobic Tea Party stuff:

the clip in the edited video implies Schiller is giving simply his own analysis of the Tea Party. He does do that in part, but the raw video reveals that he is largely recounting the views expressed to him by two top Republicans, one a former ambassador, who admitted to him that they voted for Obama.

NPR has done at least two reports on the video (one here, the other here). It's not quite a Shirley Sherrod moment--where the right-wing video was edited to totally turn her message around--but it's clear that things aren't exactly what they first seemed. O'Keefe's history should give media outlets serious reservations about taking him at face value on anything.

On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/13/11) O'Keefe was asked what he thought of the media's coverage of the story:

HOWARD KURTZ: Do you think the media coverage has been fair to you and your organization in this NPR story?

O'KEEFE: I think it's been more fair. I think the mainstream media is certainly starting to have a little more respect for us.

He's right--which goes to show you that the argument that the media is tilted to the left remains totally unconvincing.

*NOTE: A small correction: The Blaze writer's name is Scott Baker-- not Scott Walker, who is someone else entirely.

In late 2009 and early 2010, right-wing activist James O'Keefe concocted a story that got widespread media coverage. The tall tale went like this: O'Keefe and his associate went to offices affiliated with the community organizing group ACORN in order to solicit advice on running a brothel and evading taxes. The problem was that nothing much like that actually happened. As FAIR summarized  (Action Alert, 3/11/10):

O'Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a "pimp," and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not "tax evasion"). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

The upshot: O'Keefe misrepresented his exploits, released selectively edited videos, and the press fell for it. In fact, the ombud at the Washington Post and the public editor at the New York Times chided their respective papers for not giving the bogus "scandal" more attention. (Eventually, the Times would admit some of its ACORN errors, thanks to FAIR activists and blogger Brad Friedman.)

So it felt a little odd to see this headline in the New York Times today (2/2/11):

Group Releases Hidden Tapes of Planned Parenthood

The lead:

An anti-abortion group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released an undercover video on Tuesday that appears to show a clinic manager advising a sex trafficker how to get medical care for prostitutes as young as 14.

So this raises the question: Will these outlets learn to treat right-wing hidden camera exploits more skeptically--or maybe decide that they're not news at all? This Times account suggests that they have already forgotten what they learned last time:

The video resembles those made in 2009 by a conservative activist, James O'Keefe, in which employees of the community group Acorn appeared to advise a prostitution ring how to avoid taxes.

At the Washington Post, under the headline "Anti-Abortion Group Releases Planned Parenthood Sting Video," readers are told:

A group seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood released a video Tuesday that depicts two hired actors posing as a pimp and a prostitute seeking services at a New Jersey clinic, in an operation resembling one that helped take down a liberal anti-poverty group two years ago.

If by "resembles," the Post means  that this current video is getting more attention than it deserves, then, yes, there is a distinct similarity. A more reasonable write-up of the current "sting" came courtesy of Alex Pareene at Salon.com (2/1/11), who wrote that the plan

didn't really work, because Planned Parenthood quickly caught on and alerted the FBI. (BigJournalism.com exclusive: Planned Parenthood alerts the authorities when confronted by self-proclaimed human traffickers!) Planned Parenthood suspected that the hoaxer had ties to Live Action, an antiabortion activist group run by Lila Rose, a sometime O'Keefe partner-in-undercover-stinging. And Live Action confirmed its involvement by posting the sad results of its exhaustive video investigation today. It caught one staffer possibly advising a make-believe pimp to send a make-believe underage prostitute somewhere where her abortion would not be reported. (It is obviously impossible to tell what actually happened without the unedited video.) (And also this Planned Parenthood alerted the authorities about the weird visit.)

Pareene points out:

These conservative undercover "hoaxes" are best understood as an attempt to make their fantasies real. In order to make animate the world that they feverishly imagine, they must themselves become the unsavory characters with bad motivations that they enjoy thinking populate these hotbeds of degenerate liberal activity.

The corporate media problem here is quite serious, since there is a deep-seated feeling that what right-wing activists do should get more coverage, to make up for the nonexistent liberal bias in the mainstream media. This sensibility creates the media "appetite" for the ACORN hoax, the Shirley Sherrod hoax, and on and on.

At this point, it's not a question of media "falling" for this stuff, but being eager to act as a megaphone for these right-wing fantasies.

Sometimes it almost seems like one of the requirements for a high-placed job in corporate media is an inability to learn from experience. Take the front page of USA Today (7/22/10)--the "cover story" is about Shirley Sherrod (FAIR Blog, 7/21/10), whose ordeal is blamed in part on "conservative blogger" Andrew Breitbart taking advantage of "a media culture in which half-truths can spread like a virus online, to be instantly and endlessly chewed over on cable TV."

And right next to this piece, the paper's lead story is about voters being registered at welfare offices.  It concludes with a right-wing spin insinuating that registering poor people to vote is a form of electoral fraud:

Jason Torchinsky, a former Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration, says liberal groups want welfare offices to replace the work of ACORN, a coalition of anti-poverty groups that disbanded this year after allegations of voter fraud.

"With the demise of ACORN, the left needs somebody to pick up that function," he says.

Except, of course, ACORN didn't disband after allegations of voter fraud; it disbanded after that same Andrew Breitbart who smeared Shirley Sherrod put out an equally fraudulent video that falsely portrayed the group as giving professional counseling to a guy dressed like Superfly--you know, one of those half-truths that spread like a virus online and wad instantly and endlessly chewed over on cable TV...and has clearly not yet been spit out by USA Today.

The lesson of Shirley Sherrod's disgraceful treatment by right-wing and not-so-right-wing media (followed by her equally squalid dismissal by an administration that took that media at face value) boils down to a single question: When will journalists see Andrew Breitbart as the serial promoter of journalistic frauds that he is, rather than as a legitimate source for story ideas?

FAIR readers will remember Breitbart's dissemination of videos that purported to show ACORN employees advising a "prostitute" and her "pimp" -- conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe--on how to avoid paying taxes. The videos have since been heavily debunked. As FAIR has noted before (Action Alert, 3/11/10), O'Keefe didn't "pose" as a pimp--he didn't wear his ridiculous  "pimp" outfit inside ACORN offices, and in almost every case pretended to be a concerned boyfriend trying to get his girlfriend away from an abusive pimp. He also did not receive advice on how to "cheat" on his taxes. Additionally,  ACORN has been cleared of wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations.

Breitbart's latest fraud--posting a selectively edited video in which Sherrod appears to make some overtly racist statements to a local NAACP chapter--led to the forced resignation of the USDA employee.

That video went viral in the right-wing media and beyond, as accusations of Sherrod's racism were tossed about, along with the larger implication that the Obama administration harbored racists. As Sherrod tells it, she soon received three separate calls telling her the White House was asking for her resignation, with one official telling her she would be on Glenn Beck that night.

The Sherrod story didn’t actually make it on Beck that night, but it was all over Fox News. Bill O'Reilly (7/19/10) called Sherrod's comments "unacceptable" and called for her to "resign immediately."  Sean Hannity (7/19/10) called the comments "racist" and praised Breitbart for exposing them.

The next day, as details of Sherrod's entire speech emerged, it became clear she was describing her experience of struggling with and surmounting bias. Her point was an anti-racist one. Even the white farmer who was allegedly wronged by Sherrod appeared on CNN (7/20/10), along with his wife, to defend her.

Predictably, many right-wing media personalities stood by Breitbart even as the truth was being revealed. Rush Limbaugh (7/20/10) said Breitbart did "great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism."  Hannity (7/20/10) invited Breitbart on his show to defend himself.  Meanwhile, O'Reilly (7/20/10) stood by his demand for Sherrod's resignation, and even chastised the rest of the media for not reporting on Breitbart's heavily edited video--adding it to a long list of invented right-wing controversies he believes have been ignored by the mainstream media, including the aforementioned ACORN hoax, as well as the  New Black Panther voter intimidation "scandal" and the Van Jones resignation--both of which were wildly overblown (Counterspin, 7/16/10; Extra!, 11/09), but were, contrary to O'Reilly's protestations, picked up by more centrist media after amplification in the right-wing echo chamber.

The same is true of the Sherrod resignation, which some outlets continued to frame as a he said/she said controversy even after the truth began to emerge--outlets such as AP (7/20/10), which also took the opportunity to laud Breitbart's BigGovernment.com as the site that "gained fame after releasing video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute."

In the Washington Post (7/21/10), Karen Tumulty and Krissah Thompson were still lending credence to Breitbart's video even after the entire speech was released, reporting on the episode as a controversy between Sherrod and "her critics" as well as one that reinforces the right-wing narrative "that the administration of the first African-American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism."

It isn't surprising that right-wing media continue to exalt Breitbart, but when will the rest of the corporate media learn that he can't be trusted?

Andrew Breitbart is the right-wing Internet provocateur behind the ACORN video hoaxes, which purported to show a pretend pimp-and-prostitute duo getting criminal advice from the community organizing group ACORN. That's not what happened, but Breitbart's inaccurate presentation was taken at face value.

Yet some in the media are still treating Breitbart seriously. Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander wrote a column on April 11 taking his cue from Breitbart's latest effort, which is to attempt to cast doubt on the widely reported racist incidents at Tea Party protests at the Capitol on March 20, the day of the final health reform vote. Two black Democratic representatives--Andre Carson and John Lewis--say they were called "nigger." Breitbart says they're liars--it never happened. And he's posted videos of the protests with no audible racist invective.

There's just one problem; as Associated Press reporter Jesse Washington pointed out (4/13/10), the videos Breitbart is touting were shot after the incidents took place.

So a guy who pulled off one very successful media hoax is trying to pull off another one. You'd think that after being burned on the ACORN story, journalists wouldn't pay much attention to Breitbart. But not Andrew Alexander, who closed his column noting that Breitbart's efforts

may be publicity-seeking theater. But it's part of widespread conservative claims that mainstream media, including the Post, swallowed a huge fabrication. The incidents are weeks old, but it's worth assigning Post reporters to find the truth. After all, a civil rights legend is being called a liar.

There are lots of things reporters should be looking into. This is not one of them. Especially considering that the guy leading this campaign pulled off a "huge fabrication" of his own--which was "swallowed" whole by outlets like the Washington Post. Alexander's right that Lewis, a civil rights legend, is being called a liar. But the charge is coming from a liar. If Alexander is truly concerned that his paper has published fabrications, he could start by calling for an investigation of the paper's coverage of Breitbart's ACORN hoax-- especially since Alexander criticized the Post for not covering the ACORN story enough.

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 far the Times is from where it started on this story; see the list below, culled from FAIR'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.

FAIR's Jim Naureckas appeared on GritTV yesterday to discuss media coverage of ACORN:

FAIR has a new Action Alert out pointing out that the New York Times has repeatedly published accounts of the right-wing anti-ACORN videos that credulously accepted assertions that have turned out to be false--for example, that one of the video-makers, James O'Keefe, went into ACORN offices dressed as a cartoon pimp. See the alert here for the real story--and feel free to post copies of your messages to the Times or to respond to the alert in the comments thread here.

Living up to the ridiculous notion that every right-wing slam on ACORN demands coverage in the "liberal media," the Washington Post ("Duo Release Another Video of Their Meeting With ACORN Worker," 10/22/09)  runs a story on the latest from the right-wing activists whose undercover videos shot at local ACORN offices got all the attention in the first place.

So what's the news? Well, apparently the duo appeared at the National Press Club to unveil a video of themselves at a Philadelphia ACORN office, where nothing much happened. The video they presented did not include any of the audio from ACORN workers--they removed those responses, allegedly for fear of being sued. And the pair refused to take questions from the press after their (sort of) press conference. Apparently the point of the whole exercise was to show that they spent 32 minutes at the office--and were thus not told to leave immediately.  How, exactly, does this qualify as  news?

Politico (10/14/09) published a list of top topics on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, based on a search of Nexis transcripts since the show's January 2009 debut. It's instructive to look at the placement of some individuals, groups and places in the news as an indication of Beck's sense of whom and what his audience should be informed about:

ACORN: 1,224

Van Jones: 267

SEIU: 259

Afghanistan: 97

Iraq: 95

Valerie Jarrett: 52

Mark Lloyd: 50

Al-Qaeda: 50

Bill Ayers: 46

John Holdren: 43

Jeremiah Wright: 42

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 41

Osama Bin Laden: 40

Taliban: 38

If you want a lesson in how right-wing pressure on corporate media works, look no further than the ACORN story. Right-wing talkshow hosts have targeted the community organizing group for years, primarily on charges of vote fraud. Then two conservative activists produced some embarrassing videos of ACORN workers at some local offices giving tax advice advice to a couple passing themselves off as a pimp and a prostitute. From there, the story turned to right-wing gloating—and complaints about the media being too slow (and of course too liberal) to pick up on the right's anti-ACORN crusade.

And some in the media agreed. Washington Post ombud Andrew Alexander (9/20/09) criticized his paper for running just two early stories about the recent scandals involving the group. The problem was that the paper apparently doesn't pay enough attention to the concerns of the right--a feeling shared by the paper's executive editor, who called for more coverage of the group.

Over at the New York Times, public editor Clark Hoyt reached a similar conclusion (9/27/09), writing that when the paper misses such stories, it can "wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself." The Times was clueless, apparently, because they ran just one story about the anti-ACORN campaign, a piece that upset conservatives because it looked at the issue as a political matter--explaining that the videos and talk radio brouhaha was a way for the right to try and do harm to a group it opposes, and to try and connect ACORN to the Obama White House.  This is undoubtedly true. But editors at the Times, like the folks at the Post, offered the same self-criticism: We don't pay enough attention to the complaining of conservatives.

Sure enough, only a few days later, readers would see how this was changing. On October 6, the Post ran a piece on Republicans going after the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, for their ties to ACORN. The union has paid ACORN for various services over the years. A nearly identical story appeared in the next day's New York Times (10/7/09). So the completely-blown-out-of-proportion case against ACORN has now become a drive against SEIU, with no apparent news hook other than the fact that right-wing Republicans are trying to make this non-story into a story--and succeeding.

I guess editors at the Times and Post can rest easy knowing that they're not ignoring the whining of the right-wing.

Gawker blogger The Cajun Boy (6/24/09) is agog at "How Fox News Educates Its Viewers":

Last night Glenn Beck made crude drawings on a chalkboard, and tonight he and Bill O'Reilly used Barbie dolls to explain ACORN.

In the course of explaining how Nancy Pelosi is trying to stop noble Republicans from stopping ACORN from destroying America, Beck reached under the table and pulled out a Barbie kit. Now, we watched this demonstration twice and actually don't get what Beck is trying to convey, so either we're stupider than even the basest Fox viewer or our elitists brains just can't process anything that comes spewing from the mouths of these clowns. Maybe you'll have better luck.

While Beck's demonstration really doesn't make any sense in itself, another reason for the confusion generated is surely that his and O'Reilly's whole take on ACORN is nonsensical in its entirety; see the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "CNN, Fox Hype ACORN Threat" (12/08) by Daniel Ward.