Nothing To Fears But Fears Himself

In the wake of the ACORN scandal, the Washington Post (Darryl Fears and Carol Leonning) did exactly what you might expect of the major media. They wrote a series of petty and unhelpful pieces questioning the motivations of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, the two young journalists that broke the story. Of all the things they wrote, perhaps none was so blatantly offensive as the suggestion that Giles and O'Keefe were motivated by racism:

Though O'Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.


"Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization," he said. "No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find."


Well, yesterday the Post decided that retaining some degree of credibility is probably wise and they ran the following correction:


This article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O'Keefe, did not specifically mention them.


I'd say some measure of credit goes to Powerline for forcing this correction — they really took the Post to task for their appalling coverage, and deservedly so.