Old Gray Lady Misleads in Editorial on Census and ACORN

The New York Times was less than truthful in an editorial yesterday on ACORN’s involvement in the 2010 census.

After pontificating that Republicans’ fears were overblown about Robert M. Groves, the statistical voodoo practitioner who was recently confirmed by the U.S. Senate as census director, the Old Gray Lady opined

Still, some Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate are clinging to an even bigger red herring, that the Census Bureau is inviting manipulation of the 2010 count through its partnership with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

The group, Acorn for short, is one of tens of thousands of census partners — including state and local government agencies, community groups, business clubs, corporations, media outlets and churches — that voluntarily promote the importance of being counted. First used in the 2000 census, such partnerships were credited with reducing the undercount of hard-to-count groups, like African-Americans, Hispanics and the poor.

In 2008, some Acorn workers were fired and prosecuted for submitting false voter registrations. And in 2009, the organization was charged in Nevada with violating that state’s voter registration law. Acorn is fighting those charges. The bad registrations, most of which Acorn says it flagged as problematic before turning them over to election officials, never resulted in any known fraudulent votes being cast. But Republicans who flogged the voter fraud angle in 2008 are now raising fears of census fraud. That’s overblown. Census partners promote the census; they do not fill out forms or collect personal information. […]

New York Times editorial writers, it’s worth noting, are also adept at throwing out red herrings.

An entirely justified concern that some Americans have is that ACORN is actively involved in the 2010 census planning process (including hiring decisions) and that the Obama administration lied about it. This was proven in the document dump ably engineered by Tegan Millspaw of Judicial Watch. Of course the NYT ignores this issue altogether.

We’ve come to expect this kind of behavior from the New York Times. 

In the days leading up to last Election Day it spiked a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad. The story concerned possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN.

And as far as I know the Times hasn’t even bothered to report on the fact that authorities in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, are investigating ACORN –the organization itself– in connection with actual voter fraud (as opposed to voter registration fraud) after a man registered to vote multiple times by ACORN was indicted by a grand jury for casting a fraudulent vote in an election.

Then there’s the newspaper’s woefully inadequate coverage of its business partner Bruce Ratner’s ACORN-assisted land grab related to the taxpayer-subsized proposed Atlantic Yards project right in the newspaper’s own backyard in Brooklyn, but perhaps I digress.

It’s common sense that ACORN shouldn’t be anywhere near the census but the Old Gray Lady will never say that.