Posted on 10/09/2009 1:34:28 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
"Using the controversy over ACORN as a case study, this report illustrates the way the media help set the agenda for public debate, and frame the way that debate is shaped. It describes how 'opinion entrepreneurs' (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals) set the story in motion as early as 2006, how the "conservative echo chamber" orchestrated its anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, how the McCain-Palin campaign picked it up, and how the mainstream media reported these allegations without investigating their truth or falsity. As a result, the relatively little-known community organization became the subject of a major news story in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, to the point where 82 percent of the respondents in an October 2008 national survey reported they had heard about ACORN."
Click here to view the report (PDF).
61 page PDF, visually scanning it, no mention of Rathke, let alone embezzlement; none of the ex-board whistle-blowers. Use of term “right-wing echo chamber” repeatedly, pretty much establishes its academic tone. They would have been wise to have withdrawn the paper , seems to have gone to press before Giles/ O’Keefe/ Breitbart. Mainly lawyers the distinction between “voter registration” and “voting” fraud, but betrays conceptual confusion of authors in calling it “voter fraud. “ Mainly takes MSM to task for not “fact-checking” distinction, especially castigating CNN (Dobbs), WSJ. Of course Fox as part of the “echo chamber, “ but actually credits Britt Hume as having noted charges didn’t stick to Obama because he couldn’t be sullied by associations (parenthetically, Ayers— again ignoring Cashill/ Anderson) because of the “ attractive, reasonable” way he presented himself. Touts newpapers in Minneapolis, Cleveland and Pittsburgh ( the well-known liberal rags S-T, P-D, P-G), where ACORN well known for its work, for not taking the right-wing bait, publishing fewer stories about voter fraud despite Republican pressure to do so. Certainly, post Giles et al, a mark of distinction for those papers with regard to their complicity.
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