Acorns, etc.

I wrote up something at the League on the ACORN tempest. I can't help thinking two things: first, the videos imply something's wrong, but the makers are content to just imply widespread corruption without attempting to pin down the extent. With some amount of taxpayer money at stake, a low-level congressional hearing and further investigation by professional reporters is appropriate. Second, ACORN's a big organization, and yet the conservative media is interested in the story because (only because?) of ties to Obama and other Democrats. What I'm curious about is whether and to what degree ACORN's internal problems hurt the people that they're trying to help, because it's not yet clear that they do.

The new media vs. old media angle on this story-of-the-week is the main reason I'm writing about it rather than just reading. I don't want James O'Keefe to be the standard for citizen journalism. That is, he got the scoop but I'm still waiting for real journalists to tell the story.

(Also, my friend Hope told me to check out the videos well before they got to the point in the news cycle where I would have seen them otherwise. Not being a watcher of cable news or a reader of Breitbart's blogs, I normally wouldn't have caught something like this until it crossed over. It was interesting to watch the whole process.)