The Editor's Log
ACORN coverage, III
My newspaper column
The liberal activist group ACORN is caught up in yet another scandal, and some people are trying to drag the news media down with it.
ACORN is a community-based group that advocates for the poor and operates in 100 cities across the country. Earlier this month, some of ACORN’s workers in Baltimore, Washington and Brooklyn were caught on a hidden camera coaching a woman posing as a prostitute and a man posing as her pimp how to evade taxes and misrepresent themselves to get into a home.
The videos were posted on the Internet, and when FoxNews aired them last week, the uproar began. With good reason, too. They depict shameful behavior.
Other national networks and newspapers were slow to pick up the story. In retrospect, so were we.
And we certainly heard about it.
The first wave of calls and e-mails came on Tuesday. Most of the callers were irate but polite. They wanted to know why we hadn’t published a word about “a scandal that probably reaches all the way to the White House,” as one man told me. (It hasn’t so far.)
We were protecting the group, they said, because we are liberals.
Our politics had nothing to do with it, but I’ll talk more about that in a moment.
On Wednesday, we published a short story out of Washington on page A7 about the growing scandal.
The second wave of calls and e-mails came that day, with readers saying they wanted more information and that the story belonged on the front page. “This is fraud and involves billions of dollars of tax money,” another man told me. “You need to investigate it and stop hiding it.”
On Thursday, we published a longer story on page A8 about the mounting scandal.
We don’t have reporters in Washington, but ACORN’s Web site lists offices in Raleigh, Charlotte and Durham. Reporter Mark Binker began looking for the North Carolina angle.
Mark found the state director of ACORN who told him that the group is not involved in the sorts of problems that have plagued the organization elsewhere. Instead, he said, it is working on landlord-tenant disputes, preventing foreclosures, and lobbying to raise the minimum wage.
But in 2008, ACORN was involved in the national get-out-the-vote campaign. It claimed to register 28,000 voters in North Carolina, but about 120 forms the group submitted from Durham caught the attention of the State Board of Elections, and there apparently is an ongoing investigation.
Still, Guilford County’s elections director reported no problems with the group.
On Friday, we published a front page blurb about our ACORN coverage, sending readers to Mark’s story and another wire story on page A8.
Why haven’t we published the story on the front page? Again, it wasn’t political.
Our primary objective is to cover local news. The vast majority of you get your national news from other sources. Consequently, on weekdays, local and state news lead the front section, followed by national and world stories. Most days, our national section begins on page A7 or A8.
The only local angle to this story, so far, is that there is no connection to the problems facing the national organization. Publishing that story prominently would have been akin to putting a story about a storm in Dallas on the front page, even though there are sunny skies in Greensboro.
On the other hand, had Mark found some suspicious activity or wrongdoing, we would have published it on the top of the front page.
And we would do that for liberal and conservative organizations alike.
In a side note, more than 30 people contacted me about my last column explaining why we withheld the location of the neo-Nazi meeting. Thank you for taking the time. I welcome your feedback on this column, too.
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