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HOW THE MEDIA BLEW THE ACORN STORY
Christopher R. Martin & Peter Dreier, Editor and Publisher - How is it that after laboring in relative obscurity as a community organizer for almost 40 years, ACORN was so falsely framed in news stories that many Americans believed the absurd and alarming notion that it stole a presidential election? The answer is a tale of not only how the Republican Party and conservative news media framed ACORN, but also how most mainstream journalism organizations were negligent by repeating rather than fact-checking the spurious allegations.
During its four decades of community organizing, ACORN has earned the ire of certain business groups (who oppose ACORN's efforts to raise wages for the working poor), banks and pay-day lenders (who have been the target of ACORN organizing campaigns), and the Republican Party (which dislikes ACORN's success at registering urban minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats). Their attack on ACORN is part of a broader conservative effort to discredit Barack Obama -- first as a candidate, then as President. . .
The attacks continued in the summer of 2009, when two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute (and sometimes as other characters, like a potential candidate for Congress) walked into at least 10 ACORN offices around the country, asking for advice on taxes and a business venture that involved underage illegal immigrant girls from El Salvador. In some offices, ACORN employees asked them to leave; at least two offices called the police. In at least one office, a staffer, concerned that the couple was engaged in illegal child sex trafficking, used a cell phone to record video of them.
But, from a video camera the pair had concealed, we also know that several ACORN employees, in offices in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Brooklyn, and San Diego, took the bait and behaved inexcusably. Because the videos have been doctored, it isn't entirely clear what actually occurred, but it appears that ACORN staffers offered the couple advice about buying a home and doing their taxes, although none of them actually filled out any paperwork for the pair.
The embarrassing videos were soon posted to the Internet, and in short order became a national story. Starting at the conservative Web site biggovernment.com, the videos quickly became the top story at Fox News and conservative talk radio, moved to CNN's Lou Dobbs Show, then proved irresistible for the mainstream news media.
ACORN responded by firing the employees involved and initiating an internal review by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. Washington responded to the incidents with outrage, with Congress quickly voting to rescind ACORN's federal funding, primarily for homeownership counseling. Although ACORN received no funds from the IRS or the Census Bureau, both agencies also removed ACORN as "partners" in their efforts to help the working poor qualify for tax rebates and to encourage low-income households to fill out census forms. . .
This dramatic spike in public attention led us to conduct a study of how the media covered the ACORN controversy. We analyzed all stories about ACORN (647 total) from 2007 and 2008 by 15 news organizations. . .
Despite ACORN's diverse community organizing work in cities across the country, in 2007-2008, 55% of the stories about the organization dealt with voter fraud. (In the month before the election, during October 2008, the frame intensified; 76 percent of the ACORN stories focused on allegations of voter fraud.)
The problems with the voter fraud story began with an often-ignored but crucial distinction on semantics: the troubles with ACORN in 2008 were instances of voter registration fraud, not voter fraud, which is the casting of fraudulent votes. . . But, while the distinction between registration and voting was absent from many reports, there were even more problems of negligence in reporting on ACORN:
- 83% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare . . .
- 80% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law.
- 85% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems.
- 96% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of "voter fraud" to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans that were already documented at the time. . .
The mainstream news stories usually lacked the partisan hyperbole of the opinion entrepreneurs and conservative media. But in a vast majority of instances, the mainstream acted more like stenographers than reporters, repeating the accusations with trying to verify the facts. At best, they simply engaged in the typical he said/she said formula, balancing the conservative allegations of voter fraud with ACORN's denials, without providing any context. With little or no fact-checking, and no alternative narratives, the mainstream media unwittingly legitimized the original conservative narrative.
One of the rare reporters who does cover community organizing is National Public Radio's Pam Fessler. Fessler was perhaps the best qualified reporter in the country to report on the allegations of voter fraud. Her beat includes poverty, philanthropy, and nonprofit groups, and she has also covered voting issues since 2000. Her NPR reports were the best fact-checked of all of the reports we studied. . .
For example, a report for Morning Edition involved field work in Columbus, Ohio, with Fessler walking for hours with young ACORN voter registration employees to see firsthand how they did their work-something other reporters rarely did. "Most of them are kids-they hire 19- and 20-year-old kids," Fessler said. And, instead of portraying ACORN as an organization intent on perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history, Fessler instead found young adults, most of them excited to be doing a summer job. "Most kids took it seriously, but they made mistakes in the process."
Those mistakes, Fessler said, weren't exclusive to ACORN, but are symptomatic of the system of voter registration in America in which registrations are gathered in the community by third party organizations. (The nation's crazy-quilt registration laws which different from state to state - varying registration deadlines, requiring people to re-register when they move, and other rules - make mistakes inevitable. Most other democracies make voting much easier.) Fessler said she sees Republican concerns about voting problems as legitimate, but that "Until we fix the election voter registration system, this will still be controversial. Third party registration is not the smartest thing."
As we document in our study, the national news media has virtually ignored ACORN's everyday work. As a result, what most Americans know about ACORN involves phony allegations of "voter fraud," misleading reports of helping a pimp and a prostitute violate tax laws, and a misguided conviction by some that ACORN stole the election for Obama. Although this has been a bad story for ACORN, it hasn't been a good one for the news media, either.
Christopher R. Martin is professor of journalism and communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa, and Peter Dreier, a professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College. Dreier has advised ACORN on policy matters but says he has never been paid by the group or any of its affiliates. Study
During its four decades of community organizing, ACORN has earned the ire of certain business groups (who oppose ACORN's efforts to raise wages for the working poor), banks and pay-day lenders (who have been the target of ACORN organizing campaigns), and the Republican Party (which dislikes ACORN's success at registering urban minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats). Their attack on ACORN is part of a broader conservative effort to discredit Barack Obama -- first as a candidate, then as President. . .
The attacks continued in the summer of 2009, when two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute (and sometimes as other characters, like a potential candidate for Congress) walked into at least 10 ACORN offices around the country, asking for advice on taxes and a business venture that involved underage illegal immigrant girls from El Salvador. In some offices, ACORN employees asked them to leave; at least two offices called the police. In at least one office, a staffer, concerned that the couple was engaged in illegal child sex trafficking, used a cell phone to record video of them.
But, from a video camera the pair had concealed, we also know that several ACORN employees, in offices in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Brooklyn, and San Diego, took the bait and behaved inexcusably. Because the videos have been doctored, it isn't entirely clear what actually occurred, but it appears that ACORN staffers offered the couple advice about buying a home and doing their taxes, although none of them actually filled out any paperwork for the pair.
The embarrassing videos were soon posted to the Internet, and in short order became a national story. Starting at the conservative Web site biggovernment.com, the videos quickly became the top story at Fox News and conservative talk radio, moved to CNN's Lou Dobbs Show, then proved irresistible for the mainstream news media.
ACORN responded by firing the employees involved and initiating an internal review by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. Washington responded to the incidents with outrage, with Congress quickly voting to rescind ACORN's federal funding, primarily for homeownership counseling. Although ACORN received no funds from the IRS or the Census Bureau, both agencies also removed ACORN as "partners" in their efforts to help the working poor qualify for tax rebates and to encourage low-income households to fill out census forms. . .
This dramatic spike in public attention led us to conduct a study of how the media covered the ACORN controversy. We analyzed all stories about ACORN (647 total) from 2007 and 2008 by 15 news organizations. . .
Despite ACORN's diverse community organizing work in cities across the country, in 2007-2008, 55% of the stories about the organization dealt with voter fraud. (In the month before the election, during October 2008, the frame intensified; 76 percent of the ACORN stories focused on allegations of voter fraud.)
The problems with the voter fraud story began with an often-ignored but crucial distinction on semantics: the troubles with ACORN in 2008 were instances of voter registration fraud, not voter fraud, which is the casting of fraudulent votes. . . But, while the distinction between registration and voting was absent from many reports, there were even more problems of negligence in reporting on ACORN:
- 83% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare . . .
- 80% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required by law.
- 85% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems.
- 96% of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of "voter fraud" to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans that were already documented at the time. . .
The mainstream news stories usually lacked the partisan hyperbole of the opinion entrepreneurs and conservative media. But in a vast majority of instances, the mainstream acted more like stenographers than reporters, repeating the accusations with trying to verify the facts. At best, they simply engaged in the typical he said/she said formula, balancing the conservative allegations of voter fraud with ACORN's denials, without providing any context. With little or no fact-checking, and no alternative narratives, the mainstream media unwittingly legitimized the original conservative narrative.
One of the rare reporters who does cover community organizing is National Public Radio's Pam Fessler. Fessler was perhaps the best qualified reporter in the country to report on the allegations of voter fraud. Her beat includes poverty, philanthropy, and nonprofit groups, and she has also covered voting issues since 2000. Her NPR reports were the best fact-checked of all of the reports we studied. . .
For example, a report for Morning Edition involved field work in Columbus, Ohio, with Fessler walking for hours with young ACORN voter registration employees to see firsthand how they did their work-something other reporters rarely did. "Most of them are kids-they hire 19- and 20-year-old kids," Fessler said. And, instead of portraying ACORN as an organization intent on perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history, Fessler instead found young adults, most of them excited to be doing a summer job. "Most kids took it seriously, but they made mistakes in the process."
Those mistakes, Fessler said, weren't exclusive to ACORN, but are symptomatic of the system of voter registration in America in which registrations are gathered in the community by third party organizations. (The nation's crazy-quilt registration laws which different from state to state - varying registration deadlines, requiring people to re-register when they move, and other rules - make mistakes inevitable. Most other democracies make voting much easier.) Fessler said she sees Republican concerns about voting problems as legitimate, but that "Until we fix the election voter registration system, this will still be controversial. Third party registration is not the smartest thing."
As we document in our study, the national news media has virtually ignored ACORN's everyday work. As a result, what most Americans know about ACORN involves phony allegations of "voter fraud," misleading reports of helping a pimp and a prostitute violate tax laws, and a misguided conviction by some that ACORN stole the election for Obama. Although this has been a bad story for ACORN, it hasn't been a good one for the news media, either.
Christopher R. Martin is professor of journalism and communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa, and Peter Dreier, a professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College. Dreier has advised ACORN on policy matters but says he has never been paid by the group or any of its affiliates. Study
2 Comments:
"Most other democracies make voting much easier."
When talking about a 'democracy', at what point does voting become so hard that you can no longer call it a 'democracy'.
Since a democracy is supposed to be a system of government whereby the people hold sovereign power, by definition it wouldn't seem to take too much of a government making voting difficult to disqualify said government from being considered a real democracy.
Which leads to the next question. If a government is calling itself a democracy, but it really isn't a democracy, then what form of government is it?
You may not like the answer. Especially if you are an American and profess a love of freedom and democracy.
"two young conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute "
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