MSM Is Buying Conservatives' ACORN Fairy Tale

And, as usual, the Main Stream Media is working hand-in-glove with conservatives to utterly mislead Americans regarding what is going on:

Rick Perlstein: I read what Brauchli said, and what he was paraphrased as saying, and it almost suggests to me that Matt Drudge is becoming his assignment editor. I mean, why would a newspaper like the Post be training its investigative focus on ACORN now? Whether you think well or ill of ACORN, they’re a very marginal group in the grand scheme of things—and about as tied to the White House as the PTA.

The real story is that millions of Americans don’t consider a liberal president legitimate, and they’re moving from that axiom to try to delegitimize the president in the eyes of the majority. And one of the ways they do that is, frankly, by baiting the hook for mainstream media decision-makers who are terrified at the accusation of liberal bias. It really looks like Brauchli is falling for that.

...So if Brauchli wants to do an investigation of ACORN, he should be able to justify it to the extent that they’re important in the grand scheme of things. And they’re important in the grand scheme of things now because the Republicans are yoking them to a narrative about the legitimacy of the president—that is the story, that is the event that brings ACORN to the forefront. Compare, say, the Chamber of Commerce’s ties to the Bush Administration—Bush’s head of the Consumer Products Safety Commission was a former executive with the Chamber of Commerce—to ACORN. Has an ACORN staffer ever made it anywhere near an executive position in the Obama administration? The scale of connection is infinitesimal.

...I have e-mail exchanges with a lot of conservative friends, and I ask them if they’ve ever been to an ACORN office, because I think in their mind ACORN has these palaces in cities around the country where they pull the strings of local politicians. But in actual fact, it’s just this kind of pathetic, shoestring operation. It’s effective at some things; it’s ineffective at others. But the idea of making it the focus of a great national newspaper like The Washington Post does not seem commensurate with its actual importance to the universe now—except as it exists in the imagination of a right wing that is working very hard to create a delegitimizing narrative about the president.

The story The Washington Post should be using its investigative resources to illuminate is how consistently, whenever there’s a Democratic president, the right works to create a distracting narrative to delegitimize that president in the eyes of the broader public. I think historians fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, will see that more clearly than we do now. And one of the reasons we don’t see it clearly now is that when the right throws out this bait, editors of major newspapers jump for it.

... It’s just too easy—and if you read my work, it’s been too easy for four decades—for conservatives to exploit their ability to create a sense that the media are biased in favor of liberalism in order to manipulate the media, in order to get the stories they want told told in the way they want. It’s a strategy—you can see the memos in which people lay it out. And unless that strategy is reported on, and treated as part of the story, then you are not reporting on what’s actually happening in the real world.