Hannah Giles and journalism

The mainstream media should be embarrassed, said Howard Portnoy in Hot Air. Major newspapers and other pillars of journalism looked the other way as scandals swirled around ACORN, the liberal community-organizing group. It took a hidden-camera investigation by "fledgling journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles"—who is a 20-year-old college sophomore—to get the MSM to pay attention. (watch a Giles-O'Keefe video clip shot in an ACORN Baltimore office)

It's true that The New York Times "stood still" for days, said Clark Hoyt in The New York Times, while Fox News and Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com showed videos of ACORN employees advising O'Keefe and Giles on getting tax breaks for a brothel with underaged sex slaves. But while some conservatives think O’Keefe and Giles were doing journalists' jobs, "most news organizations consider such tactics unethical."

Call the secret ACORN videotapes by Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe what you like, said Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. Just don't call it journalism. O'Keefe, posing as a pimp, and Giles, posing as a prostitute, "hit pay dirt," but their "ideologically driven" and illegal secret taping, without consent, was not the kind of thing real live reporters can do.

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Giles isn't backing down in the face of such criticism, said Robert Costa in National Review. She and O'Keefe face a lawsuit filed by ACORN, which claims that a Maryland law against taping without consent made their video from a Baltimore ACORN office illegal. "Even with lawsuits and heavy fire coming from ACORN supporters, Giles says that she wants to pursue investigative journalism as a career," because she says she's committed to finding the truth.