Key Concepts: Agenda Setting, Framing, and Opinion Entrepreneurs

In recent decades, media scholars have identified two ways that the media influence public opinion and even policymaking—agenda setting and framing. Together, media agenda-setting and the way they frame stories and issues play an important role in shaping public opinion and influencing political debate. In fact, agenda-setting effects have been found to be even stronger when framed as part of a political campaign.Footnote ⁹

The concept of the “agenda-setting effect”Footnote ¹⁰ was initially documented by media researchers at the University of North Carolina in 1972. The effect suggests that the news media, by virtue of their ability to determine what will be in the news, create an agenda. According to a popular summary of the agenda-setting effect, the media don't tell people what to think, but what to think about. The collective effect of the news media's coverage of a certain issue increases the public salience of that issue. Thus, the media agenda “sets” the public agenda. For example, public concern about issues—war, crime, political scandal, homelessness, and others—is shaped in large measure by what the media covers.

A second way that social scientists examine media influence is by examining “frames.”Footnote ¹¹ The frame of a news story gives meaning to the individual events reported. Todd Gitlin defines frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual.”Footnote ¹² In other words, the way in which a journalist tells the story is the story frame. If the agenda-setting function of the media shapes what readers and views think about, the way the media frames a story shapes what or how they think.Footnote ¹³ For example, Robert Entman explains that a dominant news frame, supported by the Bush administration, emerged after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and endorsed invading Afghanistan and Iraq in a so-called “war on terror,” based in part on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.Footnote ¹⁴

Agenda setting and framing are related theories of mass communication and public opinion. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, authors of the seminal research article on agenda setting, view framing and agenda-setting as overlapping functions: “Both the selection of objects for attention and the selection of frames for thinking about these objects are powerful agenda-setting roles.”Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, Entman sees agenda setting as part of framing: “Agenda setting can thus be seen as another name for successfully performing the first function of framing: defining problems worthy of public and government attention.”Footnote ¹⁶ McCombs notes that the accumulated evidence of nearly four decades of research on agenda setting and framing is “that journalists do significantly influence their audience's picture of the world.”Footnote ¹⁷

The media environment has changed dramatically since social scientists first began exploring agenda setting and framing. In their original agenda-setting study of media, for example, McCombs and Shaw needed to analyze only five local and national newspapers, two television networks, and two major news magazines to cover “nearly all of the sources used by Chapel Hill voters during the 1968 presidential election.”Footnote ¹⁸ Since then, the proliferation of channels and personal media with the advent of 24/7 cable and satellite television, cell phones, video games, and the Internet had some media theorists at the turn of this century wondering if mass communication and mass communication theory had ended.Footnote ¹⁹ But early experimental research on the Internet found mass media were still a dominant force in agenda setting. Researchers found that news on the Internet, like news in traditional news media, can make issues salient, but that the traditional news media set the news agenda of the Internet's electronic bulletin boards.Footnote ²⁰ Several studies addressed the influence of blogs in campaigns. One study that analyzed blog posts and mainstream news media stories during the 2004 president election concluded that the blog agenda, regardless of the blogs' political leanings, were similar to the agenda of the mainstream news media, because “limited resources for gathering information make blogs heavily dependent on reports from more traditional media.”Footnote ²¹ Another study of the same election similarly found that the mainstream news media, particularly television networks, set the agenda for campaign blogs, as the campaigns reacted to what was in the news.Footnote ²²

Our research on agenda setting and framing found a different dynamic of influence in the 2008 presidential campaign. The activities of certain groups and individuals, who we call “opinion entrepreneurs,” played an important role in creating the issue of ACORN and framing the story for the mainstream news media. We conceptualize opinion entrepreneurs as similar to Entman's notion of elites (politicians, ex-officials, and experts) who influence the mainstream news media, but different in that many of them are non-elite individuals, businesses, and quasi-political organizations who, often by virtue of a web page or blog, work outside the traditional definitions of those who influence the news and public agenda.Footnote ²³ Moreover, their influence is magnified by the fact that they work collaboratively, as part of a network, echoing the same message; as a result, the whole echo chamber is larger in influence than the sum of its parts.

In the ACORN case, for example, the business-funded attack site, rottenacorn.com, and conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart (whose biggovernment.com became a clearinghouse for communicating the Right's case against ACORN) represent significant opinion entrepreneurs. Breitbart in particular is a model for the new, potent agenda-setting influence of opinion entrepreneurs on the Internet. Wired magazine noted that Breitbart is a person who “rams [his talking] points into the popular consciousness.” In 2009, in anticipation of releasing the now-infamous videos targeting ACORN offices, Breitbart “deployed an army of 200 bloggers to write post after post about Acorn, giving the story momentum that once would have required a swarm of media outlets to achieve. Fox News ran several segments on the first day alone.”Footnote ²⁴

ACORN had no comparable network of opinion entrepreneurs. Although ACORN was accused of being the main cog in a radical leftist network, it had little or no routine access to the mainstream media. Nor was there a left-oriented, progressive echo chamber counterpart with a comparable capacity to inject its message into the mainstream media. ACORN had no full-time media staff person and no full-time attorney in its national office. Put on the defensive, it was unable to mobilize its allies to serve as opinion entrepreneurs on its behalf. Most of the foundations that provided ACORN funding were cautious and gun shy about political controversy. Likewise, even some of ACORN's allies among Democratic elected officials were unwilling to come to ACORN's defense as the group became the object of controversy in the mainstream media (consistent with research that Democrats limit their rhetorical options in the face of campaign fundraising concerns).Footnote ²⁵ The House vote on September 17, 2009 to ban all federal funding for ACORN was 345–75. All 173 Republicans and 172 of the 247 Democrats voted against ACORN.Footnote ²⁶ At the time, the Tea Party protests against Obama and the Democrats (triggered by the health care reform debate) were generating considerable media coverage and making even liberal Democrats more cautious and defensive than usual. Thus ACORN was left to speak on its own behalf and lacked the capacity to do so effectively, as evidenced by the media's failure to give ACORN's perspective in the majority of stories.

In general, the news media (reporters and editors) seek out, respond to, and rely on some sources more than others, and those sources routinely become news.Footnote ²⁷ Organizations with more resources or that have more credibility in the eyes of journalists are more likely to become regular news sources, and thus shape which issues (agenda setting) and which perspectives (frames) dominate the news. For example, business-backed organizations (such as the chamber of commerce, foundations, think tanks, or policy groups)Footnote ²⁸ have the resources (staff, reports, blue-ribbon task forces, social connections) to get their concerns into the media's line of vision, whereas low-income groups often have to resort to protest. During a political campaign, candidates and their staffs become major sources of news, but some candidates receive more coverage (agenda setting) and more control over their narratives in coverage (frames) than others. The role of opinion entrepreneurs in influencing media coverage—agendas and frames—has not received the attention it deserves. We examine this phenomenon through the media coverage of ACORN.

When reporters can't immediately verify the facts of a statement from a legitimate source, they simply report the “truth claim,” as Gaye Tuchman explained in her book, Making News. A statement may or may not be true, but it is true that the source said it. Sometimes the reporter may report an opposing truth claim, enabling the reporter to “claim to have been fair by presenting ‘both sides of the story.’”Footnote ²⁹ Journalists refer to this as the “he said/she said” approach to reporting.

But it isn't simply a neutral balancing act; the news media gives more or less credence to certain truth claims by way of narrative framing. Over time, some sources gain credibility by having their truth claims regularly repeated, but not evaluated for their validity. As Trudy Lieberman noted in her study of the conservative news media, repetition creates a truth of its own: “If the public hears the same message multiple times, soon people will believe its veracity.”Footnote ³⁰

We investigate a series of questions: Have recent opinion entrepreneurs used new media outlets—such as web sites and blogs—to influence the agenda and framing of the mainstream news media, thus changing the direction of influence in media theories? Do the conservative media—broadcast, print, and new (Internet) media—repeat certain truth claims over and over? Do they frame stories with few or no opposing truth claims? Do these narratives influence the news agenda at mainstream media? Do these stories influence the public agenda?

By examining a recent political controversy, we explore a question of concern to political activists as well as political scientists. We consider the emergence of a new phenomenon on the political scene—the conservative echo chamber—to understand its role in American politics and its impact on the mainstream media, public opinion, and campaign dynamics. Our main purpose in this study is not to advance a new theory, but to take up Donald Kinder's recommendation to balance studies of experimental lab-based research of framing effects with “more studies of framing au naturel.”Footnote ³¹ Kinder's point reflects Bent Flyvbjerg's account of the limits of traditional “social scientific” social inquiry.Footnote ³² Flyvbjerg calls for analyzing power in everyday social practice and redeeming the legitimacy of the case study, rich with context. Similarly, Sanford Schram and Philip Neisser argue for the study of narratives as “an alternative to the dominant positivist understanding of the public policy-making process and public policy analysis.”Footnote ³³ With the study of ACORN, we examine the narratives and power relations of a major political controversy, applying agenda-setting and framing theories as the narratives were still unfolding in a very complex media environment.

Community Organizing and ACORN

In recent years, a growing number of social scientists, historians, and journalists have documented the upsurge of grassroots organizing across the country and the role of community organizing groups in the nation's political culture. Traditional community organizing typically involves the mobilization of low-income and working class residents of local neighborhoods to improve social and economic conditions and to gain political influence. Unlike most “interest groups” and voluntary associations that rely primarily on conventional tactics such as lobbying and voter drives, community organizing groups rely on both conventional tactics and more unconventional tactics such as protests. Community organizing groups mobilize people to fight on their own behalf, compared with advocacy groups that typically hire professionals to advocate on behalf of others.Footnote ⁴⁰ Participants in community organizing tend to be people who are marginalized by established political institutions and channels of influence—typically low-income and working class residents of cities—although the community organizing world has expanded to include new constituencies and approaches, as we shall see.Footnote ⁴¹

Historians trace modern community organizing to Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago in the late 1800s and inspired the settlement house movement. These activists—upper-class philanthropists, middle-class reformers, and working-class radicals—organized immigrants to clean up sweatshops and tenement slums, improve sanitation and public health, and battle against child labor and crime. In the 1930s, another Chicagoan, Saul Alinsky, took community organizing to the next level. He sought to create community-based “people's organizations” to organize residents the way unions organized workers. He drew on existing groups—particularly churches, block clubs, sports leagues, and unions—to form the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in an effort to get the city to improve services to a working-class neighborhood adjacent to meatpacking factories.Footnote ⁴²

Activists in the 1960s adopted some of the strategy ideas outlined in Alinsky's books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, but it wasn't until the 1970s that nation experienced an upsurge of community organizing, what Harry Boyte called a “backyard revolution.”Footnote ⁴³ That trend has continued, with groups organizing around the traditional bread-and-butter neighborhood issues (such as public safety, tenants rights, and gentrification) as well as newer issues like environmental justice, immigrant rights, and living wages. The number of groups engaged in community organizing has mushroomed. Almost every US city (and a few suburbs) now has at least one—and in many cases dozens of—community organizing groups.Footnote ⁴⁴

Community organizations emerge out of churches and synagogues, social service agencies, neighborhood self-help groups, unions, and other institutions. Robert Putnam, Steven Rosenstone, John Hansen, and others have lamented the declining membership in voluntary associations and organizations that mobilize people for political power, but it is likely that these studies overlook many people who are involved in community organizing groups, especially low-income and working class Americans. No one really knows how many community organizations exist, the total size of their budgets, the number of staff people who work for them, how long they've been in business, how many are linked to larger networks, or how effective they are.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many (perhaps most) of the community organizing groups that have emerged in the past four decades eventually fell apart or remained small and marginal, unable to sustain themselves financially, economically, and politically. What seems clear, however, is that most community organizations engage in relatively modest efforts. These include, for example, pressuring the police to close down a local crack house, getting city hall to fix potholes, or getting the parks department to clean up a local playground. Some groups are more ambitious. Their community organizing has included enacting living wage laws, forming tenant unions, building community development corporations, combating redlining, challenging police abuses, fighting against environmental and health problems, mobilizing against plant closings and layoffs, reforming public education, setting up housing trust funds, encouraging inclusionary zoning laws, expanding funding for health services and public schools, and even setting up charter schools.

Most community organizing groups are rooted in local neighborhoods, often drawing on religious congregations and block clubs. But changes in the nation's economic, social, and political conditions make neighborhood-based organizing less effective than was the case in the 1940s, when Saul Alinsky first formulated his ideas about community organizing, or even in the 1970s, when corporate consolidation accelerated. Moreover, local governments have less money and influence today than in the past, making it more difficult for city politicians to respond to community demands.

A major dilemma for contemporary community organizing groups is the reality that the sources of urban problems—poverty, unemployment, homelessness, violent crime, racial segregation, high infant mortality rates—have their roots in large-scale economic forces and federal government policy outside the boundaries of local neighborhoods. What influence, then, can neighborhood organizing groups be expected to have on policies made in city halls, state capitals, Washington, and corporate board rooms?

In Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life, Theda Skocpol laments that since the early 1900s mass membership grassroots and mixed-income organizations have declined and been replaced by advocacy/lobbying groups run by professional staff with little capacity to mobilize large numbers of people.Footnote ⁴⁶

Some community organizing groups have responded to these trends by expanding in scope and scale. They grew and gained in strength, in part by becoming part of broader networks at the city, regional, or national levels. Although most local community groups are not linked to any regional or national organizing or training networks, those local groups that are so connected have been helped to improve their capacity to develop leaders, mobilize campaigns, and win local victories as well as participate in citywide, state, and national campaigns beyond their local bases.

Thus the notion of “community organizing” has evolved beyond its localist origins. While many groups continue to focus exclusively on local issues, there are now a number of national organizing networks with local affiliates, enabling groups to address problems at the local, state, and national levels, sometimes even simultaneously. These groups include ACORN, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), People in Communities Organized (PICO), the Center for Community Change, National People's Action, Direct Action Research and Training (DART), the Partnership for Working Families, and the Gamaliel Foundation (the network affiliated with the Developing Communities Project that hired Obama in Chicago in 1983). These networks, as well as a growing number of training centers for community organizers—such as the Midwest Academy in Chicago, the Highlander Center in Tennessee, and a few dozen universities that offer courses in community and labor organizing—have helped recruit and train thousands of people into the organizing world and strengthened the community-organizing movement's political power.

Within the community organizing world, ACORN was (until its demise in early 2010) the largest and most effective group, in part because it was, in Skocpol's terms, a federated organization with local bases but with a national infrastructure and the capacity to wage campaigns simultaneously at the local, state, and national levels.Footnote ⁴⁷ Its staff worked to build strong local organizations and leaders that could influence municipal and county governments as well as major corporations (such as banks) to address the needs of the poor and their neighborhoods. Local organizing defined ACORN's core issues, but when national leaders and staff recognized problems that were energizing members in several cities, they could consider whether changes in state or federal policy would more effectively address the issue. ACORN employed a staff of researchers and lobbyists in its national offices in Brooklyn, New York, and Washington, DC, to serve the needs of local chapters. Issues such as welfare reform, redlining, predatory lending, school reform, and low wages provided ACORN with organizing “handles” at the local, state, and national levels. Their efforts in mobilizing the residents of New Orleans forced to evacuate by Hurricane Katrina benefitted from ACORN's capacity to work simultaneously to put pressure on politicians and policymakers in several cities, in at least two states, and at the national level. By 2008, ACORN was the largest community organizing group in the United States. It had chapters in about 110 cities in 40 states, and ACORN and its affiliates had over 1,000 employees and nearly 500,000 dues-paying families.Footnote ⁴⁸

ACORN emerged out of the anti-poverty activism of the 1960s. By the late 1960s, one of those groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization, had built an organization with affiliates in 60 cities across the country. But because it focused exclusively on welfare recipients, its narrow constituency base guaranteed that it would remain a marginal force in the nation's politics. George Wiley, NWRO's leader, believed that the time was ripe to build a broader multi-racial movement for economic justice, with a membership base of low-income people, including the working poor, but with support from middle-class allies. A one-time NWRO organizer, Wade Rathke, started ACORN in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1970, organizing welfare recipients and low-income working families around issues that could unite them, among them free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights, hospital emergency room care, and unemployment. ACORN initially stood for Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN soon expanded in Arkansas and started building chapters in other cities throughout the South and later throughout the country. By 1975, it was organizing in eight cities in three states. Five years later, ACORN had chapters in 35 cities in 24 states. By 2000, it had 46 affiliates in 29 states. After 2000, ACORN rapidly accelerated its expansion effort, growing to 92 cities in 35 states by 2005, then to 103 cities in 40 states three years later. As a result of its expansion outside Arkansas, the group kept its name but soon revised the acronym to stand for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Most people, however, simply knew the group as ACORN.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Beginnings of an Anti-ACORN News Frame

To understand how conservative groups used the media to manufacture a controversy about ACORN, it is useful to examine the chain of influence that involves several sectors: business-sponsored groups that opposed ACORN's organizing work on wages, lending and other issues; Republican Party officials and candidates; conservative websites and blogs, publications, columnists, and TV and radio talk shows; and mainstream media organizations.

During its more than three decades of community organizing, ACORN made enemies among some politicians, business groups, and conservatives. Many politicians, especially Republicans, opposed ACORN's efforts to register and mobilize low-income minority voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. In the past few years, ACORN was among the most effective groups at registering low-income voters, and they were able to focus their efforts in key states.Footnote ⁵⁰ The banking industry generally opposed ACORN's campaigns against redlining and predatory lending and its support for legislation, like the Community Reinvestment Act, to strengthen government regulation of the industry. Firms involved in predatory lending, pay-day lending, and credit card abuses created a front group, the Consumer Rights League (CRL), to attack ACORN, not only on lending issues but also on ACORN's other activities, including its voter registration work. Similarly, the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage, and tobacco industries, who opposed ACORN's work to raise wages through campaigns to adopt local “living wage” laws and to increase minimum wages at the state and federal levels, created a front group, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), that has issued reports and created a website to discredit ACORN and thwart ACORN-led efforts. Both CRL and EPI are “Astroturf” lobbying organizations, a term coined by the late US Sen. Lloyd Bentsen to refer to organizations that claim to be grassroots-based citizen groups but are actually conceived, created, and/or funded by corporations, industry trade associations, political interests, or public relations firms.

For years prior to 2008, these organizations had limited success in generating anti-ACORN stories. The stories usually appeared in the conservative echo chamber, but only occasionally in the mainstream media (refer to Figure 1). During the 2008 political season, however, the issues and frames promoted by ACORN's opponents received much more attention. A measure of their success was that the names of the business-backed groups that started the anti-ACORN crusade—the Consumers Rights League and the Employment Policies Institute—appeared only once each in the 647 stories analyzed. Their fingerprints were missing, but their influence was evident in news frames about ACORN.

Figure 1

ACORN stories from 15 news organizations by month, 2007–2008

The persistent attacks on ACORN gained more visibility in 2008, when a perfect storm of conditions emerged. These included the earlier rise of cable television and the 24/7 news cycle, the proliferation of conservative TV and radio talk shows, the creation of the Internet and blogosphere, the domination of the Republican Party by its conservative wing,Footnote ⁵¹ the emergence of the Tea Party movement, and a presidential election in which an African American—a former community organizer with tangential ties to ACORN—became a leading candidate and ultimately the Democratic nominee.

In a well-known essay in Harper's magazine in 1964, historian Richard Hofstader identified what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. He examined the tendency for conservative movements throughout American history to craft conspiracy theories.Footnote ⁵² This tendency persists today, exemplified by the Tea Party movement and the upsurge of conservative bloggers, websites, and especially broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, whom Jamieson and Cappella consider the dean of what they call the “conservative media establishment.”Footnote ⁵³ In recent years, however, Glenn Beck has catapulted to the top of that establishment and, if anything, supplanted Limbaugh as the dominant modern-day practitioner of the “paranoid style” of politics.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Right's framing of ACORN is part of a larger ultra-conservative narrative that pegs ACORN as a tool in a larger Obama socialist/Marxist strategy. The conservative narrative identifies an otherwise relatively obscure 1966 article in The Nation by sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven as the founding document of the alleged radical leftist conspiracy.Footnote ⁵⁵ Tagged the “Cloward-Piven strategy” by the Right, the article called for the poor to demand an expansion of the social safety net. A politicized poor would create a political crisis, urging political leaders to act in response to group demands, like in the New Deal of the 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the estimation of ultra-conservatives, though, the Cloward-Piven article represents a leftist plan for destroying the government and imposing “Obama's socialist agenda.” For example, Glenn Beck first mentioned the so-called “Cloward-Piven Strategy” in March 2009, shortly after he began his nightly Fox News show, and mentioned it at least 32 times in the next twelve months, connecting it in his trademark hand-drawn marker board diagrams to ACORN, Che Guevara, Bill Ayers, the SEIU, the Apollo Alliance, the Tides Foundation, George Soros, Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett, and Obama—all villains in the alleged conspiracy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Opinion entrepreneur WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah linked every major Obama policy to the “Cloward-Piven strategy” in a keynote address to the founding Tea Party convention in February 2010. “With Obama, everything is a crisis. Carbon dioxide levels. The banking industry. The automobile industry. The health care system. And especially the economy. He's going to fix all of them, he promises. How? By turning make-believe crises into real crises,” Farah said.Footnote ⁵⁷

As Jamieson and Cappella document, on its own the conservative echo chamber speaks to a relatively narrow base of very conservative followers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Its influence depends on injecting its idea into the mainstream media and thus helping to shape broader public opinion, especially the views of what pollsters and political scientists consider “moderate” or “swing” voters. Even if the ultra-conservative echo chamber doesn't change their minds about particular issues or change their worldview, their ability to plant seeds of doubt via mainstream media helps to undermine the credibility of liberal ideas, organizations, and institutions.

The Wall Street Journal is a mainstream media institution that serves as transmission belt for the ideas of conservative activists. Although its regular news stories are moderate in tone, the Journal's opinion and editorial pages are staunchly conservative, and were one of ACORN's most persistent critics. As the Journal noted in an October 14, 2008 editorial, “We've written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The Journal's language reveals much about efforts to shroud ACORN with a disingenuous controversy. First, “make an issue” about ACORN. Facts were not presented, only allegations that there was something troublesome or controversial going on with ACORN. Second, repeat the notion that ACORN has “ties” to Obama. (The ultimate goal was to damage the Obama campaign and, later, the Obama presidency). Finally, stigmatize ACORN with negative language—such as “shady outfit”—and keep suggesting “it's about time someone exposed” ACORN, despite the fact that after years of politically motivated state and federal charges and investigations there was no serious criminal wrongdoing by ACORN to expose.

Starting in 2004, Karl Rove (President George W. Bush's top political advisor) personally orchestrated an attack on ACORN. He insisted that a number of U.S. attorneys prosecute ACORN for voter fraud, even if there was no evidence for it. When one of them, David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, investigated the situation and discovered ACORN had not engaged in any fraud, he refused to prosecute the group. Rove quickly got Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to fire him, part of a pattern that ultimately led to the resignation of Gonzales in 2007. The resulting scandal eventually forced Gonzales to resign, but he had already helped put the anti-ACORN campaign in motion.Footnote ⁶⁰

In 2006, during Bush's second term, conservatives and Republicans renewed their efforts against ACORN. Although there was growing dissatisfaction in public opinion polls with Bush and the Republican Party, if they could make their political opponents look worse by linking them to a controversial, even “radical,” group, they still might win in 2008.

The seeds of conservative efforts against ACORN were planted first on the Web, an example of the process of opinion entrepreneurship. Hundreds of blog sites echoed the same unsubstantiated allegations and charges about ACORN. The sites, some well known, others not, included Townhall, NewsBusters, WorldNetDaily, The Foundry, Chicagoans Against Obama, Let Liberty Ring, Sharp Right Turn, LaRouchePAC, Wake Up America, Red Stater, Audacity of Truth, Audacity of Hypocrisy, Christian Coalition of America, Christian Action League, SarahPalin4VP, Judicial Watch, and Accuracy in Media.

Many of the initial allegations originated with industry-funded campaigns, or conservative commentators and operatives—opinion entrepreneurs. What follows is a review of some of the Internet-based campaigns against ACORN that began prior to it becoming a major presidential campaign issue in 2008.

One of the earliest Web efforts against ACORN was a website called rottenacorn.com, sponsored by the Employment Policies Institute. It represented a common business-funded attack on ACORN, with familiar charges on its Web site:

Like the approach noted earlier, the modus operandi was to taint ACORN with charges of systemic corruption (“questionable activities,” “investigated for election fraud”), yet the site and its 30-page report from July 2006, titled “Rotten ACORN: America's Bad Seed,” did not produce any evidence of convictions against ACORN.Footnote ⁶²

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI) is actually a front group created by Washington, D.C.-based Berman & Co., which specializes in Astroturf lobbying. According to the reporting of SourceWatch.org, “EPI's mission is to keep the minimum wage low so Berman's clients can continue to pay their workers as little as possible.”Footnote ⁶³ Thus, part of EPI's job was to churn an ever-present information campaign against ACORN for its clients in the chain restaurant and bar industry.

Berman & Co. continued its campaign against ACORN through LaborPains.org, a web site sponsored by two other Astroturf lobbying organizations—the Center for Union Facts, and the Employee Freedom Action Committee. Both groups are headquartered at the same Washington, D.C. address of Berman & Co., and oppose reforms that would make it easier for labor unions to organize. A March 19, 2007 posting titled “Prosecutors Eye Union-Backed ACORN (Again)” on LaborPains.org took a familiar swipe at ACORN:

Again, a conservative web site recycled allegations (“tied to voter fraud” and “shenanigans”). Yet the posting misinterpreted the New York Times story it referenced. In fact, the Times story was about the emerging scandal about the firing of a U.S. Attorney. David Iglesias, the federal prosecutor in New Mexico who did not find merit in charges of voter fraud against ACORN despite the urgings of his state's Republican Party officials, was one of the federal attorneys fired. “I thought I was insulated from politics,” Iglesias said. “But now I find out that main Justice was up to its eyeballs in partisan political maneuvering.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Still, the effect of the LaborPains posting was to keep repeating misinformation about ACORN to make a controversy seem legitimate.

Later in 2007, Investor's Business Daily, a conservative business newspaper, rehashed more accusations and misrepresentations. “ACORN has been accused of voter fraud in 13 states since 2004 and was convicted of falsifying signatures in a voter registration drive last July, drawing a fine of $25,000 in Washington state,” the newspaper wrote in an editorial that was often repeated around the conservative blogosphere as evidence of evil at ACORN.Footnote ⁶⁶

But accusations of voter fraud do not amount to wrongdoing (no matter how often they are repeated). As the Seattle Times more truthfully reported, it was rogue ACORN employees who falsified voter registrations, not an ACORN conspiracy. The defendants “concocted the scheme as an easy way to get paid, not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections, King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said,” the newspaper stated. ACORN agreed to pay $25,000 to King County for investigative costs.Footnote ⁶⁷

Conservative publicist and Republican strategist David Horowitz added to the efforts to stigmatize ACORN with his “DiscoverTheNetworks.org: A Guide to the Political Left” web site that he launched in early 2005. The profile for ACORN included this description:

• • “Largest radical group in America, with more than 400,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 1,200 chapters in 110 U.S. cities”

• • “Was implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during recent election cycles”Footnote ⁶⁸

Again, the crimes and misdemeanors of a “radical” community organization are in fact just “implicated.” The evidence offered by DiscoverTheNetworks.org comes from the same swirl of allegations previously published in conservative and Republican Internet sites, plus conservative periodicals and news organizations like Fox News, the National Review, the American Spectator, and the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is the modus operandi of a media “echo chamber.”

Included in the list of resources on DiscoverTheNetworks.org were anti-ACORN pieces by Michele Malkin, the self-described “blogger, conservative syndicated columnist, author, and Fox News Channel contributor.” In her July 26, 2007 post, Malkin also misrepresented the Washington state case:

“At the center” and “tied to” are the same stigmatizing language used in the other conservative blog posts, adding to the resonating theme. In fact, this single Malkin post was quoted and hypertext linked to 58 other web sites.Footnote ⁷⁰ Malkin's post also revealed the second step of the conservative strategy: link the sullied name of ACORN to the leading Democratic candidate. In mid-2007, the Democrat leading in the polls in Iowa (the first state in the nominating process) was featured in the title of Malkin's post: “John Edwards & ACORN, perfect together.”Footnote ⁷¹

By 2008, the conservatives and Republicans, as they attempted to bring the campaign against ACORN to a much wider audience, had laid a solid trail for the mainstream news media to follow. One important example of the intentions of conservatives/Republicans was the revision of John Fund's book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Fund, an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and ghostwriter of Rush Limbaugh's 1993 book The Way Things Ought to Be, made absolutely no mention of ACORN in his first edition of the book in 2004.Footnote ⁷² But, by the release of the revised edition of Stealing Elections in July 2008,Footnote ⁷³ the target had changed. Fund included two new chapters demonizing ACORN, including one whose title reflected Malkin's approach a year earlier and foreshadowed the Republican's new campaign strategy: “Barack Obama and ACORN: Perfect Together.”

Along with Fund, Stanley Kurtz was the conservative echo chamber's most persistent figure in circulating the charges against ACORN. Kurtz, who is affiliated with the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, frequently wrote about ACORN for conservative publications such as National Review, Footnote ⁷⁴ as well as conservative daily newspapers such as the New York Post Footnote ⁷⁵ and Wall Street Journal. Footnote ⁷⁶ He also frequently appeared on conservative TV and radio shows, and was cited as an expert on ACORN by other conservative columnists and by talk show hosts. His articles were frequently reprinted and cited by websites and blogs and other parts of the conservative echo chamber. (During the campaign, McCain's attacks on ACORN were drawn substantially from Kurtz's writings).

By October 2008, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, already deeply immersed in the accusations of the conservative echo chamber, came to this conclusion on his national radio program:

Limbaugh's crescendo fit nicely into the conservative media's angle on ACORN, repeated so many times, hyped with so many allegations, and ramped up with great ferocity in October 2008 (refer to Figure 1 and Table 1) in an attempt to put ACORN on the national public agenda in the final month of the presidential election.

Putting ACORN on the Nation's Public Agenda

The ACORN case is an excellent example of the agenda-setting effect. Opinion entrepreneurs set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated its anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the McCain campaign picked it up, and the mainstream media reported its allegations without investigating their truth or falsity.

The GOP strategy was on display at the Republican convention in St. Paul in September 2008. There, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New York Governor George Pataki, and newly minted vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin pointedly attacked Obama's experience as a community organizer.Footnote ⁷⁸

On October 15, 2008, Republican candidate Senator John McCain said in a televised presidential debate with candidate Barack Obama at Hofstra University that ACORN “is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Before October 2008, most news coverage about ACORN was generally limited to the metropolitan areas where the community organization conducted its activities. Although there were no national surveys documenting the public's familiarity with ACORN prior to October 2008, it is likely that most Americans didn't know much about ACORN before then. But, particularly with unprecedented numbers of news stories mentioning ACORN in the month before the presidential election, ACORN was vaulted onto the entire nation's public agenda.

There were 647 stories mentioning ACORN over 2007–08 in the 15 news organizations we analyzed. For most of the period, news coverage was relatively steady, but there was a spike of 391 stories in October 2008, that one month accounting for 60 percent of the ACORN stories over the 24-month period;Footnote ⁸⁰ (refer to Figure 1).

By October 2008, ACORN was clearly on the public's agenda as well. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in a survey conducted during October 17–20, asked a national sample of about 1,000 voters, “How much if anything have you heard about … Barack Obama's connection to the community organizing group ACORN, which has been accused of voter registration fraud?” Nearly half of the country (48 percent) heard “a lot,” 34 percent heard “a little,” and only 18 percent of respondents had heard nothing at all. It is a testament to the high level of attention given to ACORN at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the conservative media echo chamber that the same survey found that “a solid majority of Republicans (60 percent) have heard a lot about ACORN, compared with fewer than half of Democrats (46 percent) and independents (43 percent).”Footnote ⁸¹

Of course, agenda-setting theory only explains why the public was thinking about a topic—in this case, ACORN. A second step in analysis looks at how the news media framed the story; that is, how in its stories the news media suggested what readers, viewers, and listeners should think about ACORN.Footnote ⁸²

Framing ACORN for Voter Fraud

The data in Table 1 represent the percentage of the stories that had certain narrative frames. For example, of the 55 stories about ACORN in the Washington Post over 2007–2008, 47.3 percent had a “voter fraud” frame, 16.4 percent used an “assist voter registration” frame, and 14.5 percent carried an “eliminate predatory lending” frame.

As Table 1 indicates, voter fraud was the dominant story frame in news about ACORN for 2007–08, with 55 percent of the total 647 stories analyzed using it. In fact, given the comparatively low percentages for alternate frames about ACORN (the two next most frequent frames appeared in only 15.3 percent and 11.4 percent of the stories), allegations of voter fraud may have been the only story frame about ACORN that many news consumers experienced. Coverage of the voter fraud frame was even more intense in the broadcast and cable media, with 68.7 percent of those stories using the frame. Other than “assisting voter registration” (in 16.7 percent of broadcast stories)—a frame that got tainted by the much more common “voter fraud” frame—uses of any other frames were extremely low among all broadcast news media. Thus, among broadcast media, ACORN was plainly linked to voter fraud, with no major competing frames. This corresponds with what Donald Kinder identifies as the way in which news frames are presented “in everyday life.” Although frames may be operationalized as a condition and easily isolated in an experiment, in real life they are “characterized by repeated exposure through multiple venues over long periods of time—a whole curriculum of exposure.”Footnote ⁸³ In the case of ACORN, the curriculum of exposure across 15 different news media venues still generated a consistently dominant frame.

The negative broadcast news coverage about ACORN—negative in the sense that competing claims about fraud were rarely included, as noted in Table 2 below—was compounded by the fact that TV news was the dominant news medium for Americans during the election season. The Pew Center's national survey in October 17–20, 2008 found that 73 percent of respondents said they got most of their news about the presidential campaign from TV, more than double the percentage who got their news from other media.Footnote ⁸⁴

Table 2

How the news responded to “voter fraud” claims

Across all news media, October 2008—the month prior to election day—was the most intense month for stories with the voter fraud frame, with more than three-quarters (76 percent) of all stories about ACORN in that month using the frame. The news media frames of that important month carried extra weight, given their proximity to the election. Thus, although the conservatives slowly built their assertions against ACORN over many years (we have documented the beginnings of opinion entrepreneurs as far back as 2006), when the full force of the Republican anti-ACORN campaign hit in October 2008, it came as a classic “October Surprise”—an element added in the final days of the campaign with little time for citizens to gain an accurate understanding of the issue.

Fact-Checking Claims of “Voter Fraud”

In general, the news media reported but failed to thoroughly fact-check claims of “voter fraud.” In total, in more than two-fifths (44.2 percent) of the 355 stories reporting allegations of voter fraud, the media failed to include at least one of five countervailing arguments listed in Table 2, even though these countervailing arguments were readily available at the time. Moreover, when stories did include fact-check statements in stories that alleged voter fraud, rarely did they include the full context of multiple fact-check statements:

• • that ACORN was reporting registration irregularities to authorities, as required to do by law;

• • that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems;

• • that actual voter fraud is very rare;

• • that Republicans were trying to discredit Obama with an ACORN “scandal”;

• • and that allegations of voter fraud in 2007 and 2008 related to the earlier case of the firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to cooperate with Republican efforts to politicize voter fraud accusations.

Just 31 percent of “voter fraud” frame stories included one of the five fact-check statements; only 13.5 percent of the stories carried two of the fact-check statements; 9 percent contained three; 2 percent had four, and a mere 0.3 percent—exactly one story in the 355 that used the voter fraud frame (an October 14, 2008 report from NPR)—provided full context with all five fact-check statements;Footnote ¹⁰¹ refer to Figure 2.) The incomplete fact checking resulted in the voter fraud frame being sustained for much longer than it merited.

Figure 2

How the news responded to “voter fraud” claims

Other Frames in ACORN Stories

The voter fraud narrative frame dominated the two years of coverage (and particularly October 2008). But there were two other frames that emerged from the conservative echo chamber during the campaign that also got some traction in the mainstream news media.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As the U.S. and world economy began to worsen even further in 2008 due, in part to risky loans made by financial institutions, opinion entrepreneurs and the conservative echo chamber alleged that a) ACORN was the source of the entire mortgage scandal—and thus the world financial crisis—and, b) that ACORN was being rewarded for its election work by getting millions in government bail-out funds.

These frames tread on rather shaky ground, since in reality it was ACORN that sounded the alarm about predatory lending practices that led to mortgage meltdown and financial crisis. As early as 1999, ACORN members visited Citigroup offices in 20 cities to protest “discriminatory and predatory lending” and to demand a meeting with the corporation's top officials.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Indeed, in the time before the presidential campaign the Wall Street Journal covered ACORN's work in this area accurately, and led (20 percent of its ACORN stories) all but the local newspapers in frames about ACORN's work to stop exploitative lending practices.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By September 2008, though, the Wall Street Journal's editorials and columns were becoming the leading progenitor of untruthful frames blaming the economic crisis on ACORN and suggesting Democrats are funneling government money directly to ACORN: “Acorn has promoted laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, which laid the foundation for the house of cards built out of subprime loans. Thus, we'd be funneling more cash to the groups that helped create the lending mess in the first place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Contrary to the Journal's interpretation, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was enacted in 1977 to stop discriminatory redlining in bank loans. The CRA regulates loans by depository institutions, like commercial and savings banks. Thanks to deregulation, private, nonbank mortgage companies sprang up, grabbed the majority of the mortgage business away from the regulated deposit institutions. Then, with more deregulation, Wall Street investment firms purchased the subprime mortgages from the lenders, bundled them into “mortgage-backed securities” and sold them to wealthy investors worldwide, typically without scrutiny.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Still, there was some persistence to sell this frame in the echo chamber. On Fox's October 5 “Obama and Friends: The History of Radicalism” program, Stanley Kurtz shifted from ACORN's support of the CRA to community-oriented bullying as the method for ACORN's destruction of the economy. “Sometimes ACORN will actually send people to a bank official's home,” Kurtz said. “They will scare him and they will scare his kids, again, all in an effort to get the banks to make these bad loans.” Fox and the Wall Street Journal led on these frames, and some of the other mainstream media followed. Lisa Sylvester reported for Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN on September 29, 2008 reported that “critics say this community activist group shares the blame” on the financial meltdown with Wall Street.

Continuing the Controversy

The attacks on ACORN in the conservative echo chamber persisted into 2009 and 2010. These included false statements—made by Republican officials, repeated by the conservative echo chamber, and reported by the mainstream media—that the economic stimulus plan sponsored by Obama and the Democrats had billions of dollars set aside specifically targeted for ACORN, ACORN's involvement with the 2010 US Census count, and other manufactured controversies. For example, on January 23, 2009, House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner issued a press release repeating these claims: “ACORN Could Get Billions from Democrats' Trillion Dollar Spending Plan: ‘Job Creation’ Bill Offers Taxpayer-Funded Bonanza for Organization Reportedly Under Federal Investigation.” Several mainstream news organizations repeated this frame, despite its multiple inaccuracies.Footnote ¹¹⁰ FactCheck.org corrected the record by explaining in a February 6, 2009 post that “the bill does include funds for which ACORN would be eligible to compete—against hundreds of other groups. But most is for a housing rehabilitation program ACORN says it never applied for in the past and won't in the future.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Still, the allegations persisted and made a dent in the mainstream news media, including a page-one Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch story on February 18, 2009 story that gave readers no information to question the allegations rehashed in this quote from a Boehner spokesperson: “Letting groups like ACORN, which is accused of voter fraud, compete for these federal dollars is an insult to taxpayers who are already paying for ACORN's role in the housing meltdown.”Footnote ¹¹² Later in 2009, ACORN was again stigmatized in a bogus controversy over its role in the 2010 Census. Republican senators upheld the nomination of the Director of Census, again repeating complaints that a group “accused of voter fraud” should not take part in the national count.Footnote ¹¹³

As the attacks on ACORN mounted, ACORN's ongoing organizing successes barely registered in the media. For example, on November 17, 2009, the New York Times published a long front page story, “Philadelphia Gives Homeowners a Way to Stay Put,” about an innovative municipal program to help families facing foreclosure stay in their houses.Footnote ¹¹⁴ ACORN wasn't mentioned in the report, even though ACORN had the original idea for the program, mobilized residents on its behalf, and persuaded local elected officials to implement it. Christopher Hall, the homeowner featured in the article, was recruited by an ACORN canvasser.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Likewise, the Los Angeles Times published a 1,226-word article on December 22, 2009 about a plan to revitalize a low-income neighborhood, in part by relocating a polluting metal-finishing factory and replacing it with an affordable housing development. This effort was initiated and carried out by ACORN, but the article, “A Good Move for South L.A. Neighborhood,” didn't mention the organization until the twenty-second paragraph.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Meanwhile, despite the two reports that exonerated ACORN of any illegal activity, other news media used the end of the year to firmly lodge the symbol of ACORN-as-scandal in the nation's collective memory. Time magazine put ACORN at ninth in its Top 10 scandals of 2009, while U.S. News & World Report rated ACORN fourth in its Top 10 Political Scandals of 2009.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Fox News, with no sense of irony, listed the undercover ACORN videotapes as second on its “Nine Big Stories the Mainstream Media Missed in 2009” list.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The continued attacks against ACORN in the conservative media were led in the ongoing crusade by Glenn Beck, a radio and former CNN personality who joined Fox News in early 2009. Beck's emotional appeals mobilized many viewers and radio listeners, including encouraging them to participate in the Tea Party protests at Congressional town meetings during the summer of 2009. An enthusiastic practitioner of the “paranoid style” of politics, one of Beck's common persuasive devices was a hand-written chart showing the alleged left-wing conspiracy that includes ACORN, SEIU (Service Employees International Union) and its president Andy Stern, philanthropist George Soros, and Van Jones, the one-time Obama administration environmental policy advisor who was forced to resign after the conservative echo chamber, led by Beck, attacked him for being a radical with past communist and black nationalist ties. Beck and other conservatives often include Obama as part of the web of people and organizations that constitute a radical conspiracy.Footnote ¹¹⁹ At the conservative Tea Party movement's founding convention in Nashville in February 2010, keynote speaker Joseph Farah, publisher of the website WorldNetDaily, highlighted ACORN's connection to the web of radical activists.Footnote ¹²⁰

On October 14, 2009, reporter Ben Smith of the Politico.com website used a LexisNexis search to examine the topics Beck had discussed since his program began on Fox News in January 2009. He found that Beck had mentioned ACORN 1,224 times, but mentioned the Taliban only 38 times, Al Qaeda only 50 times, and Iraq only 95 times. Among individuals, Van Jones was mentioned 267 times, while a number of international terrorists and enemies of the state were hardly mentioned.Footnote ¹²¹

For Beck and others, the hidden videos taken at ACORN offices by two young conservative activists generated the most media attention for their anti-ACORN campaign. James O'Keefe, who had previously developed hidden camera stories for a conservative magazine he founded at Rutgers University, and Hannah Giles, an undergraduate who previously interned with the conservative National Journalism Center in Washington, DC, visited at least ten ACORN offices, posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend. The hidden videos were gradually released beginning in September 2009 on biggovernment.com, a web site operated by Los Angeles-based opinion entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart worked for Matt Drudge, the most-read conservative blogger, before he started his own trio of conservative web sites, which have grown in traffic through generous links from drudgereport.com, where he still contributes.Footnote ¹²²

In some offices, ACORN employees asked O'Keefe and Giles to leave; at least two offices called the police. In at least one office, a staffer, concerned that the couple was engaged in illegal child sex trafficking, used a cell phone to record video of them. But, from a video camera the pair had concealed, we also know several ACORN employees, in offices in Washington, DC; Baltimore; Brooklyn; and San Bernardino and San Diego, California took the bait and appeared willing to give the couple advice on how to get set up a business and do taxes for what sounded like an illegal enterprise. In no ACORN office did employees file any paperwork on the duo's behalf. (Because the complete original video footage has never been fully disclosed, the context and full truth of what happened is not clear.)

ACORN responded by firing the employees involved and initiating an internal review by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. The report, released December 7, 2009, concluded that although ACORN had grown so large it “failed to commit the organization to the basic, appropriate standards of governance and accountability,” leaving itself “vulnerable to public embarrassment,” there was “no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.” Harshbarger also noted that the O'Keefe/Giles videos were “in some cases substantially” edited, including the use of over-dubbing and voiceovers such that it was “difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding.”Footnote ¹²³ Only three of the 15 news organizations analyzed in this study—the Washington Post (in an AP wire story), CNN (in a 20-second mention), and Fox News (in which Glenn Beck disparaged and ridiculed the report for more than 10 minutes)—noted the release of the Harshbarger report.Footnote ¹²⁴

Despite the fact that ACORN had not been charged with any violations related to the videos, the news media stories about the videos had huge repercussions. Even many Democrats in Congress voted to condemn ACORN and demand that the federal government pull its financial support. Some foundations also pulled the plug. The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' antipoverty charity, praised ACORN for its work “preventing home foreclosures, creating job opportunities, raising wages, addressing crime, and improving education.” But under pressure from conservatives, it, too, cut off ACORN's money. The Ford Foundation and Mott Foundation likewise withdrew their funding from ACORN. The National Journal published an article, “PR for Pariahs,” about ACORN's problems with what it called its “communications nightmare.”Footnote ¹²⁵

On December 22, 2009, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report on ACORN, finding no “instances of individuals who were improperly registered by ACORN attempting to vote at the polls” and “no instances in which ACORN violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years.” Moreover, the report found that the two conservative activists who secretly videotaped conversations with ACORN workers and distributed those recordings on the Web without their consent violated laws in Maryland and California.Footnote ¹²⁶

Yet, the CRS report, a veritable treasure trove for fact-checking the allegations of the entire ACORN controversy, found little traction in the news media. The New York Times reported the story in a short article, and USA Today noted it in a seven-sentence news brief.Footnote ¹²⁷ Fox News mentioned the report, but only to set up the replay of a months-old interview between Bill O'Reilly and ACORN officials. CNN took just a few seconds to mention the report, again playing a clip of the infamous undercover video.Footnote ¹²⁸ None of the other 15 news organizations in this study mentioned the CRS report by the end of 2009.

ACORN was further vindicated in mid-December 2009 when federal District Court Judge Nina Gershon ruled that Congress had improperly singled out ACORN for defunding. She issued an injunction halting implementation of the congressional ban on federal funding. The 406-word story appeared on page 15 of the New York Times. Footnote ¹²⁹

Then on January 26, 2010, O'Keefe was one of four men arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office phones. His arrest made headlines in most major print and broadcast media. His conservative allies rallied to support him.

On March 1, 2010, the Brooklyn (New York) District Attorney's office announced that after a five-month investigation it had found no criminal wrongdoing by the three ACORN employees in the Brooklyn office who were captured on the video made by O'Keefe and Giles, which generated much of the controversy and public outrage, and which helped “frame” ACORN in the public's mind. The Brooklyn video appeared to catch ACORN workers advising the couple to bolster their housing application by lying about Giles' “profession” and laundering her earnings. Many print and broadcast news outlets used an Associated Press story to report the “not guilty” finding, but none of the nation's major newspapers gave the story much prominence. The AP story described Giles and O'Keefe as having “posed as a prostitute and her boyfriend,” but both the UPI and Reuters stories used the phrase “posing as a prostitute and a pimp.”

But in an interview with the Washington Independent, Hannah Giles admitted that the images of O'Keefe in an outlandish pimp outfit were edited in later.Footnote ¹³⁰ In fact, three months earlier, the Harshbarger report noted that “although Mr. O'Keefe appeared in all videos dressed as a pimp, in fact, when he appeared at each and every office, he was dressed like a college student—in slacks and a button down shirt.”

Indeed, the “pimp and prostitute” image became a key part of the anti-ACORN iconography. This was compounded by O'Keefe's frequent public appearances dressed in a pimp costume. In interviews, he consistently remarked that he was wearing his pimp outfit when meeting with ACORN staff.Footnote ¹³¹ In reporting the story of O'Keefe's arrest in New Orleans, the New York Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and other papers repeated that O'Keefe was dressed as a pimp when taping ACORN employees. In fact, the Times had consistently referred to O'Keefe as a “pimp.” When asked by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) to issue a correction, the New York Times said it had no reason to do so.Footnote ¹³²

Even Jon Stewart (who had joined in the anti-ACORN chorus after the O'Keefe videos were initially broadcast) devoted a segment on his January 27, 2010 “Daily Show” to making fun of O'Keefe's credibility and praising ACORN for doing “God's work.”

The Harshbarger report, the CRS report, Brooklyn DA's announcement, the O'Keefe arrest, the federal court ruling in ACORN's favor, and even Jon Stewart's about-face should, in combination, have exonerated ACORN and cleared its name, or at least led its former liberal political and foundation supporters to reconsider their abandonment of ACORN. But by the time these events took place, it was too late. The damage to ACORN had already been done. When its federal funding was cut, ACORN had to end its counseling work helping low-income people with tax preparation and obtaining the Earned Income Tax Credit. But when its major funders withdrew their support, ACORN had to lay off its much larger staff of organizers in cities around the country, closing its offices, and curtailing its work fighting foreclosures and investigating wage and hour exploitation of workers. In March 2010, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis announced that ACORN was closing down the next month.Footnote ¹³³