The Times finally ran a correction to their kooky anti-ACORN reporting:
Several articles since September about the troubles of the community organizing group Acorn referred incorrectly or imprecisely to one aspect of videotaped encounters between Acorn workers and two conservative activists that contributed to the group’s problems.
In the encounters, the activists posed as a prostitute and a pimp and discussed prostitution with the workers. But while footage shot away from the offices shows one activist, James O’Keefe, in a flamboyant pimp costume, there is no indication that he was wearing the costume while talking to the Acorn workers.
The errors occurred in articles on Sept. 16 and Sept. 19, 2009, and on Jan. 31 of this year. Because of an editing error, the mistake was repeated in an article in some copies on Saturday. (Go to Article)
It’s a little strange that both this correction and the earlier ombudsman article occurred just as ACORN was filing for a bankruptcy, partly as a result of the lies that the Times and other outlets helped spread.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Acorn wazz et by wingnuts and is no more.
West of the Cascades
We can only hope that the Times files for bankruptcy soon, too. They went bankrupt intellectually and journalistically about seven years ago.
Frank
I wanna write a book called ‘Even the Liberal New York Times.’
I might actually work up a proposal.
NobodySpecial
Shorter Times: Mission Accomplished.
Legalize
Give the Times a break. It only took them months to issue a correction.
MikeJ
We pointed and laughed at the Times ombudsman. That doesn’t imply we did both at the same time. But we did.
Tim F.
Nice of the Times to mention that the audio was heavily edited to create the false impression of wrongdoing.
John Cole
Liberal Media! Liberal Media! Liberal Media!
SpotWeld
I’m putting down money that the conspiracy theories will emerge that ACORN is still around, they’ve just become a “Dark-ops” organization that doesn’t really exist.
Acorns-in-Black
RS
That’s still not right.
He didn’t pose as a pimp. He posed as a law student trying to help his prostitute friend get away from an abusive pimp.
soonergrunt
It’s not strange at all. Gotta keep them darkies down any way you can, you know.
Once the damage is done, then we can go back to pretending to have standards.
El Cid
Strange, my ass. These bastards at the Times and the rest of the billion dollar media were happy to see ACORN, an organization like no other fighting for housing and other financial and, yes, even voter enrollment help to our nation’s poorest, inner city, and communities of color citizens, basically go down the tubes due to fraudulent reporting of right wing propagandeering.
The Times doesn’t give a fuck who has to suffer the loss of this advocacy.
andrewtna
I wouldn’t cry for ACORN just yet. They will re-open shop under a different name. Living in NY you should know that if the Working Families Party is still alive, so is ACORN.
cleek
heckofa job, Timesy.
El Cid
By the way, this is proof that they New York Times totally learned how to deal with ill-sourced propaganda since those couple of minor errors in the leadup to the Iraq war.
I’m sure that never again will the Times and others lead a media frenzy in favor of bullshit right wing propaganda. Never.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@SpotWeld:
Libtards with guns. Beck will add an extra protective layer of stupid around the The Doom Room because who can be sure in Obamastan?
scav
@SpotWeld: That’s right. And what happens when Acorns go underground?. They become Mighty Oaks! flee!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@andrewtna:
Soroscorn
Violet
This makes me angry. Crappy reporting brings down an organization. Organization has no recourse. News organization gets away by saying, “Ooops. Sorry!” well after the fact and pays no price for wholesale lies and destruction.
The whole thing just sucks. Where are our reporters of yore, those fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping, alcoholic bulldogs who would really dig into a story and find the truth. Did they only exist in movies and on TV?
Paul L.
So Doug/John are you guys, ACORN “pimp” deniers?
You do not believe James O’Keefe “posed as a pimp” in the “edited” Acorn videos?
El Cid
@andrewtna: What are you talking about? What if some offices do re-open? They still have lost their national network and enormous amounts of actual resources, and in part had to take these moves precisely because of debts and loss of income.
It’s great that they’re not all giving up, and that there will still be good work being done, but this is a real loss inflicted for no good reason than right wing propaganda and revenge for voter registration efforts in 2006 and 2008.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think your tag should be changed to “Even the Liberal Fire Dog Lake.”
Ash Can
I for one would love to see the Times and others get their asses sued off over this. Really, aren’t their laws regarding libel and penalties thereon when it leads to substantial, quantifiable monetary loss?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Paul L.: Looked more like an evil leprechaun to me.
soonergrunt
@Violet:
Yes. SATSQ.
Ash Can
@Paul L.: And if James O’Keefe said it himself, IT’S THE TRUTH!eleventy1
El Cid
@Paul L.: Do you have the unedited audio of those meetings where we can hear what was said?
And if I pulled that sort of shit in a Republican-party run charity organization, and some low level staffer had no clue how to respond, I guess it’s time to shut down the churches, too!
That’s okay, though. These guys aren’t the only ones capable of carrying around undercover video cameras. I think there’s going to be lots of interesting visitors to a variety of conservative-favored groups over the next couple of years.
Such citizen journalism, however heavily edited and lied about, could very much serve useful purposes.
Chyron HR
@Paul L.:
Really? He voluntarily confessed to all that, and yet you still idolize him? The GOP is sicker than I thought.
SGEW
I’m always a little amazed when Paul L. drops by and lowers his credibility even further. You think it’s impossible for one to think any less of his candor, credulity, or cognition, and then he outdoes himself in parroting mindless bullshit. Quite an achievement, really.
Bill E Pilgrim
Sorry!
scav
Will somebody please break it to PaulL about Santa and The Colbert Report? His playmates are beginning to laugh.
EFroh
Urgh, not on topic, but this Sully link made me cry.
soonergrunt
@Paul L.: Hey, fucknuts, we deal in truth here. You need to find a new bag.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7708
and
To say nothing of the whole James O’Keefe-thinks-he’s-a-Watergate-burgler thing in the Senator’s office.
I would tell you to go and hang yourself for being stupid, but I’m fairly sure that you don’t have the second wetsuit to do it the correct conservative way.* If you don’t manage to kill yourself the rest of us will be stuck paying for somebody to wipe your drool off the barcolounger. I’m sure that you have somebody for this necessity already, so maybe it won’t cost us THAT much. So, yeah, after all, please go hang yourself for being the stupidest motherfucker seen round these parts in a long time.
*I’m quite certain you have the vibrator.
gbear
OT, if TBogg was holding back on teh teabaggers in deference to his site-mates, he’s sure not holding back now. Some really great new posts over there.
kay
@El Cid:
No major media outlet would have ever, ever broadcast tape or printed a story based on secretly filmed footage inside a federally-funded Faith Based Grant recipient organization without 1. asking for the transcript, or 2. insisting on viewing the unedited tape.
This would not have happened to a religious group. It happened only because ACORN is 1. secular, and 2. an easy target.
They’re not doing this to Catholic Charities. Christ. I can hear the SCREAMS OF OUTRAGE from here, if they had.
It never would have aired.
soonergrunt
@kay: You forgot #3, primarily staffed by minorities.
Brandon
Thankfully O’Keefe still has an opportunity to spent some time in the Federal pokey. Unfortunately, I have no faith that the US
Atty will not let him off without a slap on the wrists, considering that one of his co-conspirators is I believe the son of a US Atty.
Comrade Dread
I have confidence that the Tri-lateral commission working through George Soros with money from the Colonel Sanders trust will continue to keep ACORN in existence as part of their secret plot to bring soshalism to America.
soonergrunt
@Brandon: his co-conspirator is supposedly the son of the Bush appointee US Atty that has jurisdiction.
SpotWeld
@Paul L.: The short of it is that O’Keefe said one thing to the ACORN staff and then edited and stripped the recordings so he could represent that he said something else.
In elaboration he went to several ACORN offices. Sometimes he was taken seriously, and he played out a serious sounding lie (I want to help my whore girlfriend save other children), sometimes he was treated as a joke and he played off the lie as a laugh since it was obvious no one was taking him seriously (which he made sure was never passed along to the media) and when he was confronted on his tall tales he turned tail and ran.
It has been established that O’Keefe presented himself to the media as something other than how he acted when he visted those offices. He is not a reliable source of information on ACORN.
MikeJ
@Comrade Dread: Don’t forget that the Fnord Motor Company controls the Semiconscious Liberation Army.
kay
@soonergrunt:
Absolutely. Those low-level ACORN employees were convicted without a trial, based on doctored evidence submitted by a rabid partisan. It’s that simple. Media found that “reliable”. It’s amazing to me. Think this would fly if a liberal had wandered into Lutheran Social Services with a hidden camera and a political agenda? Hah! Fat chance. So what’s the difference? It isn’t federal funding. They’re both federally funded.
When a prosecutor DID look at the evidence, there was nothing there, and that’s the one and only reason the NYTimes is reluctantly walking it back.
geg6
@kay:
THIS.
And we can’t forget to mention that, well, you know, ACORN. Blackity, blackity, blackity, black, black, black.
gbear
@Brandon: If one of his co-conspirators is the son of a US Attorney, then it could be more likely that the son will get off with probation on the condition he testify against O’Keefe. Snap.
PaulW
ACORN will re-form under a new name. It will be known as the National Unemployed Training Service And Career Counseling organization.
…what?
zzyzx
What is the reason that O’Keefe can’t have charges filed against him for libel?
jrg
The NYT clearly made an effort to be fair and balanced, and this is the thanks they get?
maus
@kay:
As much as I’m sympathetic to ACORN and hate the media for its whorish participation in this wreckage, the court of public opinion is not the court of law. The media lies about all sorts of things, I don’t see why singling this out makes it any worse.
maus
@Paul L.:
Seeing as the full tapes were never revealed, he “posed as a pimp” in the “edited” videos, but who the fuck knows what he actually asked them when not staged?
scarshapedstar
@Paul L.:
Gee, if only there were a FUCKING TRANSCRIPT to settle this matter!
*drum roll*
From Baltimore (all the others are basically the same):
Yeah, it sure sounds like she presented him as being not only *a* pimp but as being *her* pimp, all right. Clear as day!
…if you are deaf and blind and you have been repeatedly smashed in the temples with a ballpeen hammer, that is. Paul L, I think you’re on track to win the Dumbest Commenter of the Year award, and that’s no small feat. At least statements like “up is down” can make sense if you consider the other side of the planet. Hell, the sky isn’t even blue all the time. But to say that he posed as a pimp… wow. I don’t even know how to describe it. 2-year-olds could understand this.
2-year-olds.
geg6
@maus:
You do know that several of them were fired? And now, even if they weren’t fired, they have lost their jobs along with all their other co-workers?
Sorry, but kay was right about this.
maus
@geg6:
One way or another, they were *all* fired, but “convicted without a trial” is a wording that should not be used. Conflating the court of public opinion with the court of law is not going to make this be taken any more seriously. There’s currently nothing illegal about the media’s attempts to deceive, intentionally or not. Nobody can force them to retract, or take any manner of responsibility for the print media’s continual failure to seek truth over false objectivity.
MTiffany
So long as the Times prints their corrections and retractions BEFORE ACORN’s bakruptcy/dissolution is finalized in court, they give themselves some legal cover. Personally, I’d like to see ACORN sue the everloving shit out of the Times. Old Gray Lady, my ass; wrinkly old saggy-titted whore, more like.
Will
Journalism was never the pure bastion of democracy it portrayed itself as, but the profession used to be a lot better before it went corporate. Media consolidation really fucked the industry’s culture.
The old-school journalists really were working class sorts who would hold onto a single beat in a single city for decades. A lot of them were the type of fuck-ups who would never have survived in a corporate setting – show up late, drink at work and mouth off to the bosses – but who gave a damn about their city and weren’t afraid to piss people off.
The corporatized profession is filled with meek ladder climbers who jump from paper to paper, beat to beat in the hope of moving up the ladder to a major media market before they stall out and become editors. They don’t rock the boat, as they need those good performance reviews to fulfill their long-term career goals.
Barry
Violet
“This makes me angry. Crappy reporting brings down an organization. Organization has no recourse. News organization gets away by saying, “Ooops. Sorry!” well after the fact and pays no price for wholesale lies and destruction.
The whole thing just sucks. Where are our reporters of yore, those fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping, alcoholic bulldogs who would really dig into a story and find the truth. Did they only exist in movies and on TV?”
Well, the majority always were more establishment-supporting, and the editors even moreso.
An editor for the Detroit Free Press once described a joke played on him by police when he was a young reporter. He would go into the homicide bureau, and pick up the carbons from the forms that they filled out on each homicide (they’d leave it in a tray for the reporters). He was typing up a story, and showed it to his editor – a short summary. The editor looked closely at the carbon, laughed, and told the reporter that he’d been played for a fool – the race of the victim was ‘Negro’, and the papers didn’t report on those homicides (execpt in special cases).
Brien Jackson
The Times should have to pay ACORN damages.
Will
It’s important to remember that, for most of this country’s history, it was possible to be comfortably liberal or even leftist and still be racist as hell. The addition of sexual and racial tolerance to the list of things liberals believe is the product of the 1970s.
The thing that shocks me the most, when you read deeply into the history of the 1960s, is how very sexist and racist many of the leaders of the beat/hippie countercultures could be. Hell, read some Mailer and Hunter Thompson sometime. Love them to death, but those dudes drip with white male privilege.
scarshapedstar
I think this whole fake scandal is absolutely sickening. Read the goddamn transcripts.
How do you expect a woman to react if another woman walks in and says “I’m trying to get away from a violent man, I don’t have a lot of options, please help”?
Only a sociopath could twist compassion into an indictment like this.
MattL
funny that. Even funnier is that last night’s NBC evening news with Brian Williams had a segment on Acorn closing and told the original story the times told without the corrections. NPR did the same thing this morning. I could hardly believe my ears.
Comrade Kevin
Paul L doesn’t need facts, or thought, he has an ideology.
akaoni
@ Mike J
ACORN would have made a great card; of course the arguments as to what its power would be would vary greatly depending on the political leanings of the players…
I’d give it a power of 2 and a resistance of 1…
soonergrunt
@Comrade Kevin: but he does need two wetsuits and a dildo.
I forgot. He’ll need a condom on the dildo. Can’t be too careful, now.
Bill Murray
@El Cid: you mean the first Gulf War, I assume. The MSM promised they wouldn’t do as bad this time (ie 2003) as they did for the first Gulf War.
kay
@maus:
The media do not “lie about all kinds of things”. That’s not true.
The media would never, and I mean never, air an edited tape without even the most rudimentary effort to verify it, if the damning tape concerned a powerful person.
For Christs sake. The Enquirer had the goods on Edwards, and major media wouldn’t go near it. John Edwards was a Very Important Person.
Media didn’t do their jobs here, in this instance, because these workers have no power and there are no repercussions from smearing them so recklessly.
mapaghimagisk
Fuck you Times. Fuck you with flaming, pitch covered rake.
Fuckity Fuck you fuck.