ACORN - the need to organize the organizers

So recently ACORN, the miscelleous entity, ended up all over the news again and once again, for completely awful reasons.

As a quick summary, this fellow who is 24 and a law student went around with his 20 year old female friend to a number of ACORN's what appear to be counseling/mortgage storefronts around the country and proposed some inappropriate situations (largely illegal) to which the ACORN employees responded as though being asked for perfectly normal counsel. Oh, and he got it all on tape.

Here's the thing - if a number of your employees at different locations are giving people walking in off the street legal advice on how to commit federal crimes and not get caught and all this ends up on video that is distributed widely across the country and world and you've already had similar problems and you care at all about public perception of your organization, you don't go the defensive route. You don't go the crazy outraged route. It just doesn't work. Especially if you already used up that chip over the voter registration forms. Which is why I didn't understand why ACORN would post this article on their website: Attack Videographer Caught in Manipulation and Lies.

As a contrast, and as proof that the people in charge actually understand the significant implications for the future of their agency and its cause, you can see the primary article posted on the home page, ACORN Announces Major Steps to Address Issues Raised by Videos.

Returning to the "news" article (which is at best a mixed news/opinion piece), was what the O'Keefe fellow did "manipulative"? Possibly - I don't think there's a meaning of that word that doesn't involve projection of an individual's insecurity onto the target, but let us take it down a notch and say that what O'Keefe did was designed to elicit certain responses and reactions. That is true. It isn't really manipulaive, in my opinion, because he wasn't trying to change people's opinions or thoughts or alter how they dealt with situations - it's the entrapment question, but this is pretty straightforward. From the employees' extensive explanations of how to get around laws it seems to me that they were rather adept at doing this (counseling people on how to violate federal law) and didn't seem as though they felt pressured or out of their element. I just want to clarify for people that someone isn't engaging in "manipulation" just because you're not the one controlling the situation. It's an absurdly inflammatory choice of words.

Next up: lies. Did he "lie"? Technically, of course he lied. That's a given and it's part of the style of investigative journalism that he engages in. The point is to see how people deal with situations and to get on tape when you disagree with the manner in which they handle themselves. People generally don't engage in investigative journalism when the subject is something they believe strongly in. I mean, I've never seen it and it would be totally illogical so I assume people don't do this. But again, "lie" is not in the title of the article to make the technical point that O'Keefe was not a pimp as he claimed to be, it's there to suggest that he was engaged in deliberate falsehoods and requires that one subscribes to the kindergarden age appropriate belief that lies are bad, regardless of circumstances. Again, not really the angle you want to take here. It's whiny, self-righteous and just underlines the point that you don't understand what the problem is with being an agency that claims to be doing social good that flouts laws in favour of helping certain types of people. That just isn't how people think in America. I mean, moreover, if your employees are recommending that people who make their living off breaking laws should lie to the federal government and banks and any number of other entities or people, it's a bit much to complain when someone else uses tactics that you're recommending against you.

But as to the "story" - the woman mentioned here claims that she knew it was a fraud and that she was making fun of them by responding to their statements with even more incredulous statements.
1) That just isn't an appropriate professional response. If someone is messing around with you, you show them the door and tell them to have a nice day. End of story. Why would you play games with them? Why are you wasting the organization's and taxpayer's money in that way? If you don't think these people need help, why aren't you helping people who do? It rings false and seems weird that she would continue to engage with people she thought were mocking her - of course, she could be incredibly insecure and need to feel validated by mocking other people, but it doesn't really matter what her personal issues are, she needs to behave professionally at work.
2) Why, if you were mocking them, would you see fit to say that your employer wouldn't approve of your actions: "Further, as the actors repeatedly noted how nice she was being, Ms Kaelke responded, also repeatedly, that her"niceness" was just her, not ACORN. "My supervisor would shoot this down like faster than a bat out of hell."" I mean, hmmm. That isn't terribly amusing. It isn't a sense of humor at all. I have a terribly terribly dry sense of humor and I can't imagine any world in which that would be funny. The only legitimate interpretation of that statement is that she was in fact saying things that her employer would't approve of, which may or may not be true - I don't know as I don't know who her supervisor is or what exactly she was saying at that point but again, it doesn't really matter. It just isn't funny to say that your supervisor doesn't approve of what you're saying. If it's true, you shouldn't be saying it, especially not at work. If it's not true, that's the type of joke you'd have to tell at a bar with your work buddies so the irony was caught, not to some complete strangers.

It sort of continues on in the same vein from there, ending with "Ms. Kaelke, who did not know she was being filmed, is appalled that her defensive attempts to deal with a troubling experience have been manipulated into an attack on her work helping low- and moderate-income families fight the foreclosure crisis, work for needed health care reform, and face the economic crisis in San Bernardino. " I don't know ACORN well enough to comment on the substance of this but again, let me throw some marketing it its direction. The sentence screams defensive. The way to say this was to have an explanation of ACORN's work placed separately from this. ACORN works to help etc., explaining in detail what they do and why what they do is important. THEN you say, completely separately, and probably much earlier in the piece that she didn't know she was being filmed, although I would probably drop that as it doesn't help the case. And you drop the "manipulate" business because it's simply too much. You can't go from "radical" to "important social vehicle" by calling people names. (yes, I recognize they did not write this article but if you post something on your organization's website, you may as well have written it as you implicitly endorse what it says unless you explicitly do not)

As I mentioned I don't know enough about ACORN's actions to make any statement on what they do but assuming they actually are working to help lower and middle income individuals have better lives, wouldn't it make more sense to present this as a matter of maintaining proper standards for living in our society, respect for our fellow man and reminding people that America is based on the belief that we help our neighbors when they need help? It just seems to me that if you stick with the fundamentals, stay on message and do a good job, you accomplish a lot. When you go the radical route, you lose most of your potential audience. It's an especially problematic angle to take as a non-profit and especially in America with regards to the issue of poverty and relative poverty since there is a notion that one is meant to pull oneself up by the bootstraps - not that it's right or anything like that, but people do believe that. So you have to get around that and you don't do it by being radical.