Early this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I posted on the Associated Press's treatment of the firing of two employees at ACORN's Baltimore office. These employees were successfully stung by undercover filmmaker James O'Keefe, who posed as a pimp (one who said he has plans to use the money from his "enterprise" to run for Congress), and Hannah Giles, who posed as a prostitute.

In a pair of videos (full script here) released on Thursday, viewers saw the two helpful ACORN Baltimore employees tell O'Keefe and Giles, among many jaw-dropping things, that:

• Giles should call herself a “freelance performing artist” for tax purposes.
• That they should claim three of 13 underage girls the pair planned to bring in from El Salvador to work as prostitutes as dependents.
• That the prostitute should also claim child tax credits for those declared as "dependents."

O'Keefe and Giles piled on Friday morning by releasing a second pair of videos showing that they had pulled off a similar sting at ACORN's DC office.

But if we're to believe the Associated Press's Hope Yen, Friday's out of the blue decision by the Census Bureau to sever its ties with ACORN in connection with the 2010 census had nothing or at most very little to do with what O'Keefe and Giles pulled off. Instead, Yen portrayed the decision as a cave-in to the minority party in Washington known as Republicans. Uh-huh.

Here is a screen cap of most of Yen's report (saved here in full for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes):

Wow. That's six references to the GOP or Republican Party members objecting to ACORN, and no references to any of the Democratic Party's shrill defenders of the rogue organization.

Yen didn't mention O'Keefe's Baltimore sting video until paragraphs 10 and 11, and never mentioned the DC sting, even though its related videos were released at O'Keefe's BigGovernment.com web site at about 7 a.m. Friday morning. Given the hubbub O'Keefe's work has raised, it's virtually inconceivable that Yen and AP didn't know about the second sting. Yet Yen's report repeated the contention of ACORN Maryland's Margaret Williams that "undercover teams attempted similar setups in at least three other ACORN offices." Note that Williams didn't refer specifically to O'Keefe, because she obviously can't fully truthfully do so. I would not be surprised if Williams knew that the second sting video was in the can, just waiting to drop.

By permitting Ms. Williams's misleading statement to appear unchallenged, Yen left readers who even get that far with a clear misimpression that O'Keefe and Giles only pulled their stunt once.

So the Census Bureau, which as Yen acknowledged in an unexcerpted paragraph had "up to now" resisted GOP pressure for months, all of a sudden caves and dumps ACORN, and we're supposed to believe that it's all because of Republicans. Horse manure, Hope.

(Image found at KMBZ.com; scroll down about halfway at link.)

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters