Have the Media 'Falsely Framed' ACORN? (Editor & Publisher)

[struggle4progress]

By Christopher R. Martin and Peter Dreier

Published: November 25, 2009 11:25 AM ET updated Wednesday 6:00 PM

(Commentary) A pimp and a prostitute walk into an office. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it wasn’t for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Until recently, ACORN, the largest community organizing group in the country, was well known primarily among liberal activists and the low-income people it has organized since it began in Little Rock in 1970. By mobilizing poor people and their middle class allies, it has won major victories — at the local, state and national levels — to improve the living and working conditions of everyday people.

It has successfully fought banks that redline and engage in predatory lending, employers that pay poverty wages, and developers that gentrify low-income neighborhoods and refuse to provide affordable housing. In the past few years, it has registered over a million Americans to vote. ACORN now has about 400,000 low-income members in 70 cities and a $25 million budget, raised by a combination of dues, local fundraising events, and foundation grants.

ACORN is now well known across America, but what most Americans know about it is wrong ...

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004047850

[carpe diem]

1. duh!

nt

[paulsby]

2. ACORN screwed their own pooch

the media just lapped up the mess

[mzmolly]

3. I'll judge ACORN when I see unedited video

tapes of the events in question.

[Hissyspit]

4. Did they?

I never saw any real evidence of that.

Always easy to attack the victims of witch hunt, especially when those victims are naively expecting fair treatment.

[annabanana]

6. They were blindsided by a concerted RW media attack.

Let's get a look at the unedited footage.

[intheflow]

5. Does a bear...?

YUP.