Tired of the Lies About ACORN?

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Air America takes a fresh and unapologetic look at the ACORN scandal. ACORN has been a target of conservatives for several years, and was even the target of Karl Rove and resulted in the infamous US Attorney firings a few years ago.

Rachel Maddow had an excellent segment on her show last night that goes over some details included in this new report that details the lies being forwarded by Republicans and the misinformation and shoddy journalism being produced by the media.

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Among some of the findings in this report:

In October 2008, at the peak of the campaign season, negative attacks dominated the news about ACORN:

• 76% of the stories focused on allegations of voter fraud
• 8.7% involved accusations that public funds were being funneled to ACORN
• 7.9% of the stories involved charges that ACORN is a front for registering Democrats
• 3.1% involved blaming ACORN for the mortgage scandal

The mainstream news media failed to fact‐check persistent allegations of “voter fraud” despite the existence of easily available countervailing evidence. The media also failed to distinguish allegations of voter registration problems from allegations of actual voting irregularities. They also failed to distinguish between allegations of wrongdoing and actual wrongdoing. For example:

• 82.8% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that actual voter fraud is very rare (only 17.2% did mention it)
• 80.3% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to mention that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required to do by law
• 85.1% 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
• 95.8% 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, including the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with the politicization of voter fraud accusations – firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
• 61.4% of the stories about ACORN’s alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to acknowledge that Republicans were trying to discredit Obama with an ACORN “scandal”

47.8% of the news stories about ACORN in October 2008 linked the organization to candidate Barack Obama, most of them seeking to discredit him and his campaign through guilt‐by‐association.