When University of Northern Iowa professor Dr. Christopher R. Martin was first approached about the possibility of writing a study on media coverage of ACORN, he had to admit that despite the organization’s name being associated with numerous media reports, he actually knew very little about the organization, formally known as Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Martin, who has studied how the media covers labor and middle-class issues, was contacted by Dr. Peter Dreier, a professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles who has studied politics and urban issues, and asked if he would consider helping research how a little-known organization became such a magnet for media criticism.

acorn_manipulation“He asked me if I was aware of what was going on with ACORN, that there were allegations of them engaging in voter fraud during the election,” Martin said. “I told him that I had heard about it, but that I didn’t really know a lot about ACORN.”

In that respect, Martin wasn’t too different from most Americans. Prior to 2008, according to the study Martin co-authored with Dreier, few Americans had any real knowledge about the activities of ACORN, although it was the largest community organizing group in the nation with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. And although the organization was founded and continues to organize around issues of interest to low- and moderate-income Americans — issues such as affordable housing, veterans’ rights, predatory lending, school lunches, public transportation and living wages — the vast majority of the the news reports on ACORN focused on allegations of wrongdoing.

“The more we looked into it, it just seemed like these allegations may have been unfair,” Martin said. ” [The allegations] were happening in the mainstream media, but it seemed like they may have been coming from more conservative sources.”

Martin and Dreier found that despite ACORN’s involvement in a wide variety of activities throughout the country, the dominant focus of news reports about the organization was “voter fraud.” During 2007 and 2008, 55 percent of the 647 news stories published about ACORN in 15 mainstream outlets focused on alleged voter fraud. In October 2008 alone, 76 percent of the stories about ACORN were negative, also focusing on allegations of voter fraud. Notably, more than 80 percent of those news reports failed to provide all the facts: That actual voter fraud is very rare; that ACORN itself reported the voter registration irregularities to authorities as they were required to do by law; that ACORN was acting to stop incident of registration problems by temporary staff member; and that Republicans had been targeting ACORN registration efforts because most of the urban and ethnic individuals registered by the organization were registering as Democrats.

“The Republican Party has been working against ACORN,” Martin said and then gave a quick self-conscious laugh. “I know it sounds like some crazy conspiracy, but it actually became very clear in August when released records showed that there was meddling during the [George W.] Bush administration in the Justice Department.”

The 5,000 pages of White House and Republican National Committee e-mail messages and transcripts of closed-door testimony, referenced by Martin, were released by the House Judiciary Committee on Aug. 11. The documents revealed that Karl Rove, former Bush senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, played a central role in the firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, for failing to help Republican election prospects by prosecuting alleged instances of voter fraud by ACORN. And, while nearly every major news outlet reported on the documents, the study authors discovered that none of the news outlets mentioned that Rove was specifically focused on attacking ACORN for its voter registration efforts.

The allegations launched against ACORN and unceremoniously regurgitated by the mainstream media were not, however, limited to Republican Party talking points.

“We describe in the study how the stories about ACORN emerges in two prongs,” Martin said, indicating that there were both Republican and business interests taking aim at the group.

“There are business groups that have funded efforts against ACORN over the past several years. They haven’t liked ACORN because ACORN has endorsed things like living-wage campaigns and raise-the-minimum-wage campaigns in service industries like restaurants. So, there have also been groups working against ACORN that way.”

Were this simply an isolated example of media complicity (witting or unwitting) with political organizations, the attack on ACORN would be interest only to ACORN, its allies and detractors. But this case has wider implications.

Our analysis of the narrative framing of the ACORN stories demonstrates that — despite long-standing charges from conservatives that the news media are determinedly liberal and ignore conservative ideas — the news media is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign, even when there is little or no truth to the story.

“I think the mainstream media in many cases is overly sensitive to the charge of ‘liberal media,’” Martin said. “They go out of their way to avoid being seen that way. What was clear in our study was that the mainstream media took many of the same frames from the conservative media and the Republican Party and put those out the exact same way without any additional fact-checking or commentary.”

In the study, Martin and Dreier lay out their case that the stories about ACORN were crafted and tested within the right-wing echo chamber before being pushed into the mainstream media during October 2008, just weeks ahead of the November presidential election. It was a classic “October Surprise” that Martin and Dreier believe would have garnered more traction had it not been for other stories considered more pressing by the public and media, particularly the economic downturn.

The study also asserts that when faced with the reality that the economy was going to drive news cycles, conservative “opinion entrepreneurs” sought to blame ACORN for the decline.

“ACORN has become this huge, kind of proxy for going after [President] Obama,” Martin said.

“I don’t think there would have been the same connections if Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic nominee … You had these long-standing attacks against ACORN, and they really tried to target Obama with allegations that he was a socialist, a radical and connected to groups like ACORN that they had already managed to paint with those same types of words. And actually, his connection is fairly minor. They’ve tried to suggest that he is almost leading the entire organization, but it just wasn’t anything to that degree.”

Martin and Dreier also note that while other controversies surrounding Obama’s candidacy have faded in the wake of the presidential election and inauguration, attacks on ACORN and even the misplaced links between Obama and ACORN have remained consistent. In May 2009, for example, the GOP launched a Web site that specifically targeted ACORN and, earlier in the year, Republican elected officials falsely claimed that billions in stimulus money was earmarked for ACORN. In fact, just last week, Iowa’s own U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Kiron) stood before the House of Representatives with a Soviet-styled poster of Obama behind him and proclaimed the president is “the star of ACORN.”

“He is the lead, chief organizer,” King asserted while using a metal pointer to poke at the depiction of the president. “He is the person who told the people at ACORN, ‘I will invite you in — and we will be setting the agenda for America,’ even before he was inaugurated as president of the United States. This is the man who worked for ACORN.”

The congressional action in relation to ACORN, which has been mostly regulated to Republicans railing against the organization and funding cuts, began shortly after undercover videos were published by a conservative blogger that portray ACORN employees offering illegal advice to a prostitute and a pimp.

“Our study was completed in August, and we just released it as this was happening,” Martin said. “The current controversy follows the same formula that we document in the study. That is, the attacks on ACORN begin within the Republican Party and the right-wing echo chamber, where they frame ACORN as this radical, left-wing, corrupt organization.”

The videos, like all of the allegations that have been made against ACORN, are of questionable origin and have not been vetted or fact-checked by credible sources. For instance, to what extent the videos have been edited is only known to the persons who created them — individuals who did not necessarily go out with the intent of reporting what is happening, but with the intent of creating a story that would serve as an indictment of the organization they secretly filmed.

“Having said all of this, neither one of us is an apologist for ACORN,” said Martin, speaking for both himself and study co-author Dreier. “Clearly there are some bad things that happened with ACORN employees, but there isn’t any evidence of a top-down, ACORN-wide conspiracy to do fraudulent tax returns or anything like that.

“I’m not trying to say that there isn’t some truth to those [videos], but I think we need to have the whole story and much more context as to what is going on in those videos. People are drawing the conclusion that ACORN is a completely bad organization because of these videos, and I think that is the wrong conclusion. All those videos show is that ACORN may have some problems in terms of hiring and training employees at certain locations. They have more than 100 chapters across the country, and I don’t think these videos indict every single one of these chapters or the national organization.”

As the nation’s largest network of community organizers, ACORN is able to tackle local, state and national issues simultaneously on behalf of populations that are too often unable to advocate for themselves. If conservative efforts are successful and ACORN is dismantled, Martin fears that there is no other group in a position to advocate for the same causes on the same scale.

“If ACORN was completely decimated, it would be difficult. There would be a real void,” he said.

If the organization survives the onslaught and continues to impact future elections through its voter registration program, Martin believes the attacks will continue, because its opponents are not going anywhere.

“I think the attacks on ACORN have been part of trying to take out an organization that the Republicans see as being beneficial to the Democratic Party. Not that ACORN is partisan, but they organize and register voters in mostly urban areas who tend to be mostly Latinos and African Americans who tend to mostly vote Democratic,” he said. “From the [Republican] Party’s point of view, that’s what they don’t like about ACORN. They would be happy to take ACORN out. They tried to do that in 2006. They tried to do that in 2008. I’m sure we’re going to see that again in 2010 and 2012.”