So there’s no confusion, I think it’s entirely reasonable for ACORN to look the other way if an adult prostitute comes looking for help obtaining housing. But assisting child prostitution is a different story. In latest ACORN video, from San Bernardino, the couple is much clearer that the business involves importing 14-year-olds and letting customers beat them. And the ACORN employee in San Bernardino didn’t blink:
Child prostitution is reprehensible, and it’s inexcusable that the ACORN employee here didn’t throw them out of her office and/or go to the police. And the bit where the ACORN employee “admits” to murder is surreal. I guess I’m glad the police think that she’s a liar rather than a murderer.
Tim, Media Matters and other liberal organizations are claiming that this woman “punk’d” the two filming the documentary, and made up wilder and wilder tails to see if they would believe her.
Given what the pimp dressed up as, I’m tempted to believe them, but I am waiting breathlessly for an actual interview from the woman herself.
If this is true, and if other accusations are true (that they were thrown out of other offices, etc), then I think you have your answer as to why most mainstream media do not do much investigative reporting anymore. Look closely at the “Food Lion” stories in the mid 90’s, or the scandal earlier this year in South America where the host actually staged crimes that he later covered for his serial. Most “investigative journalists” have HUGE axes to grind (Sinclair Lewis among them).
If you’ve already emotionally made your mind up, you’re going to only show the stuff that reinforces what you believe, and automatically dismiss anything that conflicts with your opinion. You may even “jigger” (or outright manipulate) the facts to make them line up with your beliefs.
Sorry, that’s my comment.
Wow, you allow anons.
Interesting. I guess I’m not sure how this explanation works. Is the claim that the San Berardino lady was joking but the people in the other three cities were serious? Or that they were all joking? If the former, that doesn’t seem to help their case terribly much. If it’s the latter, then my question is why did ACORN fire them? Either way I think it looks bad for ACORN.
I don’t think ACORN’s case can be helped much, so Media Matters is using this more to discredit O’Keefe and, by extension, FOX news.
Although, I do have to ask, why wouldn’t ACORN fire them, regardless of the reasons behind their actions?
Because if the “punking” story were plausible, they’d probably want to use it instead of the “we happen to have bad apples in four different cities” story.
I tend to think that most companies would not take kindly to an employee “punking” a customer. Her making up tall tales means that the filmmaker approached this from the standpoint of trying to get evidence to harm them, and did not look objectively at the evidence to see if it held up. Investigative reporting is driven by this desire to make something you believe true. It may not matter how true it actually is, everything that lines up with his hypothesis is published, and everything that goes against it ends up on the editing room floor.
There are reports now that he has edited material unfairly (dubbing some questions in) and that he visited many more offices and was denied services. In some instances, the police were called. I guess wishing ACORN had a zero-level amount of stupid people/interest-in-helping-prostitutes-avoid-taxes is a noble goal, but I know enough about statistics to know that if you throw enough stuff on a wall, some will stick.