WaPo corrects Darryl Fears, Carol Leonnig race card smear of ACORN sting videomakers

Posted Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:46 pm

On 9/18/09, Darryl Fears and Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post offered "The $1,300 Mission to Fell ACORN/Duo in Sting Video Say Their Effort Was Independent" (link), an attempt by the WaPo to undercut the recent undercover reporting videos showing highly questionable activity by ACORN workers. Now, the WaPo has corrected a smear that Fears and Leonnig put in the article:

This article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O'Keefe, did not specifically mention them.

The correction was most likely brought about by Powerline! (exclamation added for extra emphasis) which called out those reporters by name (powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/09/024567.php). While it's easy - and fun! - to laugh at Powerline for being extremely doctrinaire GOP hacks who write one-hour-old-stubble-scratching articles and who don't approve comments showing how they're wrong, in this case they seem to have succeeded at making the WaPo look bad, at least to those who'll see the correction.

UPDATE: On second thought, calling what Fears and Leonig did a "racial smear" as the title used to do is only implicit and it's more accurate to simply call it playing the race card.

Tags: 
washington post
acorn
andrew breitbart
powerline
darryl fears
carol leonnig

Comments

eh (not verified)

Tue, 09/22/2009 - 19:05

It's impossible to undercut the videos -- they speak for themselves. But I'm not surprised they tried. Maybe the NYT will soon give it a shot.

WhereTheresSmoke (not verified)

Tue, 09/22/2009 - 20:48

Right you are, eh! It is beyond parody! It's as if SNL (in the old days) had gone about as far as possible to make scenes that were so extreme that they were unbelievable. But it was all real.

Just Sayin' (not verified)

Thu, 12/10/2009 - 06:42

Well, the WaPo corrected and updated the faulty information in their article. That's a good thing. That's what responsible journalists do. If they are wrong, they admit it and correct themselves accordingly. It called having morals. But have the hypocrits at BigGovernment.com posted ANY of the updates and corrections that highlight their own inconsistencies (let's not call them "lies", right?) Of course not, because they arent responsible, and they have no scruples. They know you guys will accept their story no matter how daming the evidence against them is. But they'd never admit they are wrong about anything, or even acknowledgewhere they have been midleading & presumptuous. That's how fascists behave. Btw, does o'Keefe's excuse that he cant release the audio of Katherine Russel in Philly make any sense to you? He says he cant release it because of the lawsuit from Balitmore ACORN (which doesnt involve Philly). But then he releases video from LA (which contradicts his previous of story of never being refused), and California has the same wiretapping laws as Pennsylvania. So Why can he release one set of audio, and not the other. Just quit being so self-righteous and think about it. If you really loved your country, you wouldnt put so much stock in deceptive side-show masters like Breitbart.