Re ACORN: What did the press know and when did it know it?

At Big Government today, Evan Coyne Maloney, another of the young conservative guns who uses modern media techniques to bring down Democratic dinosaurs, asks how it is that the media completely missed the ACORN scandal.  Maloney thinks that political correctness created the blinders media figures wore.  To the extent that ACORN is a black organization that services mostly black constituents, reporters simply were unable to make themselves say the unsayable to the American public — that it is corrupt through and through.  I think Maloney’s article is definitely worth reading, because he’s right about the media’s inability to get beyond its assumption that people of color and other “disadvantaged” people are always correct.  It’s the media’s own court of law:  innocent until proven guilty, except that we’ll never try to prove you guilty.

There is, however, a strong possibility that, as to ACORN, Maloney is being too generous when he ascribes the mental rot of political correctness to the journalistic class as a way of excusing their gross malfeasance.  Michael P. Tremoglie, who tried to break the ACORN scandal before Obama’s election, has no doubt but that the media’s wall of silence was a deliberate effort on their part to ensure that their candidate of choice would not be derailed (h/t Zhombre):

No one should believe that the liberal mainstream media “missed” the most recent ACORN scandal. They did not “miss it.”

When I broke the news on March 30 about the New York Times spiking the information they had about ACORN working with the Obama campaign (http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/03/30/top_stories/doc49d0a73c7f98e547489394.txt), it went national, like the current scandal, only because of the Fox News Channel and talk radio.

I was working as a journalist for the Philadelphia Bulletin* at the time. An ACORN whistleblower said that the NY Times reporter to whom she had been feeding information to about ACORN told her the editors did not want to use information about collusion between ACORN and the Obama campaign. The editors said it could be a “game changer” – meaning adversely affecting Obama’s campaign.

What’s even worse, because we’ve long suspected that the modern media shapes elections, is the scathing indictment Tremoglie levels at the Republicans:  they were complicit, because they were afraid they’d be called racists.  In other words, it wasn’t media political correctness that kept the lid on the story, it was Republican political correctness.

Republicans continue to confound me with their stupidity when it comes to labels.  They haven’t figured out that, no matter what they do, the MSM will tar them as racist, sexist, homophobic warmongers.  If you’re going to be lambasted anyway, at least do something principled to earn the name-calling from your political enemies.  Instead, though, the Republicans always fall meekly in line, and then preserve a gentlemanlike silence when their “good intentions” are ignored, and the insults come flying anyway.