I’ve wondered this too. But what would you do if two people came to you dressed up in costumes, joking around.
This is where I’m torn because I can’t tell if any of this was really taken serious. Imagine you sell cars: Two “customers” enter dressed like gorillas and ask about how many monkeys they could fit in the back of an suv, alluding that they would be taking the monkeys from research facility. Would a) you continue in a professional manner. b) play along, continuing with a some what normal sale, while joking about how the new Ford Escape can carry more monkeys than the Rav4 or Honda CRV. or c) kick them out, and document the process?
I used to teach a lot of university calculus and physics, and I’d say anything to drive home the point. If you taped enough of my tutorials you’d be able to piece together all sorts of inflammatory statements that could lead to a headline of, “University prof caught on tape apparently advising students on how to jump over the Grand Canyon.”
Was I actually advising students to jump over the Grand Canyon or was I trying to teach them conservation of energy?
That’s on the joking side. I could also see how if you pulled this stunt a few dozen dealerships, you would eventually find a salesman sympathetic to animal rights, who would continue with the sale, and appear to support your cause.
Eventually, you’d have a great piece of gotcha journalism with a headline, “Ford workers caught on tape advising on how to steel monkeys.”
Show me a tape of ACORN workers actually trafficking child prostitutes and I’ll be outraged. This is such a manufactured crisis it makes me feel sorry for conservatives. This is not a right-wing win.
Remember when liberals thought they had documentation that showed Bush 43 avoided Nam by pretending to fly in the Air National Guard? That’s what this sounds like.
It’s a bit confusing. After seeing this kid on TV I have a hard time believing anyone would take him seriously as a pimp. Is it possible all the folks at Acorn were playing along at what they knew was a gag? Since we haven’t seen any unedited tapes perhaps he asked them to. But if that was the case why wouldn’t we be hearing the ACORN workers telling us that just as the one did.
In a large organization I can understand the firing reaction. I joke around with my regular customers all the time. I’m sure there would be clips that my bosses wouldn’t understand if taken out of the joke context.
Somebody needs to investigate from the position of presumed innocence or at least an unbiased search for the truth. Hasn’t anyone tried to interview the employees in the videos to hear thier side of it?
To me, it’s going to depend on the offense. The Libertarian in me doesn’t have a problem with the lady telling the “hooker” that she needs to call herself a performance artist. When the subject shifts to underage Salvadoran prostitution, I start documenting.
Doesn’t anyone think when they brought up 13 Salvadorian underage prostitutes ,that ACORN workers did not take them seriously? They went way past believability with the story. The filmers were just playing a game to make ACORN look bad, but nothing ever came from it. No worker sent in paperwork or followed up.
The Austin Statesman has it exactly right. I understand that’s very disappointing to you, but I’m sure you guys can cobble together some other fake scandal over the weekend. Maybe the President will put ketchup on a hotdog or something.
Well that’s a dam good point. If they had actually filled out and filed any paperwork to help the fake pimp deceive a federal agency that would be serious. It makes you wonder why OKeefe didn’t go there.
I am busy compiling my list of evil organizations that control the world, but I am not sure where on the list to put ACORN:
Illuminati
Freemasons
Lizard People
Triplateral Commission
Americorps
The NFL
Oprah Winfrey
Cats
Skull & Bones
Hypnotoad
I am thinking ACORN goes between The NFL and Orah, but that is just my liberal leanings. I supose it belongs much closer to the top, maybe right after the Lizard People.
(This is a lefty site, and I could have just cited the newspaper article, but I want you to go there. Pay very close attention to the frog with the weird eyes, he’ll give you free money and sex…)
The problem here is not new. Organizations start out with no goals to do noble things, and over time they, or some fraction of their workers, lose sight of their original goals, or so monomanicially follow their goals that they lose sight of the real world effects of what they’re doing.
Unions. A great idea. A necessary idea, given that the worker was getting screwed by the robber baron employers. But eventually you have the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, and violence against scabs.
Christianity. Love one another as you love yourself, and love God with your whole heart. That which you do to the least of people, you do to God. Great idea. World-shattering. Fast-forward and you get Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggert, and Ted Haggerty.
No organization is immune.
I do find it worth commentary, though, that there are people still reflexively defending the actions on tape, or excusing them… as though they cannot bring themselves to say what you just said: ACORN does a boatload of good work and are a noble idea, but there’s a problem in how they do things that is systemic enough that it has to be dealt with.
It’s equally alarming – perhaps more so – to see OTHER people reflexively tying the President in to ACORN, as though he is some sort of masked villian with an alter ego as CEO of ACORN, and we’re just days away from the damning proof.
The only real link Obama has to ACORN is that it seem clear ACORN wanted Obama to win the election. Since they appear to have been joined in this venture by about 50 million other people, it’s absurd to single them out for anything related to Obama. Seriously – do you people have some script that requires you to tie in Obama somehow? It’s ridiculous; cut it out.
For those who think the tapes have somehow been “doctored”, I offer the following information.
First, O’Keefe was smart enough to put a visible timecode at the top left of the tapes. That’s 30 frames per second visibly ticking by one frame at a time. If the individual portions shown on youtube and FOX were edited to somehow insert or remove individual shots within the video clips shown, it would appear in the timecode which would then be out of sequence. Since it runs from start to finish from the beginning of the clip to the end, no video editing has taken place.
Second, you can watch the lips of the people speaking and see that no audio overdubbing has taken place. With a non-linear editing system, it would be possible to eliminate all audio from the video and replace it…but you cannot edit ambient sound and the spoken words separately without recording them on separate audio channels to begin with. Since the audio from the ACORN workers is heard along with the ambient sound and the speaking voices of Giles and O’Keefe, that means one mic was used…the one attached to the hidden camera. If all the audio is recorded on one mic, it can’t be separated in post-production. It’s all mixed together at the recording source.
Some people have asserted that the ACORN workers were answering harmless questions and that the “child prostitution” language was somehow “dubbed in later”. With a visible time code and one audio source, the only way for this to happen would be to somehow record the ambient sound without anyone talking. Then they would have to lay it down as a base track (at exactly the same audio level as the original, with perfect timing about what was going on in the background so it would sound the same) and then carefully substitute in the alternate dialogue…making sure that the timing is correct as far as the number of seconds it would take to speak both the “real” and “fake” questions. The timing would have to be the same to avoid either too much silence at both ends of the edit or stepping on the original audio at the beginning or the end. Oh, and make sure the audio levels of both sets of dialogue is exactly the same.
This procedure would have to be repeated for each instance of “overdubbing”. Even the one and two word answers.
I don’t know of any evidence that the tapes were doctored. But regarding the point quoted above, couldn’t they just paste on a timecode after the editing?
I think the idea is supposed to be that they just added in sound. You can’t see Giles and O’Keefe’s mouths for most of the clip, so it wouldn’t be hard to just dub in dialogue for them, would it?
