Michelle Malkin has a good column out today [3] focusing on the fact that the NY Times chose to spike a story about ACORN fraud and its ties to the Obama campaign just days before the election.
I’ve often said that it’s the journalistic sins of omission that are more damning than the industry’s sins of commission. Right on cue, the Times acknowledged this weekend that it had spiked a story on possible illegal coordination between left-wing activist groups ACORN and its canvassing arm and the Obama campaign just before Election Day. The charges involved Team Obama sharing top campaign donor lists with ACORN’s supposedly non-partisan canvassing arm, Project Vote (the same group Obama worked for as a Chicago community organizer).
Times public editor Clark Hoyt tried to spin it as a “tip that didn’t pan out.” [4]He airily dismissed the charges by ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief as “nonsense” and quoted a Times editor who shrugged, “You have to cut bait after a while.” It was an all-too-convenient judgment that just happened to be made as Election Day loomed. ...
Hoyt attempted to paint MonCrief as an unreliable source. But Times reporter Stephanie Strom had relied on her for months to break a series of ACORN corruption stories. Moreover, MonCrief’s allegations fit the shady money-shuffling pattern among ACORN and its affiliates to a T. Strom had reported on ACORN’s own internal review of shady money transfers among its web of affiliates conducted by lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley. ...
MonCrief says she was prepared to hand over documentation on the Obama/Project Vote donor-sharing arrangement to Strom before the Times’s editors decided to cut bait.
For a paper who's motto is "All the news that's fit to print", I suppose they want us to believe that they didn't think this was news. Because the only other option is that is was/is news, and they intentionally suppressed it because it may have had a negative impact on the election of their candidate for President.
But that couldn't possibly be the case, could it? Nah.
Check out the entire column here [3].
