GOODY TWO SHOES: Citizen Journalists Vs. MSM Hacks
On September 12th, The New York Times picked up an Associated Press article about the Census Bureau disassociating itself from ACORN that curiously omitted any mention the now infamous “pimp and prostitute” videos that started getting heavy play on FOX starting September 10th and 11th.
The omission was deliberate – the paper simply cut the last four grafs out of the AP article, which did include a brief description of the contents of the first video, giving context to Census Bureau director Robert Groves calling ACORN “a distraction” in the 2010 census effort, and saying the agency “no longer had confidence that ACORN was effectively managing the partnership.” Without the backstory, The Times’ version of the AP article was incomprehensible.
Three more videos were released on successive days, beginning on September 14th. What was The Times doing all this time? Nothing.
When the paper finally deigned to cover the sensational story on September 16th, the article attacked the messengers and their motives. The paper’s ombudsman Clark Hoyt tries to explain everything except the part about why The Times truncated the AP article in the first place:
Its slow reflexes - closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser - suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. …
Some editors told me they were not immediately aware of the Acorn videos on Fox, YouTube and a new conservative Web site called BigGovernment.com. When the Senate voted to cut off all federal funds to Acorn, there was not a word in the newspaper or on its Web site. When the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still nothing. …
Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.
Just as with the scandal about John Edwards’ illegitimate child, The Times was first unaware of - then dismissed - a scoop that originated outside the MSM-political axis. As Politico puts it:
The dearth - and tardiness - of coverage by the traditional media is explained in part by the fact that most reporters for establishment news organizations do not follow the conservative media. They tend to consider many of the more outlandish charges from the right to be plain loony - which they often are.
Well, as loony as that Times story about John McCain’s “affair” (sixth item on the page) – not to mention just about anything that appeared under Jayson Blair’s byline – and that “60 Minutes” story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service based on forged documents.
The Times’ media elite arrogance notwithstanding, Hoyt dismisses criticism that citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles were pursing stories that the MSM would not by calling their tactics “unethical” and suggests that that The Times could never do such a story because the paper “specifically prohibits reporters from misrepresenting themselves or making secret recordings.”
Leaving aside the fact that if journalists always acted ethically, no paper would need an ombudsman, Los Angeles Times columnist James Rainey points out that “[l]ocal and national television outlets have not been averse to assuming fake identities and sometimes using hidden cameras to expose, for example, unsafe factory working conditions or abuses in rest homes.” He adds that the MSM has shied away from undercover reporting, not because of ethical concerns, but because of the fear of lawsuits.
Hoyt also complains: “the two were sloppy with facts”:
One Acorn employee who bragged about killing one of her former husbands said she knew she was being scammed and was playing along. The police said they found her ex-husbands alive.
The Stiletto watched this particular video at least a dozen times. ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke had no clue she was being scammed, she was schmoozing O’Keefe and Giles and had an ingratiating demeanor throughout the encounter. While follow-up reporting by the MSM established that Kaelke had not, in fact, killed her husbands, no one has yet dug deep enough to find out whether she had been in “the business” herself, as she had claimed in the video (“Heidi Fleiss is my hero”). The “pimp and ho” seemed to have a solid business plan – running a brothel under the guise of a spa – and maybe she was thinking she could get a piece of the action as payback for helping set them up.
For his part, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz (“I am not a fan of secret taping, even when news organizations do it”) asks – and answers – the question, “is what they did journalism?":
Did O'Keefe and Giles produce a fair and balanced story that included how many ACORN offices rejected their scheme? No. They released the worst stuff. But they've never hidden their motivation.
For the record, O’Keefe told “FOX News Sunday” host Chris Wallace that he will soon release all the tapes.
While Slate’s media analyst Jack Shafer seems sympathetic to citizen journalism (“[a]mong the many glorious things about American journalism is that no credentialing organization or regulatory body stands between an individual who wants to break a story and his public reporting of it”) like Kurtz, he doesn’t think much of the of O’Keefe’s and Giles’ professionalism:
As a work of undercover journalism, the stunt is a mess, but an interesting one - like something William Randolph Hearst might have conjured up for his sensationalistic New York Journal in the 1890s. O'Keefe and Giles didn't assume undercover identities so that they could gain a vantage point from which to observe wrongdoing. Instead, their goal was simply to costume themselves, assume outlandish personas, and ask ridiculous questions designed to elicit embarrassing responses, just as comedian Sacha Baron Cohen does in his various guises. (Here's Ali G pranking Noam Chomsky.)
Nevertheless, Shafer is convinced that ACORN is being scrutinized by the MSM now only because of what the undercover videos by O'Keefe and Giles uncovered. He’s far from alone, judging by the latest survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press about the public’s perception of the accuracy, objectivity, fairness and - get this - professionalism of the MSM.
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