Today’s lead story at Politico is one of the finer examples you will find of ideological ax-grinding dressed up as straight-news reporting. The piece, by Ken Vogel and Keach Hagey, uses just about every journalistic trick in the book, assembling a selection of quotes and points to establish a narrative that was set in the authors’ minds long before they sat down at their keyboards. But the piece does so much more too; it flirts with some blurry ethical lines as well. Shouldn’t, for example, a Politico article about Journolist have perhaps mentioned or disclosed that at least some reporters for Politico were, you know, members of Journolist? Perhaps Politico has an incentive to downplay the impact of the listserve? (And, Mr. Vogel, did Andrew Breitbart really not respond to Politico?)

I will leave it to my colleagues at Big Journalism to give the proper attention this article is due. However, in building their ideological case, the authors point to certain “facts” about stories that first appeared here, which necessitates a few words here.

In discussing the recent Shirley Sherrod imbroglio, the authors write that Breitbart,

did not quite own up to the seriousness of the error he committed – posting a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.

We did not edit, much less misleadingly edit, any of Ms. Sherrod’s remarks. We posted two excerpts from her speech, representing the sum total of the video we had. We didn’t cut anything out of her speech. Is any news organization in the future who only posts excerpts from a speech vulnerable to the charge that it “misleadingly edited” it?

At the very end of one of the video excerpt’s, Ms. Sherrod begins to explain how she later realized her initial discrimination of the white farmer was wrong. In Andrew’s article about the speech he  noted

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.

If we were trying to show that Ms. Sherrod was “boasting” of discrimination and were prone to editing the tape as evidence, wouldn’t we have cut that part out? Wouldn’t we have neglected to mention that she eventually did the right thing? But, the media’s focus on Ms. Sherrod is really an attempt to misdirect attention from the NAACP, who was the real focus of the article and the video excerpts.

As Andrew’s article noted:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

We all now know that Ms. Sherrod’s anecdote was part of a larger point about the need to move beyond racial prejudices. But, the NAACP audience did not know that as they heard the speech. As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. By itself, that made the video excerpt newsworthy.

Indeed, the NAACP, who was in possession of the full video for months, even noted in its initial statement condemning Ms. Sherrod:

The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.

This was always the story and it is clearly an uncomfortable one for the NAACP and, obviously, the authors of the Politico article. The media would rather focus on Ms. Sherrod or Andrew Breitbart than report that leaders of a state chapter of the NAACP approved of racial discrimination.

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Politico’s Ben Smith has the bombshell:

The national group ACORN is folding, an official there, Kevin Whelan, said in an emailed statement:

The ACORN Association Board met on Sunday March 21 and approved a set of steps to responsibly manage the process of bringing its operations to a close over the coming months. These include:

* Closing ACORN’s remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1st; and
* Developing a plan to resolve all outstanding debts, obligations and other issues.

ACORN’s members have a great deal to be proud of–from promoting to homeownership to helping rebuild New Orleans, from raising wages to winning safer streets, from training community leaders to promoting voter participation—ACORN members have worked hard to create stronger to communities, a more inclusive democracy, and a more just nation.
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Ben Sheffner, at Copyrights and Campaigns Blog, has the breaking story:

A state court in Baltimore has dismissed ACORN’s lawsuit against James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Breitbart.com LLC after the plaintiffs failed to serve the complaint on the defendants within Maryland’s 120-day limit.

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It was with great fanfare that ACORN, along with two recently-fired employees of its Baltimore office, sued last September over thesurreptitious taping of the employees advising O’Keefe and Giles on running a prostitution business out of a house. ACORN’s general counsel, Arthur Schwartz, told the Washington Post at the time that the defendants, young filmmakers O’Keefe and Giles, plus Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.com LLC, which disseminated the videos, had committed “clear violations of Maryland law” against audio recording without consent from all parties. But ACORN appears to have lost interest in the case since filing it, confirming my suspicion that it was little more than a press release on pleading paper.

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A Christian pundit, Dawn Eden, thinks my daughter Hannah Giles and her partner James O’Keefe should not have used Saul Alinsky’s deceptive tactics against ACORN because Saul was “evil,” his methods sneaky, and he dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer.

In addition, Eden took a swipe at Lila Rose, Planned Parenthood’s main pain in the butt, for being deceptive in her undercover vids which exposed Planned Parenthood’s illegal activity. Oh, and I almost forgot: Dawn also busted on Hannah for being un-Christlike for wearing a miniskirt and dressing like a hooker.  Sounds a little catty to me—and a wee bit like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady—but I digress.

First off, Ms. Eden, if you ever drum up the nerve to expose a scandalous multimillion dollar Obama-backed, taxpayer-funded organization for doing illegal crap and then undergo death threats (versus sitting on the sidelines and simply critiquing those who have the cojones to do so) you will find that the lawbreakers are rather reticent in telling journalists, who are intent on exposing and destroying their world, exactly how they’re breaking the law.  Yeah, I know.  It’s weird, eh?

You’d think that nefarious organizations would just spill their guts, throw up their hands, give up their hard drives, refrain from dumping tens of thousands of documents in a dumpster, and just cooperate to the fullest extent with the FBI and the DOJ, but alas, they don’t because they’re criminals, and criminals, generally speaking, aren’t known for truthfulness, contrition and full disclosure with cops.

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California Attorney General Jerry Brown seems to be getting a lot of reminders from his gubernatorial challengers Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman about his failed governorship of the state from 1975-1983 when Californian’s endured high unemployment, home foreclosures, large scale labor strikes and fuel shortages at the gas station. Recognizing the failed policies of then Governor Brown, California voters revolted and passed Proposition 13 which is a landmark initiative that limited politician’s ability to arbitrarily raise taxes on California residents.

Over a week ago, Attorney General Jerry Brown got yet another reminder, this time coming from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report “Follow the Money: ACORN, SEIU and their Political Allies” focuses public attention on AG Brown’s failed investigation of ACORN. While some of Brown’s gubernatorial challengers talk of the need for a California Governor to have a spine of steel, AG Brown has instead crumpled like an aluminum can cowardly hiding behind state bureaucrats and a wall of state agencies.

On October 1, 2009, Jerry Brown publicly announced that an investigation had been opened concerning undercover videos that were obtained by citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles who videotaped ACORN employees at two California offices. ACORN employees were filmed providing advice regarding tax evasion, prostitution and human smuggling of underage girls. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was informed by AG Brown in a letter that he had “opened an investigation of both ACORN and the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped.” Since that announcement, AG Brown has found himself at the center of a controversy surrounding the mismanagement of the investigation as well as a potential scandal due to a double standard involving one of his own state employees secretly recording conversations with reporters.

Shortly after ACORN had been alerted to the immanent investigation as a result of AG Brown’s public announcement, ACORN employees at the San Diego, CA office were caught engaging in a massive document dump on October 9, 2009. Those records were retrieved from an unsecured shared public dumpster where they had been thrown revealing sensitive personal, financial and banking information for both clients and employees in addition to revelations about the political inner workings of ACORN’s relationship with major U.S. banks and labor unions.

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ACORN founder Wade Rathke has been gloating on his blog about the recent arrest of James O’Keefe in Rathke’s hometown of New Orleans.

Andrew Breitbrat and his www.biggovernment.com site stopped pretending that James O’Keefe, bungler-in-charge, was not his boy, and realized that he needed to stop shouting and start ‘splaining.

Breitbrat?  Zing!  How adult of you, Wade.

Similarly, current ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis issued a statement upon the news:

The recent arrest of James O’Keefe, is further evidence of his disregard for the law in pursuit of his extremist agenda. From the day that O’Keefe’s undercover “sting” videos came out, ACORN leadership pledged accountability for its own staff while pointing out that the videos had been shot illegally and edited deceptively in order to undermine the work of an organization that has empowered working families for four decades.

It’s as if O’Keefe’s problem somehow is vindication for the corrupt web of organizations she oversees.

Bad news, Bertha: it’s not.

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James O’Keefe, along with Hannah Giles, broke one of the biggest investigative news stories since Watergate on the systemic corruption of radical left governmental organizations. It was, for new media, a defining moment. And while the historic implications of the O’Keefe/Giles expose are not yet fully understood, the media landscape was forever changed.

Despite this seismic shift in modern journalism, the mainstream media scornfully ignored the biggest story of the Obama administration. ACORN, Obama’s personal community organizing group, funded with taxpayer dollars, was shown to be a criminal, rapacious, and predatory organization. In clip after clip from O’Keefe and Giles, ACORN’s indecency became more obvious and outrageous, and the little remaining trust that the American people had in government/community service organizations morphed into outright contempt.

And the mainstream media yawned.

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When the Christmas Day panty bomber was arrested for trying to blow up himself and the plane he rode in on, he was questioned for approximately 50 minutes before an attorney was brought in to advise him.  What happened next?  Mister Burning Briefs clammed up.

Contrast that with James O’Keefe, American citizen, who was denied an attorney for 28 hours after he was arrested and accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.  During that time, the FBI issued a press release on the arrest and leaked the criminal complaint.  The mainstream media salivated, while ACORN’s Bertha Lewis scambled to appear before TV cameras.

The Christmas Day bomber was given Constitutional rights and Miranda’d within an hour of his arrest but a U.S. citizen was not given a lawyer until more than a day had passed?

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Let me first say, if what is being reported in the media is accurate, a dumb prank was attempted in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu by James O’Keefe and his comrades.

There should be zero tolerance for crime, regardless of who does it.  If O’Keefe is guilty of what the FBI is alleging, he should be held accountable.  The Left believes that now, but where were they six months ago?

It’s interesting to observe, and personally experience, the hypocritical way the Left is treating this situation. Consider two unsolicited e-mails I received Monday night from a few liberal wackos with too much time on their hands.  Here’s the first, which was accompanied by the subject line, “Republicans are As—-es!”:

Hey as—-e, why don’t you talk about the son of a bitch who broke into Senator Landrieu’s office in LA? Yeah, scumbags like you don’t care about the law.

The other, titled, “James O’Keefe is going to jail! YOU FAILED!”:

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Sometimes, the news coming out of Southern California is more entertaining than the movies coming out of Southern California.

Last week the  37,000-member California state chapter of ACORN broke away from its national organization to form a new nonprofit group called the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Amy Schur, executive director of ACORN ACCE in California, says the decision was made because “the level of controversy had become a significant distraction for us.”

So let me get this straight. The California ACORN chapter, which includes the San Bernardino group that was featured in the ACORN videos providing advice for human smuggling and prostitution, and the San Diego chapter, that conducted what looked like the world’s biggest document dump just before the AG’s agents arrived, wants to split off from the national organization because they say the national group has problems.

If anything, the national group should split off from the California group and beat them to the punch.

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Esquire has an interview with ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis:

I called ACORN to get a response from Bertha Lewis, the group’s CEO. “I don’t think the conservative right will ever be satisfied,” she told me. “They’re not going to stop because they’re raising money on us every day — we’re a nice, simple convenient bogeyman.”

Still, Lewis seemed almost shell-shocked: “We can’t understand this obsession, and the vehemence. They just make up something and keep repeating it over and over — yesterday, I’m cleaning my house and I get a call, someone from my office saying ‘This guy from Breitbart is going crazy saying you were in the White House!’ Apparently some woman named Bertha Lewis visited the White House in September, so automatically they assumed — but it wasn’t me.”

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Updated January 4, 2010

This afternoon, on arguably one of the slower news day of the year, the Obama White House released another document dump of “visitor records.” According to the White House, today’s batch total more than 25,000 records, covering meetings between September 16-September 30th.

You can scroll through the list of records on the White House site OR you can download the raw data. Interestingly, the full download uncovers almost 30,000 records, including many from outside the mid-September time-frame detailed on the White House site. In other words, only the records from the specific two week time period are viewable on the White House site. Many other visitor records were released today…they are just much harder to find.

Like, for example, the visitor records for Bertha Lewis.

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From Mediaite:

14. Andrew Breitbart, Breitbart.com

Though he’s not exactly a household name, Andrew Breitbart has long been a power player in the sphere of Internet influence and opinion. The former editor of The Drudge Report, and lead researcher and developer for The Huffington Post, Breitbart has since set out on his own, creating a number of sites that both aggregate and report from what he describes as a center right point-of-view. When Breitbart provided an exclusive interview with Mediate this year, he revealed big plans to grow his “Big” network of sites beyond Big Hollywood and Big Government (which he launched this Fall.) Big Journalism is set to launch next January, with more to follow in the coming year.

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5. Hide the Decline: “Climategate” and the CO² ruling

Why it’s important: The unauthorized release in November of 61 megabytes of confidential files and emails hacked from the computers at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit – Ground Zero of the “anthropogenic global warming” racket – shocked nearly all sentient people into the realization that scientists could be just a corruptible as your average politician or, worse, your average “environmental journalists” as they sought to “hide the decline.” While each country’s capo di tutti capi was gathering in Copenhagen to hatch yet another scheme to beggar the industrialized West in the name of collective guilt, the scandal burbled along under the radar as rational people finally had the proof they needed that the Chicken Little alarmists were, well – crowing capons.  For years, skeptics had been derided by such barking lunatics as Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., as “deniers” – the word was deliberately loaded to evoke the Holocaust – even as the Man Who Flunked Out of Divinity School did his best to dodge all challenges to his newfound religion:

Meanwhile, with AGW going up in smoke like a fruitless sacrifice to a god that failed, and the Waxman-Markey “cap and trade” extortion bill faltering in Congress, along came the EPA, right on schedule, with its “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide – you know, the stuff you breathe out when you exhale, and the same stuff that makes the good green plants happy, healthy and wise – is, of all things, a “pollutant.”  Still, the news for the Karbon Krazies just keeps on getting worse.

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Because nobody who’s anybody reads the The New York Times these days, except the die-harders and dead-enders along West End Avenue, as well as the editors of Time and Newsweek, you may not know who “Clueless” Clark Hoyt is, but it really doesn’t matter because he doesn’t know who you are, either.  For those scoring at home in their pajamas, Mr. Hoyt is the “public editor” of the Times, i.e. the hapless fellow who has to write those tedious Sunday reports to the readers, in which he explains why whatever the Times did was right and whatever they didn’t do… well, hey, they didn’t know about it!  What do you think they are, a “newspaper of record” or something?

Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com.  When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper, although a report in the Caucus blog that day covered the action. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing.

Well Mr. Hoyt, welcome to the world of the “undernews” – Mickey Kaus’s apt word for the news that everyone in the blogosphere knows about but, apparently, no one who gets his news strictly from the Times, other major newspapers, the newsweeklies, and most of the networks has the slightest inkling of.

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The “independent” investigation of ACORN has been completed, and the final report is in.

The verdict? ACORN has done nothing illegal, and most of its problems stem from the subpar leadership of its founder and former “chief organizer,” Wade Rathke. As long as Rathke and his allies are out of the picture, everything should be good to go at ACORN headquarters, according to Scott Harshbarger, former attorney general of Massachusetts.

I get the feeling Mr. Harshbarger produced exactly the type of report (which can be viewed at ACORNcracked.com) that the ACORN board of directors paid him to produce: a rationalization of the group’s behavior, designed to deflect the growing chorus of criticism and breathe new life into the organization.

I doubt that anybody will be fooled by the silly conclusions in Harshbarger’s report. But I fear that ACORN’s friends in the White House and Congress may use it as an excuse to allow the organization back into the federal government’s good graces.

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On September 16, 2009, with much fanfare, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis announced that ACORN was hiring an independent auditor to review its internal processes.  Yesterday, the former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger produced a report finding ACORN, as a corporation, engaged in administrative negligence.

This of course has not stopped ACORN from declaring victory and calling the report a vindication.  Is anyone surprised that a report paid for by ACORN exonerates them?  The fact that this review didn’t even include an audit of ACORN’s financial statements speaks volumes.  Luckily for taxpayers, there are numerous federal and state investigations currently underway that should ultimately produce a legitimate finding regarding ACORN’s illegal activities.

The reality is ACORN has masqueraded as charitable organization in order to fund and advance a partisan political agenda.  There is no mechanism in place to follow where the use of taxpayer and charitable dollars end and where funds used to pay for their political activities begin.

Despite these findings of obvious negligence on ACORN’s behalf, the Proskauer Rose report was not an audit.  In fact, among the “7,000 pages” (19) Mr. Harshbarger reviewed, none of those pages included:

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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:

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.

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On Friday, the Department of Justice released a ruling it issued Monday, outlining its arguments that federal agencies can continue providing taxpayer funds to ACORN.

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The last two months of the growing ACORN scandal have focused on the damning videos shot by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles.

In seven out of eight offices, ACORN employees attempted to aid and abet O’Keefe and Giles’ illicit “scheme” to establish a brothel for underage illegal-immigrant prostitutes from Central America. .

That phase has been tabled for a future date, as I forthrightly stated last Thursday evening to Attorney General Eric Holder on FOX NEWS’ Hannity show.

The next phase will be the evidentiary phase.  Starting with, but not limited to an extraordinary document dump at the San Diego office that was one of the offices  O’Keefe and Giles exposed, causing the firing of a single employee.

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