Deconstructing ACORN
There was surely no more entertaining story in the news this week than BigGovernment.com’s takedown of ACORN. From start to finish it was a masterclass in absurdity, as the prep school types who did the guerilla filming led a series of bumbling ACORN employees to come up with ever more inventive ways of helping them organize a child prostitution ring. I single out ACORN ‘chief organiser’ Bertha Lewis for special praise however — she revealed a genuine aptitude for high comedy when she complained that the footage had been ‘edited’ (unlike, for example the footage we see on the news every night) or doctored (although how she did not say) and yet continued to fire those very employees who she claimed had been framed. Then there were all the clumsy lies about the offices from which the film makers had been turned away, which were proven false day after day as new tapes rolled out. However the pinnacle of absurdity was reached when she threatened to ‘go after’ the Fox news network, which is of course owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man with some talented lawyers at his disposal. Maybe she’ll invade China too.
So really, it was all great stuff: informative, important, hard hitting and ultimately — totally effective. The film makers who set out to get ACORN were politically motivated of course, but that didn’t matter — the swamp of filth they uncovered would give any reasonable person, left or right, cause for concern. I mean, we can all agree that enabling child prostitution is bad even if Glenn Beck says so too, right?
The films certainly inspired a rare display of bipartisanship in Washington. The Census was quick to respond, cutting all ties on September 11th. By Monday 14th the senate had voted to cut off all housing and community grant funding to ACORN and by Thursday the house had voted to block all government funding. Thus in the space of a week, an organization once praised by Obama, and which had been instrumental to his campaign, and which had enjoyed close ties to the Democrats for decades, had been destroyed by two citizen journalists and a man with a website.
However one thing about this story gives me cause for concern. As the videos were rolling out, CBS, NBC, ABC, and most of the big newspapers were very slow to respond. CNN gave it some coverage, but their editors displayed a nose for news that would embarrass even a first year journalism student, by uncritically repeating the falsehoods fed to them by ACORN, and worse still attempting to frame the story as an issue of journalistic ethics, and not the shocking collusion in a possible crime by a taxpayer funded entity. In fact, the more prestigious media outlets chose instead to focus on the ramblings of a disgruntled old man who, I am reliably informed, used to be president, Obama’s description of Kanye West as a ‘jackass’ and the earth-shattering discovery that mass rallies attract a certain number of extremist nutbags. In fact, when Charles Gibson was asked why his network ABC wasn’t reporting on ACORN he replied that he didn’t know anything about the story. It took days for most of the media to get on top of the story, long after it was all over the internet and Congress was taking action.
What’s going on? How do they expect to reverse ratings failure and declining sales when they don’t inform their audience about important stories until days after they have broken? And it’s not as if this is the first time this has happened — when Obama’s Green Jobs Czar Anthony ‘Van’ Jones was exposed as an apparent 9/11 Truther, most of the media didn’t get to the story until after he had been fired. Aren’t they worried that this makes them look stupid and incompetent?
Now I know that some people say the so-called ‘mainstream media’ (or ‘elite media’ or ‘traditional media’ etc) is biased, and that the networks and major newspapers are in the tank for Obama and the Democrats, and that the silence over ACORN was motivated by a desire to prevent harm to their cause. Well, OK, but even then — if your goal is to provide a propaganda service on behalf of the powers that be, then you should at least aim to be effective. But ACORN was destroyed regardless. Even worse, Jon Stewart did a skit on ACORN on Tuesday when only Fox was covering the story and then on Thursday Jay Leno made gags about the hapless community organizers in his opening routine. Both comedians assumed that their audiences already knew the story, which means that the ‘mainstream media’ isn’t setting the agenda any more — and thus can hardly be described as mainstream.
What to do about this decline in fortunes? Well, if your goal is to run a business that delivers news, you’re obviously going to fail if you don’t inform people about the important stories your rivals are covering. And if it’s to protect your political friends, well, then you have to be subtle about it. Report the story, but try to frame it in such a way that it helps your cause — like CNN did, only first make sure you check how easy it is to disprove the various narratives the people you are inclined to protect supply you with. At least that way you won’t look like a bunch of pompous, self-deluding, incompetent hacks. Who knows, you might even score some advertisers, gain an audience — even make a profit someday.
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I want some business advice from ACORN.
They’re rather preoccupied at the moment, I hear.
I took notes from watching the videos. I’ll be using them when filing my taxes next year. Don’t know if they cover the advice you’re looking for, David, but I’m happy to share. I’m sure you can extrapolate from there, as in “What would that counselor suggest I do if I wanted to ________?”
As a proud lefty pinko tree-hugging Obama supporting socialist, let me just say:
a) This was an intelligent, well-written, thought-provoking and very fair essay from someone who, I’m guessing, probably doesn’t agree with me on much. Kudos nonetheless.
b) The staffers involved are idiots with a twisted sense of ethics. They should be as deeply ashamed of themselves as humanly possible.
That being said, is it really fair that a pair of idiots who, I’m pretty darn sure, did not follow their employee handbook very closely, can bring down an entire organization? Shouldn’t this be the beginning of an investigative story, not the end of it?
Back when the Abu Gharib scandal was in the news, the big question was whether the soldiers doing the torturing and humiliation were acting independently, or whether they were following a policy handed down from on high.
Those individual soldiers, like these staffers, were assholes. But what I want to know, in both cases, is: were they following orders or defying them? And while I have seen a lot of coverage of the incident, I haven’t seen much exploration in the media of the larger question of whether these two were truly bad apples, or whether the whole damn tree (apple or ACORN) was rotten.
Andrew, there’s been a lot of exploration in the media over the past decade about ACORN being a rotten apple tree. But since most of it came out of the right field, as it were – e.g., FOX News, New York Post – you probably hadn’t come across it. This documentary is all the proof Fox needed to finally show they’ve been right about this all along. That the rest of the mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the deeper story is the mainstream media’s failing, not a vindication of ACORN. The mainstream media, as you might have heard, is just not very good.
This article has a lot of links to pre-exposé stories in the mainstream media about ACORN being not quite what they’d like to seem:
http://www.slate.com/id/2229387/
Andrew:
If it was simply one set of Acorn employees in one office in one city, then it could easily be dismissed as an aberration.
That is not the case here! We have a repeating pattern of illegal and immoral behavior in Acorn offices all across the US.
How would you explain the Acorn Employees, in offices as far apart as Boston and San Francisco, are both giving the “pimp” and “prostitute” the same advice on how to get away with committing patently immoral and illegal acts?
It is obvious to anyone watching the videos that the Acorn employees shown are not bright enough to have conceived of the plan separately.
It is a clear pattern of behavior that indicates the implicit approval of the Acorn leadership.
On a lighter note….
I am waiting for the video that shows the Acorn employee helping a dead, illegal immigrant prostitute get a voter registration card. It would be the government-sponsored fraud trifecta!