{"id":16421,"date":"2018-01-18T13:10:26","date_gmt":"2018-01-18T21:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=films&#038;p=16421"},"modified":"2025-05-20T10:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T17:59:51","slug":"acorn-and-the-firestorm","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/acorn-and-the-firestorm\/","title":{"rendered":"ACORN and the Firestorm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For 40 years, the controversial community organizing group ACORN sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals, promoting government waste and ineffective activism. These competing perceptions exploded on the national stage in 2009, just as Barack Obama became president. Fueled by a YouTube video made by undercover journalists, ACORN\u2019s very existence would be challenged. <\/span><b><i>ACORN and the Firestorm<\/i><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> goes beyond the 24-hour news cycle and cuts to the heart of the great political divide. \u00a0<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The film unfolds through the perspectives of Hannah Giles and Bertha Lewis, two women on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as through the eyes of ACORN staff, to tell the story of a polarizing media frenzy that set the tone for elections to come.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For 40 years, the controversial community organizing group ACORN sought to empower marginalized communities. Its critics, though, believed ACORN exemplified everything wrong with liberal ideals, promoting government waste and ineffective activism. These competing perceptions exploded on the national stage in 2009, just as Barack Obama became president. Fueled by a YouTube video made by undercover [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":16422,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1245,1225,1263,1226],"class_list":["post-16421","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-crime","topic-politics-and-government","topic-poverty-2","topic-social-justice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>ACORN and the Firestorm | How a Video Sting to Bring Down Community Organizing Group Set Off Media Frenzy | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"ACORN and the Firestorm (Independent Lens) is the story of community organizing group ACORN, the video sting that sought to bring them down, and the ensuing media firestorm.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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