ACORN Orders Investigation Into Programs

Hidden video subterfuge made news, but where was the reality check?

(NEWSER) - “You've got to give James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles credit for abundant chutzpah and guile,” writes James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times. The pair’s hidden camera ACORN takedown “likely will do for guerrilla video what Ashton Kutcher did for Twitter—popularize and expand the form.” But Giles and O’Keefe play by their own rules, he notes, leaving the media fumbling to respond to these newsworthy, but also bizarre and Comedy Central-worthy stings. More»

Second film shows staffers advising fake hooker, pimp

(NEWSER) - ACORN is weighing legal action after another undercover sting tape emerged, this time in Brooklyn, the New York Post reports. Like a tape made in Baltimore, the new footage shows a man and a woman dressed as a pimp and a prostitute getting advice on housing loans. “Honesty is not going to get you the house," says an ACORN staffer. "You can't say what you do for a living.” More»

Breitbart says video of 'thugs' will be up soon

(NEWSER) - Andrew Breitbart—whose conservative BigGovernment.com website aired the ACORN sting videos—decided to mosey down to an ACORN protest in Los Angeles this week, and he's not happy with the rough treatment he got. He blogs that he was harassed and threatened by the "dregs of society" so badly it left his cameraman shaking. Rest assured, audio and video will be going up soon. More»

Bertha Lewis not contrite enough for Dana Milbank

(NEWSER) - ACORN chief Bertha Lewis wasn’t in the mood to apologize at the National Press Club yesterday. For anything. Not for the internal ACORN review showing that $5 million had been embezzled from the group, rather than the previously alleged $1 million (“This is speculation, completely false”), not the voter registrations allegedly filled out for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (“an utter fabrication”), and certainly not for the “highly edited” pimp and prostitute tapes. More»

(NEWSER) - Andrew Breitbart may have an ideological ax to grind, but so what? The undercover ACORN videos he's posted illustrate a significant strength of 21st-century American journalism, writes Jack Shafer: "It will accept contributions from everybody from amateurs to entertainers (I'm looking at you, Jon Stewart) to gadflies to billionaires to activists to students to genocidal tyrants." Breitbart's right-wing slant doesn't taint the work. More»