The Fishwrap of Record has finally seen fit to tell its readers about the latest ACORN scandals (the San Bernardino tapes, which don’t get a mention, are beyond belief). True to form, the New York Times commits grievous sins of omission that whitewash the paper’s own role in deliberately covering up ACORN’s illicit activities before Election Day last November.
The Times article by Scott Shane casts the ACORN stings as a purely partisan game: “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.”
The lead sentence paints any investigative journalism of ACORN’s long history of taxpayer abuses and shady business and campaign finance practices as opportunistic attacks on Barack Obama: “For months during last year’s presidential race, conservatives sought to tar the Obama campaign with accusations of voter fraud and other transgressions by the national community organizing group Acorn, which had done some work for the campaign.”
But it was a then-liberal whistleblower Anita MonCrief, formerly of ACORN affiliate Project Vote, who worked extensively with New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom last year on several investigative pieces exposing the financial shenanigans in the ACORN web of money-shuffling, non-profit, tax-exempt affiliates.
Strom called MonCrief a “gold mine” in July 2008. One of the last stories Strom wrote — blowing the whistle on an internal report raising red flags about ACORN’s massive potential violations of federal law– appeared in the Times on October 21, 2008:
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