The community organizing group Acorn, battered politically from the right and suffering from mismanagement along with a severe loss of government and other funds, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, officials of the group said Friday.

Acorn is holding a teleconference this weekend to discuss plans for a bankruptcy filing, two officials of the group said. They asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella, and will not be affected if the national organization files for bankruptcy.

This week, the Maryland chapter announced that it would not reopen its offices, which were shuttered in September in the wake of a widely publicized series of video recordings made by two conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, who secretly filmed Acorn workers providing them tax advice. In the videos, Acorn workers told one of the activists, James E. O’Keefe III, how to hide prostitution activities from the authorities and avoid taxes, raising no objections to his proposed criminal activities.

After the activists’ videos came to light and swiftly became fodder for 24-hour cable news coverage, private donations from foundations to Acorn all but evaporated and the federal government quickly distanced itself from the group.

The Census Bureau ended its partnership with the organization for this year’s census, the Internal Revenue Service dropped Acorn from its Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program, and Congress voted to cut off all grants to the group.

A network that once included more than 1,000 grass-roots groups, Acorn, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was created in 1970 and has fought for liberal causes like raising the minimum wage, registering the poor to vote, stopping predatory lending and expanding affordable housing.

But long before the activist videos delivered what may become the final blow, the organization was dogged for years by financial problems and accusations of fraud. In the summer of 2008, infighting erupted over embezzlement of Acorn funds by the brother of the organization’s founder. Some chapters were also found to have submitted voter application forms with incorrect information on them during the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, leading to blistering charges from conservative organizations linking Acorn’s errors to the Obama campaign.

“That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work,” said Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of Acorn’s Maryland chapter. “But if the organization had confronted its own internal problems, it might not have been taken down so easily.”

Read the whole article here.

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films.

The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director.  It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for a private interview in her office at ACORN’s facility in Philadelphia on July 24, 2009.  This is the first such suit filed against the filmmakers by an individual ACORN employee.

The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, claims that the Giles and O’Keefe “purportedly sought information regarding housing and mortgage opportunities in Philadelphia, but were in reality imposters who deliberately and surreptitiously created video and audio recordings in an attempt to discredit plaintiff Conway-Russell and ACORN Housing Corporation,” and that they subsequently “disseminated the illegally obtained recordings in a manner calculated to harm and injure” Katherine Conway-Russell.

Conway-Russell alleges that the actions of Giles and O’Keefe ran afoul of Pennsylvania Law and, indeed, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania all parties to a conversation must be aware of and consent to any recording.  According to 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703, it is a felony of the third degree to intentionally intercept, endeavor to intercept, or get any other person to intercept any wire, electronic, or oral communication without the consent of all the parties.

Read the whole article here.

This attempt to whitewash ACORN and its employees’ wrongdoing has been appropriately decried by Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican National Lawyers Association, and contributors to Biggovernment.com.

ACORN’s pending litigation against the federal government has received less attention.  Last week, unbeknownst to all but avid court or ACORN watchers a pivotal moment occurred in the lawsuit.  Peter D. Leary, an attorney at the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Congressional efforts to defund ACORN.  His brief defended the defunding, while severely narrowing its scope and application.

Congress was clear in its decision to defund ACORN.  The plain language of the Continuing Resolution (CR) is unmistakable:

“None of the funds made available by this joint resolution or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.”

The Department of Justice has however issued a memorandum severely narrowing its application.

Harvard Law School professor and Acting Assistant Attorney General David J. Barron concluded that the CR “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to ACORN or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability.”  He reaches this conclusion by parsing the definition of the term “provided.”  I wonder where Professor Barron was when President Clinton was attempting to define the word “is.”

This memorandum and its conclusions defy both logic and common sense.

Now we turn to the brief filed last week by the government.  It defends the defunding of ACORN noting that the Executive Branch has interpreted the CR ban on funding narrowly, and relying heavily on the fact that a CR is by definition temporary in nature.

The brief relies on the Barron memorandum noting that “the Executive Branch has interpreted [the ban on funding] more narrowly, such that ‘section 163 does not direct or authorize [Agencies] to refuse payment on binding contractual obligations that predate the Continuing Appropriations Resolution.’”

To reinforce the point that the defunding is only temporary attorney Peter Leary states that “[t]ellingly, three of the four full-year Fiscal Year 2010 Appropriations Acts that have been enacted since the CR went into effect contain no provisions foreclosing plaintiffs  from applying for or receiving federal grants.”  The message is clear, Obama’s Justice Department will defend the actions of Congress to defund ACORN so long as they are only temporary and the free-flowing access to federal funds is restored soon.

This brief may be music to the ears of Representative Jerrold Nadler.  If you recall he’s been fighting the ban and advising ACORN’s attorney on the issue.  While DOJ has not gone so far as to agree with ACORN, it has eviscerated the intent and substance of the ban on funding.

It’s time for Congress to permanently defund this corrupt organization.  Congress must protect the taxpayers and ensure that no more federal funds are not subject to waste, fraud or abuse by ACORN.

Since the freewheeling days of the 1920s celebrated in The Front Page, there has been a profound shift in the way journalists view themselves and their societal role.  We might locate its origins in the 1947 report by the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, known today as Hutchins Commission after its chairman, Robert M. Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, and funded by Henry Luce of Time Inc.   In answer to the question, “is the freedom of the press in danger,” the commission answered yes, and issued “five ideal demands”:

1) A truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.

2) A forum for the exchange of comment and criticism.

3) The projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society.  (“The Commission holds to the faith that if people are exposed to the inner truth of the life of a particular group, they will gradually build up respect for an understanding of it.”)

4) The presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society.

5) Full access to the day’s intelligence.

The high-minded commissioners were dissatisfied with the grubby, dirty business of shoe-leather newsgathering (“Those who direct the machinery of the press have engaged from time to time in practices which the society condemns and which, if continued, it will inevitably undertake to regulate or control”) and sought to comb its hair, shine its wingtips and take it out for a night on the town.

I think you can begin to see where the problem lies, and where our conversation picks up.

Calls for the professionalization of journalism, – or even the governmental control thereof  — go back even farther, to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion. Lippmann, a radical socialist in his youth who stepped from Harvard (of course) into journalism via his mentor, the muckraking Lincoln “I Have Seen the Future, and It Works” Steffens, also drifted in and out of government (think of him as the George Stephanopoulos of his day), serving as an assistant to the Secretary of War, as the Secretary of Defense was then called, and in other capacities.  But he made his mark, and his career, as one of the original pundits, first at the New York World and later at the New York Herald Tribune, where his column “Today and Tomorrow” was required reading, the way Walter Winchell’s radio program was required listening.

After examining the deficiencies of the press, Lippmann declared:  “… analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.  My conclusion is that public opinion must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press.”

To me, those words remain as chilling today as they when I first read them years ago.  Organized for the press?  Surely, Lippmann would be proud today to see MSM and MSNBC pundit/parrots like Howard Fineman, Jon Meacham, Evan Thomas and Jacob Weisberg – whose unintentionally hilarious piece in Slate the other day on “Obama’s Brilliant First Year” stunned liberals and conservatives alike with its sheer lickspittle delusionality – happily chirping away on shows like Morning Joe.  But the rest of us might prefer a little more independence of thought.  Further, the ongoing decline of printed newspapers and magazines has even led some to call for the subsidization of the press by the government – a prospect that ought to have every First Amendment patriot up in arms.

And this is, I believe, the heart of the disagreement.  Is “journalism” a profession, in the same way science medicine or the law is, given to grave, bonze-like chin-pulling and an inside-the-Beltway search for “consensus?”  Thanks to “Climategate,” we’re all witnessing right now where that leads, as the monstrous scam known as “global warming” has been exposed for the malevolent shakedown racket that it is.  Hide the decline!

Or is reporting a craft, a calling, a game that anyone and any number can play once you master a few simple storytelling rules (mostly having to do with the way a news story is constructed), without a government license, a journalism degree or even a “legitimate” media gig?

I come down on the “craft” side of the ledger.  When I got my first job, on the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the managing editor asked: “Have you ever studied journalism?”  When I replied that there were no journalism courses at the Eastman School of Music, where I had studied composition, history and piano, he smiled.  “Good.  Now you don’t need to unlearn anything.”  A few months later, I was on the police beat and on my way to a first prize in reporting, shared with two D&C colleagues, in the 1972 New York State Publishers Association contest for a series on heroin.  Prior to taking over as the paper’s classical music critic the next year, I covered floods, fires, spectacular (and very gruesome) murders, and federal court.  Later, on the San Francisco Examiner, I found myself in the middle of the “White Night” riots that followed the Dan White trial in San Francisco; at the second eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State: and, for Time, at the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The point being that if I could do it, anybody can do it.

In retrospect, several factors came into play in the 1970s, all of which contributed to the current image of the “professional journalist.”  One was the changeover from manual typewriters, clattering teletype machines and clangorous presses to the current buttoned-down, insurance-office atmosphere that prevails in increasingly silent (because increasingly empty) newsrooms.  Even on the most routine day, there was a sense of excitement in the newsroom: the shouts of “copy!” to summon the copyboys (the old shout of “boy!” had been retired, for obvious reasons); the curses of the reporters as they ripped sheets of triplicate out of their typewriters, wadded them up and launched them toward an already overflowing wastepaper basket, only to crank up a fresh sheet and start pounding the Smith-Corona again; the clang of the linotype machines in the composing room and the hammering of type on the plates; the rumble in the bowels of the building at two o’clock in the morning as the presses started their run and spit out the bulldog edition.

More important was Watergate, during which reporters learned that they could bring down a president; idealists and ideologues who had formally considered the law as an instrument of social change realized that the Washington Post was a quicker ticket to reform, fame and fortune than the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Before Watergate, hardly anybody knew a reporter’s name; after Woodward and Bernstein (full disclosure: Carl is a former colleague and friend), it was a straight shot to Celebrity Journalism, in which one’s opinion about the news was as newsworthy, if not more so, than the actual news itself, viz: the McLaughlin Group, Reliable Sources, and the Fox All-Stars.

Still, the old fighting, working-class spirit lived on for a while.  So let’s hop back in the Wayback Machine and fly back to Old Chicago – Chicago, 1978, that is, when some enterprising editors and reporters at the Chicago Sun-Times, led by reporter Pamela Zekman and editor Jim Hoge, opened the Mirage Bar on the Near North Side.

This was no ordinary watering hole: it was a sting operation, designed to do one thing, expose corruption in America’s most corrupt city, and it did it well.  Like ants to a picnic, the faux tavern immediately attracted a host of Windy City municipal inspectors who happily overlooked (deliberate) code violations in exchange for a greased palm.

Posing as repairmen, Sun-Times photographers recorded everything from a hidden loft.   As Time Magazine put it:

Cheating was not restricted to public officials. Six local accountants taught the proprietors how to save taxes by hiding income. But the best teacher was a “Mr. Fixit” named Philip Barasch. Unaware of the investigators’ true identity, Barasch, a big Chicago landlord and self-styled “business broker,” guided them every step of the way, telling them the hour inspectors would show up and the exact amount to give them (with Barasch’s business card enclosed). The only officials he did not advise bribing were police because, he said, “if you pay off a cop, they keep coming around every month, like flies, looking for a payoff.”

The Mirage was the most famous Chicago journalistic sting, but not the only one.  Chicago newspapers routinely infiltrated reporters into suspected rackets – spec stings, you might call them – such as morgues, ambulance companies and prisons, anyplace where graft and corruption might well be found.  Was there “probable cause?”  In a court of law, probably not.  In the court of public opinion – are you kidding?

True, not everybody in journalism approved.  Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, famously dinged the Sun-Times’s shot at a Pulitzer in 1979, saying: “In a day in which we are spending thousands of hours uncovering deception, we simply cannot deceive.  How can newspapers fight for honesty and integrity when they themselves are less than honest in getting a story?”

That, however, was the post-Watergate Bradlee talking, basking in his heroic portrayal by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men with Nixon’s scalp still dangling from his belt.  And yet it was the same Ben Bradlee who, in 1971, sent Ben H. Bagdikian, under a false identity, inside the Huntingdon State Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania for five weeks to write an eight-part series called “The Shame of the Prisons.”

Contemporary reporters use the hidden-camera tactic all the time.  Indeed, NBC’s Dateline show – the home of To Catch a Predator – boasts openly about it, for example here, in a story about sweatshops in Bangladesh (“With our hidden cameras we’ll find out who sews those pants, and under what conditions”); here, in a story about insurance agents taking advantage of befuddled seniors (“Join us in a ground-breaking hidden-camera investigation, as we go behind the scenes to uncover the techniques they use: inside sales meetings — where we catch the questionable pitches; inside training sessions — where we discover agents being taught to scare seniors; and, finally, inside senior’s homes to reveal the tricks some agents use to puff their credentials to make a sale”) and – oops! – here when they got caught sneaking a mole into a computer-hackers conference (“DefCon security on Friday warned attendees at the annual hacker conference that Dateline NBC may have sent a mole with a hidden camera to the event to capture hackers admitting to crimes. DefCon says it was tipped off by their own mole at Dateline who sent them a pic of the undercover journalist who DefCon employees identified as producer Michelle Madigan.”)

In this, Dateline is only following in the hallowed footsteps of CBS’s 60 Minutes, which not only employed hidden cameras as it unhorsed various squirming miscreants, but indulged in checkbook journalism as well, notoriously paying for interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, G. Gordon Liddy and Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman.  The 60 Minutes ethos was captured in this portrait of the late Don Hewitt, the show’s producer, in Rolling Stone:

Take a recent Thursday afternoon, for example, when Hewitt pointed to a television set in his office and said, “Watch this. You won’t believe it.”

We both stare at the tube as Mike Wallace appears and informs us that the following piece is “not ordinary family fare,” the kind of “warning” that makes it impossible to turn off your set.

The piece is called “Kiddy Porn,” and it is vintage 60 Minutes: a gut-grabbing story featuring sleazy characters and shot with hidden cameras.

Sleazy characters?  Hidden cameras?  Sound familiar?  (For a good roundup of the pros and cons of hidden cameras, go here).

In his recent piece in the L.A. Times, media writer James Rainey argues from authority as he advises his readers not to call what O’Keefe and Giles did journalism, citing the Society of Professional Journalists’s guidelines on the subject.  So, as long as we’re arguing from authority, let’s check out the widely used textbook, Journalism Ethics by Philip Seib and Kathy Fitzpatrick (Harcourt Brace, 1997), in which we find these rules concerning undercover journalism:

* Undercover efforts should be undertaken only as a last resort, when conventional reporting techniques have been tried and failed

* The story should be of vital public interest.

Given that the MSM has thus far shown a profound disinterest in investigating an organization with a decidedly hinky past featuring embezzlement at the highest levels (the sum has since been reported as up to $5 million) that is also closely tied to president Barack Obama, you’d think the “fiercely independent” MSM would be all over allegations against the many-headed hydra.  But no:  since ACORN disguises itself as a defender of the poor, it gets a pass.  And as for “vital public interest,” the organization was recently de-funded by Congress, for crying out loud, although the ever-reliable attorney general, Eric Holder, has managed to find a way around the ban.

Because, believe it or not, there was a time when the media challenged the government, instead of acting as (in Andrew Breitbart’s phrase) part of the “Democrat-Media Complex.”  There was a time when the media stood up for the real Forgotten Man (read Amity Shlaes’s brilliant book), who was neither an elected official nor a picturesque beggar but the poor schnook caught in the middle, the man who paid his taxes and got almost nothing in return – except the privilege of supporting Democrat constituencies indefinitely.

So it seems only reasonable to ask just who Mr. Rainey considers a model journalist.  Luckily, he’s already provided us with the answer:  TMZ’s Harvey Levin:

My 1st Amendment hero brings close-up photos of celebrity rear ends to the world, under the witty, witty headline “Beach Bums.” My 1st Amendment hero delivers us the news any time someone famous looks fat, drunk or plain gaga.

My 1st Amendment hero posts Mini-Me’s sex tape and treats the Kardashians as if they were America’s first family. And my hero also lands real scoops that the rest of the media, including this newspaper, would love to have.

Yes, Harvey Levin is my 1st Amendment hero, and I’m not (that) embarrassed to admit it.

Thanks for sharing!

Rather than being the first of a new breed, Woodward and Bernstein were, in many ways, the last of the old breed, before reporters became journalists and the search for the facts became overwhelmed by the desire to appear on television.  Far from chasing tabloid trash and calling it news, today’s citizen-reporters are instead a throwback to an older, better kind of newshound, the kind of guy who couldn’t be bought, and whom corrupt officials and organizations rightly feared.  We all have our First Amendment heroes, and mine is symbolized by this guy:

That’s the great Cagney, as Frank Ross in Each Dawn I Die, one of the hundreds of slice-of-life movies made by Warner Bros. in the 1930s.  Not for Warner’s were the larger-than-life, impossibly glamorous heroes of the other studios, especially MGM.  Rather, Warner’s scripts – and stars – were drawn from the same milieu: the streets.  Cagney’s Ross is a two-fisted newspaperman trying to get the goods on a corrupt gubernatorial candidate; when we first meet him, he’s literally sneaking around, spying on the bad guys as they destroy evidence in advance of an investigation his stories have provoked – hello, ACORN!

Ross, however, is framed for vehicular manslaughter and sent up the river, where he makes an uneasy alliance with a big-time gangster, “Hood” Stacey, played by George Raft.  It all ends in a blaze of gunfire during a prison riot, in which Stacey dies a noble death, Ross is cleared and the crooked governor gets what’s coming to him.

Sure, “Frank Ross” was a fictional character, but he was emblematic of hundreds, maybe thousands of reporters like him, driven by a burning sense of justice and fair play.  They picked their teeth with scuzzy pols and gold-plated rackets, and they didn’t much give a damn how they did it.  They had no time for high-toned moralizing or a Code of Ethics handed down by a bunch of bigdomes.  They already had a code, the code of Get the Story.  We could use more of them today.

It was the biggest story of 2009.

If you doubt, ask ACORN. Or Van Jones. Or the So We Might See campaign. You won’t need Timemagazine’s once clout-filled “Man of the Year” issue to figure it out, either. Just take a look back at the bestseller lists, the ratings of Fox News or simply turn on your local AM radio dial.

The single most important news event of 2009 was the emergence of The Virtual Newsroom. A newsroom run by a virtual army of conservative journalists famous and unknown, their individual and collective impact multiplied exponentially by millions of Internet users, radio listeners, readers and television viewers.

How did this happen? How does it work in practice?

First, perspective is needed here. Like other big news events, it didn’t happen overnight. There is history, lots of it.

The entire article is worth a read. But, here is a particularly fun excerpt:

Story One: Here you have two young conservative journalists, O’Keefe and Giles, possessed of a keen philosophical eye, a knowledge of technology (cameras, microphones videotape, the Internet) and a fat and inviting liberal fish in a barrel known as ACORN. Imagination conjured as to how they will approach their story — they go out and conduct their very-old style journalism investigation. Story in hand, Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.tv in the Internet division takes the handoff. He sends a virtual memo to talk radio row’s Beck and Hannity. Who in turn are both Fox News stars. Five…four…three…two…one. Bang! Within a virtual instant, the Virtual Newsroom has just blown in the hull of the good ship ACORN, its stunned survivors racing around the deck of a political Titanic as Breitbart, O’Keefe and Giles are powered by the engines of the Virtual Newsroom. The full power of the Virtual Newsroom kicks in. Talk radio shows light up the call screeners screens. The newspaper and magazines kick in, in print and online. The lights are on in the Fox studios as the surging Fox audience gapes at a federally funded organization strategizing on prostitution. And…lights out for ACORN. Or more accurately, considerably damaged and suddenly congressionally unfunded. And the coverage from what’s left of the liberal mainstream media in all this? Next to zero.

Read the whole article here.

Below is a page from ACORN’s 2005 Annual Report. In it, they tell the story of how one of their employees teamed up with NBC Dateline to do a ‘video sting’ on tax-preparer Jackson Hewitt.

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

Somehow we missed the missives from the Columbia Journalism Review condemning NBC for staining journalism. We also can’t find James Rainey’s cliche-riddled scolding of NBC for taking part in ACORN’s intentional deception. We can’t imagine the journalism mandarins would approve of such tactics only because they approved of the target. Surely, the criticism of NBC must be out there. If our readers find any links to these critiques, please include them in the comments.

For greater context on the long history of hidden-camera videos and other forms of aggressive investigative journalism, see Michael Walsh’s piece here.

The documents were thrown out in advance of state investigators arriving at the local ACORN office to conduct an investigation resulting from national media attention.  ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera was videotaped giving advice to two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute regarding underage prostitution and human smuggling.  Without admitting any wrongdoing ACORN terminated Mr. Vera, or so they said.  Documents provided to BigGovernment.com show that Mr. Vera was not terminated but was simply laid off, implying that Mr. Vera is also eligible for rehire. (The document also notes that Mr. Vera was laid off due to “restructuring” related to “videotaping incident.)

Other documents provided to BigGovernment.com show that in the wake of the national scandal involving underage prostitution and human smuggling, ACORN employees were communicating with media, law enforcement and internally among ACORN offices as to how to develop a storyline that could explain the undercover videos taken of Mr. Vera.  One of those documents with San Diego television station 10News is shown below:

As a result of the undercover videos surfacing and the national media attention that followed, internal documents that were thrown in the trash and recovered by Derrick Roach reveal that ACORN was well aware that personal information for individuals who have applied for services and individuals on so-called “yes lists” needed to be secured under lock and key.

Ironically, the only part of this tumultuous episode that may in fact be a joke is that California Attorney General Jerry Brown is running for governor, again.  At age 71, California’s top cop and erstwhile Gov. Moonbeam might benefit from a refresher course in current law.  Attorney General Brown cited a case from the 1960’s where items placed in the garbage were considered private; however, in 1988 the United States Supreme Court ruled in a case, California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988), that there was no expectation of privacy when items are thrown in the garbage since it is common knowledge that plastic garbage bags are readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public.  As for the local National City ordinance prohibiting scavenging through garbage that the ACORN office and its supporters cite, that law was enacted in 1984 and was nullified by the United States Supreme Court ruling just four years later.