On October 17, ACORN responded to attacks by Senator John McCain by issuing a report, "ACORN and John McCain: The Real Story of the Financial Crisis 1999-2008". The gist of the report is quite simple: ACORN has been fighting predatory lending practices for 10 years, and John McCain has not. Hence, the idea that ACORN is responsible for such practices, and the negative conseequences they've had for our financial system is ludicrous. This is not a hard claim for journalists to double-check for themselves, particularly since the difference is so stark, and I do so myself on the flip, along with reporting on ACORN's report itself.
But before getting to that, I want to say a word about the failure of the traditional media. This is an open-and-shut case. John McCain is lying about ACORN. But the media cannot say that, because of their dangerous, dysfunctional and delusional framework of "ethics" and established practices--their mythos of objectivity and fairness, if you will, which has nothing at all to do with actual objectivity and fairness. The best way to understand this failure, the best single book on the subject remains Jeremy Iggers slim 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest. This book takes a unique approach to media analysis/criticism: it examines the media through the lens of moral philosophy, pointing out how the very framework of journalism ethics is actually the central cause of much that is wrong.
Of course, Iggers doesn't imagine or pretend that this faulty ethics came out of nowhere. It had very clear historical roots, and political/economic causes. But withing the framework of journalism itself, the code of ethics has been crucial in defining certain things as protypically problematic--such as the fictionalization and.or sensasitonalization of stories that are only trivially false from a socio-political perspective--while saying nothing at all about the collective promotion of mass deceptions, such as the Iraq War. The attempt to blame ACORN for the financial meltdown--like the preceeding decades-long pufferry of "trickle-down" "free-market" voodoo economics that was the real cause--is simple a matter of "normal" journalistic practice under the ethical guidelines in place, while the stright-forward factual reporting that John McCain is a bald-faced demogogic liar is a terrible no-no, an "editorial opinion" that has to be strictly segregated onto the editorial pages. The bottom line is simple: the truth cannot be told. It can only be presented as an opinion to be "balanced" with lies.
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