The New York Times "was duped" and "refuses to own up to mistakes in the paper's coverage" of the now-infamous ACORN "pimp" hoax video tapes published by partisan Rightwing activists James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart.

That coverage, according to a devastating, no-holds barred, well-documented action alert issued today by the decades-old media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), was "wildly misleading" as a result of the paper having "decide[d] to skip the standard rules of journalism.".

FAIR has been covering bias in the media since 1986 and today's detailed action alert calls on the "paper of record" to issue retractions, apologies and explanations for their repeatedly incorrect and uncritical coverage of the Rightwing ACORN "pimp" hoax videos.

The group also excoriates New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt's often-absurd emailed justifications to The BRAD BLOG for refusing to recommend the paper issue retractions and apologies, as they decry: "It is hard to believe that Hoyt actually believes what he's saying here."

Finally, FAIR's analysis of the reportage, videos, and transcripts comes to the damning conclusion: "The videos were in fact a hoax, and the Times was duped. Its readers deserve to know as much--and ACORN, which suffered serious political damage as a result of the false stories, deserves an apology."

They ask readers, as we have for many weeks, to contact the Times' Public Editor Hoyt to "recommend that the paper investigate the ACORN videos and produce a report that clarifies the record"...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The glacial pace of international climate negotiations; 'The Cove' goes undercover in L.A.; Venezuela's dam electricity shortage ... PLUS: Industrial food production & another new food recall (with video!)... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': Restaurants get a little greener; Farm lobby’s lawyer appointed as Ag Committee’s counsel; SoCal utility to install solar on warehouse roofs; Natural gas as a near-term CO2 mitigation strategy; Green Biz Wiz: folks to follow on Twitter; Fish oil supplements may contain PCBs ... PLUS: Who says you can't bottle the wind? ...

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

"The government has offered no...unique reason to treat ACORN differently from other contractors accused of serious misconduct or to bar ACORN from federal funding without either a judicial trial or an administrative process applicable to all government contractors."

That was the finding in the judgment [PDF] issued late today by U.S. District Court Judge Nina Gershon, granting both declaratory relief and a permanent injunction to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

The court declared that the provisions of the "FY 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act," an amalgam of six separate bills which President Barack Obama signed into law on Dec. 16, 2009, which sought to strip ACORN of their right to enter future contracts with the U.S. government and to deprive them of all federal funding, save what had already been earned on existing contracts, amounted to an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder in violation of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.

Gershon's decision comes on the heels of a recent string of legal and public relations exhonerations for the community group which has long been targeted by the GOP, in large part, for their successful work in legally registering hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income voters who tend to favor Democratic candidates...

Doris "Granny D" Haddock
1910 - 2010

"Granny D" was surely one of the greatest Americans of all time. In 2005 we were "moved beyond words" when she helped to launch VelvetRevolution.us, the activist organization co-founded early that year by The BRAD BLOG.

More on this extraordinary patriot who, at the age of 89 walked 3,200 miles from coast to coast to draw attention to the need for campaign finance form, and kept up the fight until the day she died, right here and here.

This nation could use millions more like her. Our loss today is immeasurable.

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” - Mark Twain

"All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke

In a society increasingly dominated by dictatorial and corrupt corporate wealth and power, a collection of community organizations, The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), steps forward to become the voice of the most vulnerable of our citizens --- the poor and lower-middle class. It is a national coalition which not only strives to insure that these otherwise atomized and powerless masses retain and exercise their equal right to vote, but a caring organization which seeks a living wage for all citizens; that tries to protect them from predatory lenders and phony foreclosure assistance scams.

At a time when the heartless and uncaring Bush/Cheney cabal left thousands of our fellow citizens to sink or swim in a toxic soup of petrochemicals, flood waters and decaying bodies, ACORN, according to the Congressional Research Service [PDF], stepped forward to assist "in the clean-up of 1,850 homes and" organized "10,000 hurricane survivors into the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association."

So it comes as no surprise that ACORN has become the target of a years-long relentless right-wing assault, most recently spearheaded by the likes of accused federal felon James O'Keefe and his serial dissembling employer and publisher, Andrew Breitbart. Neither is it a surprise that the phony pimp's video hit pieces emerged on Rupert Murdoch's own Fox "News" Channel, which Robert Greenwald so forcefully demonstrated was but the propaganda arm of the GOP in Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.

It is, however, slightly more surprising, and certainly most noteworthy, that now that they've been exposed as hoaxes, even Murdoch's own New York Post was forced to describe the doctored tapes as a "'heavily edited' splice job that only made it appear as though the organization's workers were advising a pimp and prostitute on how to get a mortgage...[with] many of the seemingly crime-encouraging answers...taken out of context so as to appear more sinister."

What is truly disturbing, however, is that this concocted tale would be unquestioningly accepted as legitimate by the corporate media and by Congress, which, in their rush to mollify the noisy hard-right, displayed a profound ignorance of basic concepts of fundamental fairness and due process of law.

ACORN was prematurely and inappropriately tried and convicted in the press and in Congress, without so much as a single hearing, vis a vis a grotesque and shameful word-of-mouth propaganda lynch job unseen since the days of Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced, right-wing demagogue who misused his powerful perch in the U.S. Senate to smear "loyal Americans as disloyal" and who falsely "charged that the government was being undermined from within"...

TWITTER: @GreenNewsReport

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: The Arctic is venting; Food poisoning is expensive; Texas is breaking wind (records, that is); Limbaugh and cow farts ... PLUS: The 'greenest' Oscars yet ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': Shocker: Oil co. exec says U.S. should move slowly on renewables; Air pollution costs California hundreds of millions in health care; Coal-ash sites polluting water; Asia-produced ozone making its way to U.S; Scientists discover why sunshine & Vitamin D is crucial; Challenging conventional wisdom on renewable energy’s limits; Using behavioral science to craft smarter energy policy... PLUS: New research: synthetic nitrogen destroys soil carbon, undermines soil health ...

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

[UPDATED TWICE: Good news! Morrissey quickly corrected his report after we notified him of the incorrect coverage. Bad news! His correction was also incorrect. SECOND UPDATE: Morrissey has copped to his second error as well, and has finally corrected appropriately. Details on all, at bottom of this article. -BF]

Once again, the accurate reporting of facts, truth, and reality doesn't seem to be required when it comes to the Rightwing's continuing, years-long attempt to villainize the community organization ACORN for having the temerity to help legally register millions of low- and middle-income voters (who tend to vote Democratic) to legally vote so that they may legally participate in their own democracy.

Latest example: Yesterday, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air --- a blog created by Rightwinger Michelle Malkin and recently purchased for an undisclosed sum by the far Rightwing Salem Communication outfit --- misreported [emphasis added]:

Unfortunately, Morrissey and Hot Air are patently --- and apparently knowingly --- incorrect.

The "two felony indictments," which Morrissey even links to [PDF] and quotes from in his inaccurate hit piece, are not "against ACORN," but against two workers who defrauded ACORN, even as the pair defrauded the voter registration process...

The Department of Justice's Anti-trust division has determined that the purchase of Premier Election Solutions, Diebold Inc.'s recently renamed e-voting division, by Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), has resulted in a voting machine monopoly. The DoJ and nine states that have joined in a lawsuit are suing to require ES&S to divest of the assets gained in the bargain-basement priced purchase of Diebold's e-voting outfit last September.

The merger with Diebold/Premier, ES&S's second largest competitor, had given ES&S, a private corporation which already controlled some 50% of U.S. elections with its electronic voting systems, a full 70% control of the votes cast in this country. The acquisition had been opposed by election integrity organizations, Hart Intercivic (a much smaller Austin-based competitor), the New York Times' editorial board, and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and was being investigated by 14 different states along with the DoJ's anti-trust division...

Much more soon on Rightwing propagandist Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe's quickly unraveling ACORN "Pimp" Hoax, just how much of a hoax it really was, how the media and Democrats shamefully failed their due diligence in reporting and/or acting on it, and coverage of a lot of new commentary on it all that has been coming in rapidly from the Left, Right, and Other over the last week or so.

Until then --- and as we still wait for Breitbart and O'Keefe to release the unedited versions of the videos which they've charged for six months demonstrate serious crimes they apparently don't want to show us, and while we continue to wait for the embarrassingly discredited hard rightwing L.A. County District Attorney Patrick Frey, who blogs pseudonymously as "Patterico" both at his own site and in comments at The BRAD BLOG and at Breitbart's websites, to explain how it is that as a Deputy D.A. he's authenticated the "unedited audio" that he claims proves some form of criminality by ACORN that neither the Brooklyn D.A. nor the former MA Attorney General [PDF] nor the Congressional Research Service have been able to find --- here is a short, instructive video worth a quick look.

It's from 2007 and demonstrates just how simple it is to edit raw video in order to show something other than what actually occurred...

The lessons above are worth keeping in mind given last week's Brookyn D.A. finding that the O'Keefe/Giles/Breitbart Brooklyn video shows "no criminality," and that, as reported in Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post was "a 'heavily edited" splice job" where the low-level ACORN Housing employee's "seemingly crime-encouraging answers were taken out of context so as to appear more sinister," and as the New York Daily News similarly reported a NY law enforcement official last week confirming that O'Keefe and Giles "edited the tape to meet their agenda."

Meanwhile, the "paper of record," the New York Times, which grossly misreported the story time and again, is, as The BRAD BLOG originally reported, and as Katrina Vanden Heuvel at The Nation reminds us today, still standing by its damaging and inaccurate coverage of the entire ACORN "Pimp" Hoax.

As mentioned, much more coming soon...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

The March 3, 2010 segment of Democracy Now is so shocking that it is best seen. In Utah, lawmakers have approved a measure that could potentially expose a pregnant woman to murder charges if she is stuck in an abusive relationship, is beaten and miscarries. When one of two twins is a still birth, the mother is charged with murder because she refused a C-section. In Iowa, a woman is arrested when she miscarries after a fall down the stairs.

All this amongst efforts by the health insurance cartel to treat spousal abuse as a pre-existing condition.

Perhaps we should post signs: Warning: Pregnancy will place you in legal jeopardy.

UPDATE, 3/10/10: Democracy Now reported that Utah's Republican Governor Gary Herbert signed the anti-choice measure into law. "The...bill would allow women to be charged with murder if they commit 'an intentional or knowing act' that causes a miscarriage. The bill initially included language that would have also punished women for 'reckless' acts. But despite the revision, critics still say the measure could target women for all kinds of actions, including staying with an abusive partner."

The 01/04/10 Democracy Now! segment, Utah Abortion Bill Could Punish Women for Miscarriages, Domestic Violence follows below...

Given her own history of documented voter fraud felonies, you'd think Ann Coulter would want to stay away from the whole ACORN issue (particularly since there is no evidence that, unlike her, they've ever committed any).

But Coulter just can't help herself, I guess, as evidenced by her column last week, dutifully reprinted by "Andrew Breitbart Presents...Big Journalism" in the wake of the Brooklyn D.A.'s finding of "no criminality" seen in the Brooklyn ACORN "pimp" hoax videos, and even Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post reporting the videos as a "'heavily edited' splice job" with "seemingly crime-encouraging answers...taken out of context so as to appear more sinister."

So what did Coulter do to shore up the wingnut hoax that is falling apart faster than Andrew Breitbart himself? She quoted some "seemingly crime-encouraging answers" from the video, "out of context so as to appear more sinister," naturally. And, even more naturally, those folks who have been played and conned by "Andrew Breitbart Presents...Big Journalism" and "Andrew Breitbart Presents...Big Government," etc., ate it all up...

Earlier this week, the Brooklyn D.A. concluded a five-month investigation of the Brooklyn ACORN videos, finding "no criminality." Following the release of the findings, Rupert Murdoch's own New York Post, of all places, reported it this way:

Using similar language, the New York Daily News reported a law enforcement source as noting: "They edited the tape to meet their agenda."

The New York Times, the so-called "paper of record," while reporting that the DA found no criminality, offered no such coverage of the DA's office explaining that the videos were deceptively and misleading edited and promoted as if they revealed something they actually didn't. The language used by Times reporter Andy Newman even appears to defy the paper's own Public Editor Clark Hoyt's recommendation --- as he shared it with me via email personally --- to "avoid language that says or suggests that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera." (More specific details on that in my post from yesterday.)

In the meantime, as the Times continues to fail, last night Stephen Colbert mocked the entire ACORN "pimp" hoax as we've been revealing it over the last several weeks and, along with it, James O'Keefe, Andrew Breitbart, Fox "News" --- and, yes, indirectly, the New York Times --- by sharing his own "exclusive," damning, and heavily-edited video interview...

Related: Yesterday ACORN launched a campaign to fight back and "Demand Accountability" from the Times and the other media outlets that have grotesquely misreported this story and have still failed to correct their damagingly inaccurate coverage. More on that campaign and how you can add your voice to it, right here...

Following on our weeks-long coverage here at The BRAD BLOG, and at other sites who've similarly jumped in demanding accountability from the New York Times, ACORN itself is now launching a "Letter to the Editor" campaign to "Demand Accountability" from the paper for their repeated misreporting of the James O'Keefe/Andrew Breitbart ACORN "pimp" hoax.

An email blast is being sent to "over 100,000 ACORN supporters" today, according to spokesman Kevin Whelan, calling on them to "send an email to the Times' Public Editor and tell him to retract the Times' erroneous reporting about O'Keefe and ACORN."

The community group's heavily-footnoted email blast, signed by "CEO and Chief Organizer" Bertha Lewis, quotes several articles from The BRAD BLOG's detailed coverage, including NYTimes Public Editor Clark Hoyt's outrageous emailed justifications for refusing to recommend the paper correct its multiple misreports.

"Can you tell Clark Hoyt, The New York Times' Public Editor, that The Times needs to retract its past ACORN stories and report the truth about the anti-ACORN sting operation from now on?" the email campaign asks [emphasis in original] before chiding Hoyt for refusal to "see that a correction is in order, because that would require conclusive evidence that The Times was wrong, which I haven't seen."

The BRAD BLOG, however, has indeed shown "conclusive evidence" to Hoyt that the paper was wrong, and even Hannah Giles (who played the fake prostitute) and even Andrew Breitbart (who published the videos to help launch his new BigGovernment.com website) have both now admitted that the reports of James O'Keefe dressing as a "pimp" in the offices of ACORN were flat out wrong.

Whelan says the group is "asking people to contact either the New York Times OR their local paper and ask for a correction to the erroneous reporting regarding O'Keefe and his video scams."

"Bradblog and a handful of online writers have been way ahead in looking at the facts on this story," Whelan wrote, "just as you were in exposing the great voter fraud fraud in 2006." (Our indexed coverage of that particular Rightwing fraud campaign is here.)

More from Whelan's email to The BRAD BLOG:

The ACORN email blast to supporters also notes that the New York Daily News had the decency to report on a law enforcement source who noted Monday that "they edited the tape to meet their agenda," following the conclusion of the Brooklyn D.A.'s finding of "no criminality" after a five-month investigation of Brooklyn ACORN tapes.

Moreover, even Rupert Murdoch's New York Post reported on the finding, noting the D.A. described the video as a "'heavily edited' splice job" where "many of the seemingly crime-encouraging answers were taken out of context so as to appear more sinister."

And yet, the New York Times, the "paper of record," continues to misreport the story, even in the wake of the D.A.'s finding, as we detailed last night.

Please read ACORN's full letter, and sign onto their accountability campaign right here...

And please spread the word by DIGGing, REDDITing, RE-TWEETing, etc!

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IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Walmart puts the squeeze on suppliers; Amphibians that go both ways; A mini-hydroelectric power plant in your backpack? ... PLUS: Obama tries to make energy efficiency sound sexy ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

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IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA': The Chamber of Commerce vs. climate science; Is solar cheaper than nuclear?; Hospital study: The high cost of dirty air; Satellite photos show decades of Mountaintop Removal destruction; Global warming skeptics distract from security risks; Architects designing cities for global warming adaptation; Natural Gas lobby challenging coal; Independent board to review work of top climate panel; Rise in anti-science cyber-bullying... PLUS: What will climate science learn from 'Climategate' investigations? CRU's Phil Jones admits emails were 'awful' ...

Info/links on those stories and all the ones we talked about on today's episode follow below...

It's not particularly worth my time, or anybody's time (unless they are involved in suing or pressing charges against the GOP hoaxsters), to get into the detailed weeds on how the ACORN "pimp" hoax videos were doctored to show something other than what they really were, in comparison to what the text transcripts (which may or may not be accurate) actually show, since:

• the entire scam was a political hit job and a scam from the jump, and;
• since accused felon James O'Keefe and his employer and publisher Andrew Breitbart have refused to release the unedited video tapes, and;
• since three investigations (one from the Congressional Research Service, one from MA's former Attorney General, and the latest, just this week from the Brooklyn, NY District Attorney) have all found no criminal wrongdoing by the low-level ACORN employees caught on secret video, and;
• since nobody but low-level workers and volunteers are even seen on the tapes, and;
• since ACORN immediately fired those who violated the organization's own written protocols.

As The BRAD BLOG has been detailing over the last several weeks, the highly-edited, heavily-overdubbed, secretly (and likely illegally) taped videos, and those who published them, have already proven to have discredited themselves.

Now that O'Keefe's ACORN "pimp" hoax has been acknowledged, even by Andrew Breitbart, as a deceptive fraud --- where he once called it Pulitzer Prize-worthy "journalism" he now compares it to Borat --- it doesn't seem to matter to the same rightwing bloggers who trumpeted it in the first place that O'Keefe lied about playing his now-infamous 70's-era blaxploitation "pimp" character in ACORN offices. What's important, those foolish enough to keep backing O'Keefe and Breitbart now claim, is not that the purveyor of the information has been shown to be a fraud himself, but what he purports to have caught ACORN workers saying and doing on his highly-edited video productions.

But even those charges don't hold up to even the quickest scrutiny...