Feeding The Beast

If you watched any network news channel this month, you no doubt saw clips of James O’Keefe and his partner Hannah Giles walking into the Baltimore and Washington, DC offices of the non-profit ACORN organization. O’Keefe and Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute looking for advice on how to evade taxes and funnel the money into O’Keefe’s fake congressional campaign.

The video quickly jumped from the blogosphere to run in heavy rotation on conservative media. Mainstream news networks soon followed in lock-step. Stories about Sonia Sotomayor, the birther movement, and town-hall disruptions followed a similar path and have trickled up throughout the Obama era.

So where are these stories coming from? Citizen journalists, activists, or covert partisan operatives? Mark Bowden is a longtime journalist and author, most recently, of The Best Game Ever. He wrote about how these clips become news for The Atlantic.

The Atlantic: The Story Behind the Story

(Photo by Antonio Martínez via Flickr/Creative Commons)