This study was kinda interesting...
"Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong"
I found it at
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/27-10, which I guess got it from Huffington Post - I'm trying to verify its claims.
Quote:
Last month, facts exonerating ACORN began to emerge. On December 7 an independent report by Scott Harshbarger, the former Massachusetts Attorney General and former president of Common Cause, cleared ACORN of any illegal conduct. The report stated, "While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers." His report also noted that the videos were doctored and misleading.
"The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voice-over for significant portions of Mr. O'Keefe's and Ms. Giles's comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions."
and
Quote:
Soon after Harshbarger refuted the charges of financial wrongdoing and voter fraud against ACORN, a nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) report released on December 22 found no evidence of voter fraud associated with ACORN and "no instances in which ACORN violated the terms of federal funding in the last five years." Moreover, the report found that the two conservative activists who secretly videotaped conversations with ACORN workers and distributed those recordings on the Web without their consent violated laws in Maryland and California. CRS also noted that as of October 2009, ACORN had been subjected to at least forty-six federal, state, and local investigations, with only eleven still outstanding. Only one state, Nevada, brought charges against ACORN, under an ambiguous law that prohibited paying staff to register voters.
EDIT: Hmmm... looks like Harshbarger's report was from an internal investigation at ACORN. Back to square one...