The Washington Post news pages, curiously, look for explanations in other quarters. They’re less interested in the culture of ACORN than in the motivations of filmmaker James O’Keefe and his colleague Hannah Giles, who posed as pimp and prostitute in ACORN headquarters and provided the resulting videos to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. The Post’s Thursday news story (headlined “ACORN to review incidents”) helpfully identifies Giles as “the eldest daughter of a conservative Christian minister in Miami.” (Questions for the reporter: Does it make any difference that she’s the eldest rather than, say, the second eldest? On what basis do you characterize the minister as conservative, ...

The Washington Post news pages, curiously, look for explanations in other quarters. They’re less interested in the culture of ACORN than in the motivations of filmmaker James O’Keefe and his colleague Hannah Giles, who posed as pimp and prostitute in ACORN headquarters and provided the resulting videos to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. The Post’s Thursday news story (headlined “ACORN to review incidents”) helpfully identifies Giles as “the eldest daughter of a conservative Christian minister in Miami.” (Questions for the reporter: Does it make any difference that she’s the eldest rather than, say, the second eldest? On what basis do you characterize the minister as conservative, and why is that relevant? You characterize the minister as “Christian,” but aren’t all ministers in the U.S. Christian, or are you just trying to distinguish him from a cabinet minister?) The Post’s
Friday story (“The $1,300 mission to fell ACORN”) reads as if the reporters were assigned to find out what nefarious right-wing outfit financed their operation and came up empty. They did manage to include two paragraphs on the beliefs on Giles’s father, apparently on the theory that it illuminates her motivation. Then it segues to an account by ACORN sources of how the two were thrown out of an ACORN office in Philadelphia when they mentioned 13-year-olds (but not when they mentioned prostitution?). I guess the idea is to discredit Giles and by inference O’Keefe as religious fanatics whose motivations should lead readers to disregard what’s on their videos.

The Post, like almost all of “mainstream media,” waddled in late on this story. I remember one time in the 1980s when the Wall Street Journal beat the Post was beaten on a story based on public information in Montgomery County, Maryland, court files. Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Post at the time, did not whine as New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson did on the ACORN story about how the bureau was short-staffed and, gee, it’s hard to stay on top of every story. Bradlee was furious—scooped in our own backyard!—and as I recall heads fell. But that was then and this is now. “Mainstream media” is complacent about suppressing a story that is embarrassing to the Obama administra...

The Post, like almost all of “mainstream media,” waddled in late on this story. I remember one time in the 1980s when the Wall Street Journal beat the Post was beaten on a story based on public information in Montgomery County, Maryland, court files. Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Post at the time, did not whine as New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson did on the ACORN story about how the bureau was short-staffed and, gee, it’s hard to stay on top of every story. Bradlee was furious—scooped in our own backyard!—and as I recall heads fell. But that was then and this is now. “Mainstream media” is complacent about suppressing a story that is embarrassing to the Obama administration and the Democratic party, and its response after getting scooped is to waddle in with attempts to discredit it. Pathetic.