Update on the ACORN Story
On Twitter yesterday, Andrew Breitbart issued a confrontational “correction“ stating that James O’Keefe wasn’t actually dressed like a pimp when he interacted with ACORN employees. I am unsure whether a correction has been posted to Big Government, where the video sting initially ran. I can’t find one.
Obviously, Mr. Breitbart or editor Mike Flynn should run a correction if they haven’t already. Corrections should also be run by The Washington Times, where Mr. Breitbart’s column gave an inaccurate impression of when Mr. O’Keefe wore the pimp suit, and Fox News, where Mr. O’Keefe said nothing to disabuse his hosts of that inaccurate impression. Analysis of all that, plus a roundup of other news sources that were misled by the video can be found here. None of this excuses the abhorrent behavior of some ACORN employees whose actions were inappropriate no matter the context, but it does call into question whether or not the video was edited in other misleading ways, and I certainly won’t feel comfortable trusting it until I see an unedited version.
Strangely, Mr. Breitbart says he’ll only release the full unedited video if Eric Boehlert or a couple other Media Matters big shots will debate him after watching the whole thing publicly.
In a recent exchange on Twitter, Mr. Breitbart complained to me that “the media” casts him as a conservative activist, rather than a publisher. In fact, Mr. Breitbart is indisputably an activist and a publisher, having earned both titles, among many others. What I wonder is whether he is a reputable publisher. After watching the ACORN videos, I shared them with several apolitical friends who don’t follow the blogosphere very closely. All assumed Mr. O’Keefe walked into the ACORN offices wearing the pimp suit. A reputable publisher corrects the mistaken impressions of his audience when they’re generated by content that he produced. So here we have a test of professional ethics.
Stay tuned.
At no point watching that video did I think that the guy was dressed as a pimp in the interview. What is devastating isn’t what any of the people were wearing but what they said, where they couldn’t have laid out that their characters were doing something deeply illegal and immoral more clearly and the ACORN employees played along. I’m sorry, but this post just reads like a pretty baseless attempt to undermine an extremely strong story.
— Matthew Sinclair · Feb 20, 11:05 AM · #
Matthew,
I lauded the story on the same grounds, but the fact that Acorn employees behaved badly hardly excuses O’Keefe and Breitbart from misleading their audience — and if you look at the number of people who did think he wore the pimp getup in the ACORN offices, and the fact that Breitbart even seemed to assert as much in an op-ed column, it’s pretty obvious that lots of people were misled.
This is the sort of thing that would get a professional journalist at an outlet like The New York Times fired, and in Mr. Breitbart’s case, it demands at least a correction on the site where it ran.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Feb 20, 05:01 PM · #
We don’t know that. O’Keefe edited the videos and re-dubbed many of his lines; there’s no guarantee that the ACORN employees were actually asked the questions they appeared to be responding to. We don’t know what O’Keefe laid out in these sessions. Hannah Giles received advice on how to flee her pimp and avoid arrest – standard advice to rescue sex workers – not advice on how to evade taxes.
Huh, and here I thought the test of his ethics would have been before he tried to trespass on government property to engage in felony wiretapping. How’d that test work out for him?
Conservatives who flogged this story have a huge egg on their face. O’Keefe has made you all look like idiots. Most of the questions the ACORN employees appear to answer were put in post-interview. Most of the really “incriminating” stuff is just a function of trick editing. Months after this story broke, the only charges filed have been against the O’Keefe gang themselves. And now it emerges that O’Keefe has been lying to everybody. And Matthew thinks this is a “strong story”? What a moron.
— Chet · Feb 21, 08:23 AM · #
If you are working at an ACORN office – likely a storefront in a less-desirable part of town – much of your ‘clientele’ is going to range from ‘not the brightest bulb in the batch’ to ‘seriously disconnected from reality’. I got the impression that Mr. O’Keefe got pigeonholed into the latter category, and got the ‘humor him and get him outta here ASAP’ treatment.
— JD · Feb 21, 06:24 PM · #
It was stories like this that drove me out of the conservative movement. From “The Clinton Chronicles” (some of the most scurrilous lies ever told, relentlessly re-circulated for the sole purpose of dragging the President of the United States through the mud) to the denial of evolution and every single environmental problem, to the unwillingness to look at the data and say, “well, I guess rising tides don’t lift all boats after all,” the right has been way too willing to substitute character assassination and ideology for honest, rational inquiry.
Is everyone on the right like this? No. And of course there are plenty of leftists who do the same sort of thing. I just see an awful lot more of it on the right, and I see less accountability from within the right for deceptive behavior (for heaven’s sake, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have made careers out of making false/outlandish statements, and they are rarely censured by any of the supposedly more “responsible” arms of the movement. Any bets on whether Coulter would be kicked out of The Corner today for writing what she did almost nine years ago?). The willingness of the right to traffic in lies and slander is shameful.
Which is to say, I’m glad someone is honestly critiquing the right from within it. If the conservative movement were at all healthy, Breitbart and O’Keefe would be looking for other lines of work after the ACORN incident. Instead, they are digging in their heels, with the (at least tacit) approval of the larger movement.
Oh, and I reacted to the video the same way JD did, an interpretation that is supported by the fact that nothing was ever actually done on ACORN’s part after the interviews (is there something wrong with doing a thorough entry interview for a (potential) new case?) and in Philadelphia they even called the police.
— Decline and Fall · Feb 22, 12:45 AM · #
“Huh, and here I thought the test of his ethics would have been before he tried to trespass on government property to engage in felony wiretapping. How’d that test work out for him?”
You’re a liar.
— tomaig · Feb 22, 04:29 PM · #
Why does it matter if O’Keefe was dressed like a pimp? I guess I hadn’t even thought about the question, but upon reflection I would guess he wasn’t: in many of the “stings” he was posing as a pimp posing as someone respectable. Someone who wouldn’t wear that outfit.
Lots of things are misleading, including how that video was edited. I mean: misleading as towards the balance of the case. I think that huge books aside, pretty much everything is misleading. And if you know of a non-misleading huge book, let me know.
Of course only one side can be misleading as to the truth. But that is a bad way of thinking about what ‘misleading’ means, since lets blatantly misleading stuff off the hook as long as the conclusions are the right ones.
Note: I’m neither defending nor criticizing the videos in toto. I just don’t think that “he wasn’t dressed like that in the offices” is much of a criticism.
— John 4 · Feb 22, 10:37 PM · #
In the first 10 seconds of the video, O’Keefe says that he is “a man pretending to run for congress some day” whose girlfriend is a prostitute. The two are looking to make money off child sex slaves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtTnizEnC1U
He is shown to be wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants walking into ACORN. If you were confused about what he wore into the ACORN offices, it’s because you didn’t pay attention.
— drudge · Feb 23, 03:25 PM · #
At this point, Breitbart-O’Keefe’s entire Acorn ‘sting operation’ is suspect. There has been enough misdirection and obfuscation on their part to raise questions as to whether they showed any bad behavior on the part of the filmed ACORN staffers at all.
Really, they need to release the full, raw footage of these ‘sting’ sessions for people to determine what really happened during the O’Keefe-Giles visits to ACORN offices. Until they do, I feel like we should consider the ACORN ‘sting’ as just a bunch of unproven assertions.
— D. Aristophanes · Feb 24, 03:31 AM · #
Conor,
You claim:
“None of this excuses the abhorrent behavior of some ACORN employees whose actions were inappropriate no matter the context, but it does call into question whether or not the video was edited in other misleading ways, and I certainly won’t feel comfortable trusting it until I see an unedited version.”
Are you aware that there is unedited audio available that you can listen to in its entirely?
biggovernment.com/acorn
So you really don’t need to view unedited video to form a pretty firm opinion about whether the tapes were doctored.
Also, are you aware that O’Keefe himself filmed himself walking into or out of offices wearing normal clothes? The very first few seconds of the very first video show this. If O’Keefe was trying to hide this, why did he show it, at the VERY BEGINNING OF THE VERY FIRST VIDEO?
“A reputable publisher corrects the mistaken impressions of his audience when they’re generated by content that he produced.”
Your post gives the mistaken impression that O’Keefe never showed footage of himself walking into ACORN wearing normal clothes, and that there is no unedited audio. I hope you correct those mistaken impressions that you have conveyed.
— Patterico · Feb 28, 11:09 PM · #
Indeed! One could, for instance, observe that no criminal charges will be brought against ACORN employees as a result of O’Keefe et al. having “edited the tape to meet their agenda”, in the words of one prosecutor.
The tapes were doctored to suit the conservative agenda, which is pretty much what I said happened since the beginning. For Conor this whole situation was a comment on the “banality of evil”. It still is, just in a completely different way.
— Chet · Mar 1, 11:37 PM · #
“behavior of some ACORN employees whose actions were inappropriate”
Waiting for YOUR retraction Conor.
Here is Breibart’s psuedo-retraction.
Brooklyn prosecutors on Monday cleared ACORN of criminal wrongdoing after a four-month probe that began when undercover conservative activists filmed workers giving what appeared to be illegal advice on how to hide money.
While the video by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles seemed to show three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide ill-gotten gains, the unedited version was not as clear, according to a law enforcement source.
“They edited the tape to meet their agenda,” said the source.
“On Sept. 15, 2009, my office began an investigation into possible criminality on the part of three ACORN employees,” Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes said in a one-paragraph statement issued Monday afternoon. “That investigation is now concluded and no criminality has been found.”
— matoko_chan · Mar 3, 03:13 PM · #