Acorn

What any thinking person Already knew.

O'Keefe and Giles were not journalists, nor did they accurately 'Report' anything that happened.

Mass Attorney General's report

From the Salon Summary.

The videos, he writes, "represent the byproduct of ACORN's long-standing management weaknesses, including a lack of training, a lack of procedures and a lack of onsite supervision."

Harshbarger's report forthrightly reprimands the ACORN leadership for failing to "meet the expectations and requirements of the stakeholders who supported and benefited from its advocacy and service work."

Amateurish as those recordings were, with their grainy images and muddy sound, they presented the bizarre tableau of prostitution and fraud as right-wing cinema vérité. The tapes' raw appearance was, however, highly misleading, according to Harshbarger, because the broadcast versions were edited and voiced over in ways that distorted the actual encounters between Giles and O'Keefe and the duped ACORN personnel.

To assess the meaning and accuracy of the videotapes, Harshbarger and his colleagues did the job that journalists ought to have done from the beginning. They interviewed ACORN employees.

What Harshbarger discovered, as his report's Appendix D reveals, is that much of what appeared on Fox News Channel and in other media outlets, let alone on right-wing Web sites, was not what had actually occurred in the ACORN offices -- and that exculpatory material was edited out of the tapes.

' It is difficult to determine what this employee is responding to because the videographers' statements are obscured by a voiceover inserted later."

After O'Keefe and Giles left the San Diego office, that same employee called a cousin who worked in a local police department "to ask him general advice regarding information he had received about possible human smuggling" -- a reference to O'Keefe's claim that he was bringing in young girls from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. The police report concerning that call shows that officers followed up later, only to be informed by the ACORN employee that the incident was a "ruse."

In Philadelphia, O'Keefe's suspicious behavior likewise alerted the ACORN staff that something was amiss, and the police were informed there as well. No video of the visit to the Philly office was ever released by O'Keefe and Breitbart, although Harshbarger notes that "some of the released videos contain scenes of the sign of the Philadelphia ACORN office and shots of Philadelphia's head organizer with no audio."

None of this should be surprising to anyone familiar with the backgrounds of O'Keefe, Giles and Breitbart -- a former employee of the Drudge Report. But it is now clear that the ACORN videotapes were anexercise in propaganda, not journalism.

Washington Post on Tuesday doesn't mention his questions about the videotapes, his rebuffed attempt to interview the video producers, or the producers' staunch refusal to permit him to review the unedited tapes for comparison with the versions that were released.

(Of course as the pure Journalists that they were(sarcasm), they refused to release the evidence that would exonerate clames that they are anything but Right wing Shills, and provided a story that is most probably patently false.eric's note)

But

Of course none of that will stop the fucking morons from believing it..