Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite: ACORN and the James Rainey Saga

by Michael Walsh

The hidden-camera videos by James O‘Keefe and Hannah Giles detailing the inner workings of the taxpayer-funded leftist racket known as ACORN have set off a storm of journalistic controversy, but not in the way one might think.  Rather than engaging the substance of the stories first made available on Big Government and later on Fox News – that ACORN, to put it generously, seems to be staffed by an inordinate number of employees blithely willing to aid and, if possible, abet criminal activity – the dinosaur media has reacted not by investigating the message but by attacking the messengers, all in the name of “journalistic ethics.”

Now, when a “journalist” – I prefer the days when we called ourselves “reporters” – starts lecturing his readers about the saintly nature of “journalism” you know that the entropic, self-referential MSM has just about hit bottom.  Long gone, apparently, are the days of the old Front Page, the 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – filmed four times – that lovingly limned the street-smart, ink-stained wretches (in the late Herb Caen’s famous phrase) who would stop at nothing to Get The Story.  For decades – and certainly when I started in “journalism” in 1971 – this was model of the enterprising reporter: check your conscience at the bar, get the story, go home, go to bed, get up the next morning and do it all over again.  These guys were our heroes:

front page

Not pursuing a legitimate news story, as James Rainey and the rest of the Pecksniffian  bien-pensant staff of the once-great Los Angeles Times seem intent on doing, because the young reporters are “agents provocateurs” and “political guerillas,” is bad enough.  Who cares what they are?  It’s like saying Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns are scum-sucking bottom feeders who would steal milk bottles from babies and nickels from newsboys if they thought it was a Page One story; a badge-of-honor insult those old-school newshounds would have worn with pride, alongside the egg stains on their ties and the lipstick on their collars.

After all, James “the Dog in the Night-time” Rainey works for the very same newspaper that since last year has been suppressing a potentially devastating videotape that depicts then-state senator Barack “Present” Obama gushing over his Chicago pal, Rashid Khalidi, a charter member of the University of Chicago-Columbia Obama axis of influence.  As Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who put the “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, in the Supermax prison for life for his role in planning the first World Trade Center bombing, notes:

Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?

But it’s Rainey’s reasons for not looking into the apparent – one might say “manifest” – ACORN malfeasance that ought to be even more disturbing:  “The duo certainly has caused a stir — and raised questions about an organization that in the past had received substantial government funding — but, sorry folks, please don’t call this journalism.”  Right – and don’t call us  late for dinner, either!

Leaving aside Rainey’s consistent misrepresentation that “the response from ACORN employees was not so uniformly compliant as the videographers have implied” – the evidence is right here on Big Government for all to see, so you be the judge – why not call it journalism?  And is that really the most important issue at stake here?

In his September 23 column, Rainey resorts to one of the weakest of intellectual arguments, the “appeal to authority” – in this case, the Society of Professional Journalists – to dismiss the ACORN stories as tainted by their provenance:

Should news organizations be using this kind of subterfuge to get stories? If so, when? And when such hidden-camera theatrics come over the transom, how closely should they be scrutinized before they are thrown open to the public?

The answers — surprise, surprise — are not so simple.

Local and national television outlets have not been averse to assuming fake identities and sometimes using hidden cameras to expose, for example, unsafe factory working conditions or abuses in rest homes.

But the Society of Professional Journalists has set a standard that deception should be used only when every other reporting approach has been exhausted and only then in certain cases, most notably to reveal a severe social problem or to prevent people from being harmed.

To use the technical term favored by “professional journalists,” this is “laugh out loud funny,’ especially since – and this will probably come as news to the Los Angeles Times newspaper – ACORN itself has openly boasted, in its 2005 annual report, of doing exactly the same thing.  As is well known, under the rubric of “Financial Justice” (ACORN’s lingo reeks of old-fashioned communist phraseology, as anybody over the age of 45 is aware), we find this heartwarming tale of the triumph of the human spirit:

Pretending to be a naïve tax preparation customer, Christina [Talarczyk, an ACORN activist in San Antonio] walked into a Jackson Hewitt office with a Dateline producer who had a camera hidden in his sunglasses.  The tax-preparation employees were caught on camera as they tried to convince Christina to take out a high-interest RAL [Refund Anticipation Loan]


Pages from 2005-ACORN-Annual-Report-web –

Now that we understand the Rainey Principle – that it’s not the method but whose ox is gored – where to begin? Let’s jump in the Wayback Machine, dial up “journalistic methods” and see where it takes us!

On January 12, 1928, a woman named Ruth Snyder was sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison for murdering her husband for his insurance money; her lover, Judd Gray, met a similar fate later that same day.  One of “Ruthless” Ruth’s claims to fame is that she became the model for Phyllis Nirdlinger in James M. Cain’s novel, Double Indemnity (in the movie her surname was changed to the more euphonious Dietrichson).

But her place in journalistic history was forever enshrined by a “journalist,” Chicago Tribune photographer Thomas Howard, who was sent to New York at the behest of the Trib’s sister publication, the New York Daily News, to surreptitiously photograph the merry murderess’s hot date with Old Sparky.  Although executions were routinely witnessed by the gentlemen of the press, acting on behalf of the public, photographs were strictly forbidden.  The Daily News decided to test that unconstitutional “no law” restriction by bringing in a shutterbug unknown to the other witnesses.  Having scoped out the room, and (thanks to some legwork by Daily News staffers), and knowing precisely the angle and distance he’d have to work with, Howard smuggled in a miniature camera with a single glass plate strapped to his left ankle, concealed by his pants leg.  He had only one shot to get it right and he did.  The next day, Friday the 13th, his picture appeared on the cover of the Daily News with the headline, “DEAD!”

ruth_snyder_electric_chair

Naturally, there was a great deal of huzzerei, and legal action was threatened, although it appears none was ever taken.  Howard made a pile, his camera wound up in the Smithsonian and, according to some sources, he even got a job in the White House.  What the “severe social problem” was is unclear, and as for preventing harm…

You’ll have to ask Ruth Snyder.

Want to know who James Rainey’s First Amendment hero is?  Want more “appeal to authority”?  Want the 411 about hidden-camera tactics?  More tomorrow…


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Posted Nov 30th 2009 at 10:21 am in ACORN, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 80 Comments