Study details mainstream media’s biased reporting on ACORN

Institute for Southern Studies - ACORN, a community-based advocacy group for low- and moderate-income families, has been in the news in recent weeks thanks to an undercover video in which two employees in the organization’s Baltimore office appear to offer unethical advice on home loans, tax evasion and disguising identities of underaged sex workers to two conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute. The organization has fired the workers and hired a former Massachusetts attorney general to conduct an internal review. It’s also suing the filmmakers for illegal taping under Maryland law.

The media scrutiny of the 500,000-member group continues today, with reports that a leading Senate Republican, Charles Grassley of Iowa, has called on the Internal Revenue Service to look at how ACORN has transferred charitable and government funds meant for the poor to political and profit-making arms of the group. Those transactions occurred before a change in the group’s leadership last year.

This is not the first time ACORN has found itself in the media spotlight: The organization first became a high-profile story during last year’s presidential campaign when Republican candidates and other conservatives attacked the group and tried to link it to Barack Obama, with GOP presidential candidate John McCain charging hyperbollically in an October debate that the group was “maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Now a new study documents serious problems with the way major media outlets have handled the ACORN story.

Full Story: ISS – Study details mainstream media’s biased reporting on ACORN.