Have the Media 'Falsely Framed' ACORN?

ACORN is now well-known across America, but what most Americans know about it is wrong. Most mainstream journalism organizations have been negligent by repeating, rather than fact-checking, spurious allegations.

By Christopher R. Martin and Peter Dreier
Editor and Publisher

(November 25, 2009) -- (Commentary) A pimp and a prostitute walk into an office. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it wasn’t for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Until recently, ACORN, the largest community organizing group in the country, was well known primarily among liberal activists and the low-income people it has organized since it began in Little Rock in 1970. By mobilizing poor people and their middle class allies, it has won major victories — at the local, state and national levels — to improve the living and working conditions of everyday people.

It has successfully fought banks that redline and engage in predatory lending, employers that pay poverty wages, and developers that gentrify low-income neighborhoods and refuse to provide affordable housing. In the past few years, it has registered over a million Americans to vote. ACORN now has about 400,000 low-income members in 70 cities and a $25 million budget, raised by a combination of dues, local fundraising events, and foundation grants.

ACORN is now well known across America, but what most Americans know about it is wrong.

Leading up to the 2008 presidential campaign, ACORN was a target of allegations of voter fraud from the Republican Party and conservative news sources. Although the predicted voter fraud never materialized, the stories planted during the election season yielded a bountiful crop of misinformation. Now, in November 2009, a national survey revealed shocking public misperceptions about ACORN: more than half of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of ACORN, and 52% of Republicans, 18% of independents, and 9% of Democrats think ACORN stole the election for Obama.

(More here.)

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