Journalism: September 2009 Archives

Have you heard about federally-funded ACORN workers in several cities advising a prostitute and her pimp (actually undercover journalists) on how to conceal underage prostitution from the police and the IRS? If not, Jon Stewart's Daily Show segment on the topic makes for a quick overview:

Even though the scandal involves an organization closely allied with President Obama and the Democratic Party, Stewart doesn't flinch from the inescapable conclusion about ACORN, but instead calls mainstream journalism on the carpet for missing this story.

Where were the real reporters on this story?... You're telling me that two kids from the cast of "High School Musical 3" can break this story with a video camera and their grandmother's chinchilla coat, and you got nothin'? They did it for $3,000. That's Blitzer's monthly beard wet-back budget. It probably costs CNN that much just to turn on their hologram machine. I'm a fake journalist, and I'm embarrassed these guys scooped me.

The reason mainstream journalists weren't on the ACORN corruption story is because they didn't want to be.

Here's what ABC's Charlie Gibson thinks:

But Gibson told a radio show Tuesday morning that he wasn't familiar with the story -- and it might be "just one you leave to the cables."

ABC reporter Jake Tapper has filed some reports on the scandal, and Gibson was asked on WLS Radio's "Don & Roma Show" what he thought of the story.

"I don't even know about it," Gibson said, laughing. "So you've got me at a loss. ... But my goodness, if it's got everything, including sleaziness in it, we should talk about it in the morning."

When one of the radio show's hosts described it as a "huge issue," Gibson said ABC had "done some stories about ACORN before, but this one I don't know about."

For the full scoop on James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles' ground-breaking undercover investigation of ACORN, visit the ACORN category at BigGovernment.com.