The American Spectator

Those two employees had worked in Baltimore (the other two were in Washington, and the investigators later released videos from other cities), and the Baltimore Sun’s September 11 edition reported that the investigators purportedly planned to traffic in child sex slaves:

The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.

“If they don’t have Social Security numbers, you don’t have to worry about them,” the employee says.

The Sun noted that the exposé, by 20-year-old Hannah Giles and 25-year-old James O’Keefe, was published on BigGovernment.com, a conservative website run by Andrew Breitbart, before being aired on Glenn Beck’s Fox program. The New York Times finally got around to informing its readers of the scandal on Wednesday, September 16 — after videos from four different ACORN offices had aired on Fox and two days after the Senate voted 83-7 to ban the group from receiving federal housing money.

It was a busy week for Beck and Breitbart. On September 11 they claimed another victory when the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it was “reassigning” Yosi Sergant, its communications director. The previous week, Beck had aired portions of a tape from an August conference call with artists, in which Sergant exhorted them to push the administration’s agenda. The call was first reported on Big Hollywood, another Breitbart site, by a participant, Patrick Courrielche, who provided Beck the tape on which Sergant said this:

I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment. There’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. Then my task would be to apply your artistic, creativity community’s utilities and bring them to the table.

Sergant also told the artists: “We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government, what that looks like legally….We are participating in history as it’s being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together [to] move the needle and to get stuff done.”

At this writing, the New York Times has published not a word about it. It’s difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could employ an exponent of a crackpot conspiracy theory, “partner” with an apparently corrupt organization, or attempt to politicize an agency like the NEA without the mainstream media treating it as a major scandal. But with Obama in the White House? A quote attributed to the fired Washington ACORN employees sums things up nicely. The AP reported that they had advised Giles and O’Keefe that they “must be low-key about the business, or people could ‘call Fox’ ” — not the New York Times, or CBS or NBC, or “the media,” but Fox.

To be sure, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart are advocacy journalists with distinct points of view. But the supposedly impartial mainstream media also claim to have an “adversary” relationship with the government. That they have left this field to a few upstarts suggests that they have a point of view too — one that is, in the age of Obama, far more compliant than adversarial.