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A Few Bad Apples

by DF 9/17/2009 - 2:41 pm   |

You've probably heard by now of the videos being promoted by Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com and Fox News that purport to show Acorn employees engaging in some rather unethical behavior.  I don't know to what extent the videos have been edited, because they have clearly been edited, but there certainly seems to be some rotten behavior on display.  The SF chronicle has reported that that these employees have already been fired, although the same article also notes that there were other cities that booted the videographers, with the Acorn office in Philly even filing a police report, something that Breitbart and Giles, one of the videographers in question, patently denied on Hannity.

But my purpose here isn't to get a real sense of the accuracy of these videos.  I've searched around a bit and my general sense of all this is that there's some truth to the videos, but that there are also some things obscured.  And it seems that the most important thing that's been obscured is that while this behavior doesn't seem limited to any particular Acorn office or city, there do appear to have been a number of spots that got left on the cutting room floor because they showed these people the door.

And that's really what I'm interested in.  Let's allow that what we see in these videos is accurate and that these Acorn employees did exactly what they appear to have done.  Does that amount to an indictment of Acorn on the whole?

If it does, it would appear to violate the conventional wisdom of "a few bad apples" that I thought we all knew and loved so well.  After all, that's what I heard back in the days of companies like Enron, WorldCom and Tyco being embroiled in major accounting scandals.  This wasn't some kind of systemic disease, we were told, but was rather the work of a few bad apples.

I heard the same thing when the photos of abuses at Abu Ghraib surfaced.  We were told that it was wrong to think that this was the manifestation of a system designed to produce these results (HA!), but rather the work of a few bad apples, acting alone.

So, in light of the old "bad apples" chestnut, how shall we view the actions of these Acorn employees?  Do we employ the bad apples rule in this case or do we extrapolate from what is seen in these videos a wholly corrupt organization?

PS - Beyond playing the game that I'm engaged in here of attempting to consistently apply the rhetoric of the right is the fact that Acorn has received a whopping $54 million in federal funding since 1994.  That's about $3.5 million per year.  To put that in perspective, MIT receives about four times that per day in research funding for defense.  Some ten billion dollars just up and vanished in Iraq.  Even if we assume that every last dollar given to Acorn was misused, is it wrong for me to expect to see a level of outrage commensurate with the level of misappropriated tax dollars?

I am struck by the relevance this gives to Genghis' comments on the most recent Tea Party thread.

by Nebton 9/17/2009 - 3:53 pm

Except there's one key difference here: We know that Breitbart is lying because there's hard evidence in the form of a police report.  We know, for a fact, that they cherry-picked the results.

What is the reason to believe that the people in the video from Larry's thread were cherry-picked, if that's the accusation?  If there's good reason to believe it, I haven't heard it.

As I stated repeatedly in that thread, Genghis' criticism is valid in general, but there's little reason to believe it applies in that specific case.  The views expressed by the people in the video were uniform with not only every other bit of coverage that I've seen on the event, but also with the non-stop coverage that I watched on C-SPAN of the event's organizational leadership.

So, while I acknowledge that's there's no way to know that they didn't cherry-pick their subjects, what reason do I have to believe that they did?  Given all of the context and supporting evidence, I see none.  If the assertion is merely that it's possible that they did cherry-pick, then that's an assertion I can't deny.  But it's hardly interesting.  What's more interesting is that the content in the video is entirely consistent with all of the coverage that I've seen, which lends itself to the more interesting possibility that the subjects were, in fact, representative of the crowd there.

In fact, all one has to do to come up with a much more plausible explanation is to entertain the possibility that they actually were representative of the crowd.  You can't deny that this is possible any more than I can deny that they were cherry-picked.  If we allow ourselves to see this as possible, all of a sudden we have the potential for a much more interesting observation - that of the effectiveness of the current brand of propaganda - versus the rather superficial observation that people form groups and sometimes indulge in laughing with their fellow in-groupers at the expense of the out-groupers or grossly over-generalized assertions that liberals have a desire to see all Republicans as dumb.

But my post isn't about any of that.  It's primarily about disingenuous rhetoric that is used to excuse the largest of transgressions while comparatively small transgressions are inflated into massive scandals and all for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, just like the propaganda that has clearly been effective in knee-capping healthcare reform.

by DF 9/17/2009 - 4:09 pm (re: Nebton)

I'm not aware of this specific case, so excuse anything I say that seems ignorant.

Do we know that Breitbart is lying, or is it just clear that he left off some information that we think might make Acorn not look so bad? If so, isn't is possible that the video from Larry's thread also left off a couple of people who weren't very interesting? Don't get me wrong, I'm with you that I'm fairly certain that the Tea party video was representative in general. Is it possible that Breitbart's video is also being representative in general? I.e., is it at least possible that the majority of Acorn offices were misbehaving?

I'm really just playing devil's advocate here, as I have a hard time believing that very many Acorn offices would do such a thing (or even be stupid enough not to suspect this as a trick), but we can't really rule it out immediately. How many Acorn offices are represented in Breitbart's video vs. how many filed police reports?

by Nebton 9/17/2009 - 4:30 pm (re: DF)

I included a link to a transcript where Breitbart says, unequivocally, that something of this nature happened at literally every place they visited:

HANNITY: So, in other words, when you go to Baltimore and D.C. and New York and San Bernardino and San Diego, and this all happened, were there any cities you went to where you just didn't get any videotape, not worthy to air?

GILES: We are airing it. It's pretty worthy. Everyone seems.

HANNITY: In other words, you didn't go into one office and they said we're not going to help you do anything like that?

GILES: No.

HANNITY: Not one. Every place you went they helped you or were willing to help you either not report you for an underage prostitution ring, evade taxes as we have.

BREITBART: Right. It is interesting. There is no place has ACORN tried to state that kicked them out based upon the premise that they were doing something nefarious.

But that's nothing but a lie.  The police report is included in this link.

I've already acknowledged, several times, that it's possible that the activists in the 9/12 video may have cherry-picked their subjects.  This is simply obvious.  But the accusation on the part of Genghis was not only that they had perhaps done it, but done it with the intent to make Republicans look dumb for the purpose of laughing at them.  As I've detailed here and in the other thread, that accusation just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

There's no way of knowing from Breitbart et al. whether the majority were misbehaving because they didn't even come close to visiting a majority of offices.  As I understand it, Acorn has something like 700 offices nationwide.  So far, they've put out videos showing questionable behavior in maybe five or six cities.  You know stats.  That doesn't tell you anything about the population, especially when we know for a fact that they're misrepresenting the data.  Acorn claims that they were thrown out of about as many offices, including the Philly office that filed the report.

So, is it possible that the majority of offices are offending?  Sure, it's possible.  Am I going to conclude that it's probable based on the testimony of Andrew Breitbart and a news story that only Fox will touch?  I don't think so.

CNN's Tucker: "ACORN gave CNN a copy of the police complaint." On the September 11 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN news correspondent Bill Tucker reported: "ACORN gave CNN a copy of the police complaint filed against the filmmakers In Philadelphia. The filmmakers, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles are not commenting and Giles was a no-show for an agreed-to interview with CNN."

by DF 9/17/2009 - 4:49 pm (re: Nebton)

OK, so I've read a bit more, and I'm convinced that Breitbart et al. were being strung along in at least one case (although it was stupid on the part of the stringer-along), which makes sense as, even if I thought Acorn was corrupt, it was hard for me to accept them falling for the story.

I don't posit that the 9/12 video was overtly manipulated, but if they did have some uninteresting subjects I'd expect them to edit them out, lest they bore us. That's a problem with these short video clips. It's so easy to see what you want to see and to believe what you want to believe. Again, I believe the 9/12 video was essentially honest and the Breitbart video was dishonest and/or poorly researched. However, those beliefs are based to a large extent on my existing world-view.

by Nebton 9/17/2009 - 4:55 pm (re: DF)

I have no doubt that editing was done, and hopefully done honestly for the purposes of making the video engaging.  And you make a good point about the length of the clip.  I think this is evident in the extreme cases such as the soundbites (and resultant talking points) that proliferate our media, and perhaps our very communications, but it might be a subtler case with a ten minute clip.  Maybe I've underestimated that in my assessment, but the video is consistent with nearly everything else I've seen, in news and opinion coverage and in person, so I see little reason to suspect the authors or regard the content as disingenuous.

I'd be curious to know what you came across in your reading.  It sounds like you're talking about the employee from San Bernadino, the one who claimed to have been a prostitute and to have murdered her husband.  I read some conflicting accounts.  I've read that she has said that she said she had done it because she was scared in one instance and because she was playing with them in another.  I'd also read that the police had followed up and all her previous husbands had been located alive.  I'm really not sure what to make of it yet.

by DF 9/17/2009 - 5:37 pm (re: Nebton)

Yes, that's the instance I'm talking about. You've probably read more about it than I. Assuming she was playing with them (the most likely scenario, IMO), in retrospect it wasn't a very wise idea.

by Nebton 9/17/2009 - 6:45 pm (re: DF)

Yeah, if she was just joking, I'd say she over-sold it.

by DF 9/17/2009 - 6:47 pm (re: Nebton)

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