I was about to change the channel because I can’t stand the channel, but FoxNews Sunday had as their “Person of the Week” the ‘filmmaker’ that did ACORN sting that’s making conservatives wet with anticipation and liberals flaring. There was a background of this guy and it was rather interesting. They talked about how, when he was a student, he was against affirmative action programs. FoxNews was kind enough, when this was mentioned, to show the filmmaker with what I assumed was his black friend to prove he himself wasn’t racist.

While I doubt this guy is a racist in the sense of burning flags on lawns, I would say he’s like any other beginning investigative reporter. At a few large companies I worked for there were always memos being sent out about how to deal with the press over the phone or in person. They may not even be investigative reporters. What was the concern was getting things said out of context because of the corporate mindset. What got me thinking of this was a video shown on FoxNews early in his video career. He went to his school to protest being served Lucky Charms, because he is Irish American.

Now I’m not sure if he went to a low level staff member or a high member in the department, but he didn’t take his grievance up with the President of the college. Like he did with ACORN, it seems he talked to a low level person who frankly has no power. One thing large corporations will no grant lower level people to have is common sense. They don’t allow it because they worry about lawsuits at the most and the loss of income at the least. I have come across instances where people will cuss you out over the phone, lie to you or otherwise try to get you upset so they can get their way. They may be wrong but the company won’t let you call out the person for what they are. To do that will get you fired. They won’t back up their employees. That means a lot of times, at least in my case, where I’ve heard things that have been stupid but I’ve had to hold my tongue to keep the client.

Now, what would happen if I was taped and that was put on YouTube? Just like in the situation with the workers at ACORN, I would have been fired, to save face for the company. I was doing what the company said to do, yet I would be let go because I reflected badly by following the rules of the company.

Now with this ACORN business and watching this filmmaker dress up as someone out of some 70s Blackplotation movie, I’m surprised he wasn’t thrown out of many of the offices he went into. So far he has only released a little of the videos and claims he’s doing this to prove his point that ACORN, and let’s put it in real words instead of the polite words that have been used, is a program run by incompetent and corrupt minorities. It strikes me as hard to believe that he did this act to a bunch of ACORN groups and not one caught onto his act, threw him out and passed on the information to other ACORN groups. It does make sense he could have hit a few places where they may have humored him or, in the worse case scenario, definitely tried to help him.

But we never got to the next level. That’s what a lot of people question in this filmmakers operation. Just to compare this conservative filmmaker to a liberal filmmaker like Michael Moore, Moore knows that the first lines of defense never are the people that make the decisions. He goes higher up the food chain. The filmmaker exposing ACORN never went to the next level, never met the supervisor who would walk them through filling out the forms to get the aide. I have had phone calls where people have talked about their websites that are against Obama and will rant for minutes about the corporate greed and how the darkies are taking over this country. I can’t tell them how stupid they are or refuse to help them. I have to do it. Because I help them at this low state does that mean I agree with everything they say? Of course not. When they’re gone I will tell people how silly the call was and if I’m concerned enough I may alert my boss about it. Once that’s done it’s out of my hands.

The whole thing about the ACORN mess is that both sides aren’t being honest about their motives. The filmmaker wants to make a name for himself and as long as he can exploit corporate thinking he’s going to look good. We don’t know how many places he went to before getting the response he wanted. As an example, if I had a beef with McDonalds, I could go to 100 McDonalds to try and show rude employee behavior. I may get 5 where they’re rude but I’m going to make sure those 5 are shown on YouTube, not telling the public I went to 100 to get the 5. The public, remembering their own bad experience they had with McDonalds, would perpetuate the feeling that it’s a bad situation with the company. It’s not true but people would believe it, even though my numbers are faulty.

From ACORN’s end, they want to keep getting money. They keep that corporate thinking. Instead of getting in front of it, admitting fault and changing the attitude of the lemming like policies they have, they circled the wagons, blamed ‘whitey’ for their troubles, and when the drip of more videos came out, they finally admitted to firing the employees that probably were just following the corporate orders. In the meantime, the government is thinking of cutting their aide, which only made them bunker down even more. They weren’t honest from the start to say they would look into it and make changes. They did the blame game without having all the facts in front of them. They assumed the person only had one tape, so when more came out ACORN looked like fools. Like the McDonalds analogy there may only be five clips of silliness, but releasing them slowly and not knowing the whole amount of tapes done or what happened at spots where taping wasn’t shown was their downfall.