ACORN Chief Blames Everyone But ACORN

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»

The actions of a half-dozen employees doesn't represent the huge organization

(NEWSER) - The conservative campaign against ACORN—which has now, thanks to a few video “sting” operations, lost its federal funding—is built on an outrageous set of exaggerations and falsehoods, writes Joe Conason for Salon. “No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a ‘pimp and ho,’ but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families.” 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»

Says it proves ACORN lied about incident

(NEWSER) - The ACORN stingers have released another video, this time of their visit to the Philadelphia location—where, ACORN has until now insisted, they were kicked out. In the new, edited video, James O’Keefe says they weren’t kicked out, but instead sat for more than half an hour with an office employee, who gave them her business card and scheduled a future meeting. 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»