Fox News reports fake murder story from ACORN video as fact
After Andrew Breitbart posted a video of an ACORN employee in San Bernardino, California, claiming that she had killed her ex-husband, Fox News' Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity promoted it without fact-checking it or indicating that they had contacted ACORN for a response to the claim. In fact, ACORN stated that the employee made up the story because she recognized that the actors in the video "were clearly playing with" her so she "matched their false scenario with her own false scenarios," and, indeed, the San Bernardino Police Department has said her claim is false.
Fox News figures fail to fact-check ACORN employee's claim she killed her ex-husband
Beck: "I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a jury. But gosh, even to me, it seems like this is a potential admission of murder." After airing video of Tresa Kaelke stating that she shot her ex-husband, Beck stated, "This is twisted, bizarre, macabre -- I mean, is this theater? I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a jury. But, gosh, even to me, it seems like this is a potential admission of murder. And the way she was describing doing some groundwork beforehand, you know, so everybody in town knew exactly what was going on, a case might be made for premeditated murder." Beck later added, "[W]e we haven't been even able to confirm from the state of California whether Tresa's husband from 10 years ago was killed, or if he's dead, or if she even had a husband. Did she make the story up? I don't know. Nobody's asking questions." [Glenn Beck, 9/15/09]
Rove: ACORN must have "terrific ... human resources department to hire people like that." Karl Rove stated that Kaelke "admitted to -- or claimed to have killed her husband because she thought he was going to abuse her at some point. So, she's claimed that she shot him in the head. I mean, this is an organization that really must have a terrific human relations -- human resources department to hire people like that." [On the Record, 9/15/09]
Hannity: "[S]he's on tape admitting that she plotted to kill and had her husband killed, but we don't know if it's true yet." Hannity asked Hannah Giles, the woman who posed as a prostitute, "Have you ever checked to see if in fact she had a husband who was killed?" Giles stated, "We're working on that." Hannity later stated, "So she's on tape admitting that she plotted to kill and had her husband killed, but we don't know if it's true yet." During a later segment, country music singer John Rich said, "[W]hat kind of screening process are they going through that they let a lady who admits to killing her husband standing right there?" [Hannity, 9/15/09]
ACORN: Employee "matched" actors' "false scenario with her own false scenarios"
Fox News figures don't indicate that they contacted ACORN for a response. During their discussions of the story, Beck, Rove, Hannity, and Van Susteren did not state that they had contacted ACORN for a response to Kaelke's claim in the video from San Bernardino that she had killed her ex-husband.
ACORN: Kaelke said she decided to tell actors "outrageous things with a straightface." According to an ACORN press release, Kaelke stated of the actors who filmed her, "They were not believable. ... Somewhat entertaining, but they weren't even good actors. I didn't know what to make of them. They were clearly playing with me. I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me. Like Stephen Colbert does -- saying the most outrageous things with a straightface." The press release also stated: "When the actors approached Ms. Kaelke with their provocative costuming and outlandish scenario, she could not take them seriously. So she met their outrageousness with her own personal style of outrageousness. She matched their false scenario with her own false scenarios."
Police report confirms employee did not actually kill her ex-husband
San Bernardino PD: Investigators found former husbands "alive and well." In a September 15 news release, the San Bernardino Police Department stated that Kaelke's claim that she shot and killed her ex-husband does "do[es] not appear to be factual":
DESCRIPTION OF INCIDENT:
An undercover video reportedly filmed in the San Bernardino office for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was recently released on the Internet. The film depicts a worker talking about her past involvement in prostitution and the alleged self-defense killing of her former husband.
The San Bernardino Police Department is investigating the claims made regarding the homicide. From the initial investigation conducted, the claims do not appear to be factual. Investigators have been in contact with the involved party's known former husbands, who are alive and well.
Fox News' recent ACORN attacks rely on Drudge protégé Andrew Breitbart
Breitbart's BigGovernment.com first posted ACORN video. In a September 15 post for biggovernment.com, James O'Keefe, who made the video in which Kaelke appears, posted "Part I of the ACORN San Bernardino expose." Clips from this and other ACORN videos pushed by Breitbart have been featured on numerous Fox News programs.
Breitbart has repeatedly attacked progressives. Breitbart, whom Beck has called one of the "great journalists of our time," has made several incendiary statements about progressives, claiming for instance that Democrats depend "on the ability to keep blacks in fear"; that Ted Kennedy is a "villain," a "duplicitous bastard," and a "prick"; and that "Democrats would distribute needles, methadone, medical marijuana and biscotti in voter goodie bags if they could get away with it."
Transcripts
From the September 15 edition of Fox News' On the Record with Greta Van Susteren:
VAN SUSTEREN: And tonight: How much worse can it get for ACORN? Well, a lot, apparently. There's another undercover tape, number four. Now, number four tape shows an ACORN employee giving advice to a very young woman who's pretending to be a prostitute. All four videos, shot by a filmmaker and his associate, have been given to Fox News. Here is tape number four shot in California.
[begin video clip]
KAELKE: [inaudible] service. Really. Yeah. Well, Heidi Fleiss is my hero. ... So do you know how you want to run it? If you had a case -- well, if you have a building --
HANNAH GILES (posing as a prostitute): I was thinking -- I mean, OK, first, I'll say that I would need to want to do it under the cover of a spa.
KAELKE: Yeah.
GILES: I know there's a lot of home salons and things like that.
KAELKE: Yeah.
[...]
KAELKE: Me, what I would do -- and this is what I did. I would disguise it. ... I, in my life, have been abused also, I mean, just with an ex-husband, you know, that just beat the hell out of me, you know, a few times and then, you know, I killed him. But it -- you know, I don't think that that's a nice thing. I don't think --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You killed him emotionally?
KAELKE: No, I shot him. I shot him.
GILES: In self-defense?
KAELKE: Yeah.
[end video clip]
VAN SUSTEREN: Karl Rove joins us live. Well, Karl, this organization's sure getting the prize -- four tapes, and each one is more stunning than the last one.
ROVE: Yeah. Today's was particularly unusual. She admitted to -- or claimed to have killed her husband because she thought he was going to abuse her at some point. So, she's claimed that she shot him in the head. I mean, this is an organization that really must have a terrific human relations -- human resources department to hire people like that.
From the September 15 edition of Fox News' Hannity:
HANNITY: Not only does she admit to, if I heard her correctly, running a prostitution ring, "Heidi Fleiss is my idol" -- is that the right phrase?
GILES: Yeah, her hero.
HANNITY: Her hero. OK. Specifically, now she goes into this scenario about her husband and the killing of him.
GILES: Yeah.
HANNITY: Why don't you explain exactly 'cause I want to make sure people understand it.
GILES: So this is exactly what happened. She said she was abused by her husband and that she killed him. Now, if a woman's getting abused, she has a right to defend herself. And I went ahead and I asked her, "Oh, was he abusing you when you killed him?" And she goes, "No, not right that instant," which is huge.
HANNITY: All right. So she's saying she killed her husband --
GILES: Yeah.
HANNITY: -- or created the plot that killed her husband. Is that --
GILES: Right. And then after we asked -- she goes, well, that she tried to cover up for saying she didn't kill him in self-defense and said she went around to the community and let different groups know that she was being abused. And so, it's basically like she set up the murder of her husband.
HANNITY: Have you ever checked to see if in fact she had a husband that was killed?
GILES: We've -- we're working on that.
HANNITY: You haven't gotten to the details on that.
BREITBART: There's -- well, look, there's so much stuff coming in. We have -- there are more than four cities.
HANNITY: So, she could have been -- she could have just -- in fairness, she could have just been --
BREITBART: She certainly does exist, and, if you look on the Internet, you can see that she's also involved on the other side of ACORN -- ACORN political side.
HANNITY: Right.
BREITBART: So she is a community organizer in the political sense, as well.
GILES: There is a criminal record also for her if you look her up in different things, and then you have to --
HANNITY: So you're really investigating that now. And --
GILES: We're working on that.
HANNITY: So she's on tape admitting that she plotted to kill and had her husband killed, but we don't know if it's true yet.
GILES: Yeah, we don't know if it's true. And she also threatened to kill someone else.
[...]
HANNITY: And we continue now with our "Great American Panel." So we've been running this ACORN video every night, and you've got, you know, a group that gets -- it has gotten tens of millions, on track to get billions, of taxpayer dollars.
And we have, you know, this young girl, 20 years old, young guy, 25 years old, act as a pimp and a prostitute. And every city they go to, you know, they're willing to engage in discussions, the ACORN people, about importing young girls from El Salvador for a prostitution ring. You know, what human being with a soul doesn't say, "Let me -- excuse me a moment. Let me go call the police"?
JOHN RICH (country music singer): I think, you know, as the election was going on, there were little hints that something weird was going on with ACORN, you know. You'd pick up on little things and go, "Something about that doesn't seem right." But I don't think in anybody's imagination you could even come up with the level of what they're dealing with now -- what's -- and of course, they're not all that way. That'd be crazy to say they're all that way.
HANNITY: Every city they went to, they got --
RICH: There is a lot of -- I mean, what kind of screening process are they going through that they let a lady who admits to killing her husband standing right there?
From the September 15 edition of Fox News' Glenn Beck:
BECK: If you didn't think that there should have been an investigation before, what I'm going to show you tonight will boggle your mind, and, if at the end of the hour, you still don't think there should be a rigorous investigation and you wonder why, if we want to figure out how the president wants to community organize, why he's surrounding himself with members of ACORN, well, then, I don't know what else to do.
For the remainder of the hour, we're going to take this video apart piece by piece, because, this one, not only involves prostitution, illegal aliens, tax corruption, and fraud, but also an admission of a woman killing her husband. Remember, this is now the fourth city.
[...]
[begin video clip]
KAELKE: He came at me and I let him throw me around a little bit, you know. And I just picked up the gun and said [bleep] you and I shot him. And he died right there. And -- but before that, I had done some -- laid some groundwork. You know, I went to the domestic violence shelter and I pleaded my case to them. And, so everybody in town was knowing that this was happening, you know, 'cause I've seen too many movies about -- The Burning Bed, I love Farrah Fawcett in that movie. You know, that guy got his -- oh, my God.
GILES: Well, you had to go through a lot more stuff than [unintelligible].
KAELKE: Well, yeah. Yeah. Right. Then -- so, I don't agree with -- I never -- I don't believe in corporal punishment for children when you're raising them. I never spanked my kids for anything.
[end video clip]
BECK: OK. Let's see if I have this right. She's -- she never spanked her kids, but she did shoot her husband dead. She doesn't spank her kids, but you can bring in 13-year-old illegal aliens and have them be hookers.
I mean, where do you even begin, America? This is twisted, bizarre, macabre -- I mean, is this theater? I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a jury. But, gosh, even to me, it seems like this is a potential admission of murder. And the way she was describing doing some groundwork beforehand, you know, so everybody in town knew exactly what was going on, a case might be made for premeditated murder.
In fairness, I don't understand people who stay in abusive relationships. I don't. I get it. I get it. And maybe a jury might conclude that it was justifiable homicide. I don't know, but we haven't been even able to confirm from the state of California whether Tresa's husband from 10 years ago was killed, or if he's dead, or if she even had a husband. Did she make the story up? I don't know. Nobody's asking questions. See if the mainstream media will follow this one.
Right Wingnut websites take their ACORN obsession to the next level by dressing up like a pimp & prostitute and trap these underpaid workers trying to do good things for poor people.
And now Fox News is about to orgasm over these films.
I'd like to see hidden undercover cameras of Fox News "newsrooms" as they warplan their daily coverage to nail Obama and every non-conservative politician in the country.
The only appropriate response to the film makers would have been "I'm sorry; we can not help you in an illegal endeavor". I can't believe you would make excuses for them. Wrong is wrong not matter which side of the aisle it comes from.
I wonder if the people here feel betrayed by the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. The last time I looked the Congress was controlled by the dems and didn't the Congress rescind funding for acorn. Of course there was still 82 of our elected reps who still supported the criminal group known as acorn. I think the voters will remember.
link
One of her ex-husbands, Ronald Kaelke, 66, of Newberry Springs, said he was unaware of any investigation or that his ex-wife had made any claims of murder.
"The couple divorced in 1987, but attempted to reconcile and lived together from 2002 to 2005, Ronald Kaelke said in a telephone interview. In 2007, the couple traded allegations of domestic violence and received separate restraining orders against each other, he said.
"'As far as her murdering an ex-husband, that's news to me,' Ronald Kaelke said. 'She's definitely got problems and goes off the wall sometimes.'"
But I've got my own investigation going on. I just stopped in at Wal-Mart, where I bought a box of Zip-Loc baggies.
As the clerk was ringing me up, I asked if these would be suitable for packaging my "Mary Jane" which I would be "pushing" to school kids.
She replied "Sure, I guess".
Looks like I've got a large corporation with irrefutable ties to the GOP and many conservative groups clearly advising me on how to run an international drug ring.
And if you're sending one of the MJ bags to me, don't put a return address on the package.
Someone alert Cluster Fox!
How is this reporting fake murder story as a fact.
Watch the video (in the upper left hand corner on the home page). Both Hannity and Beck were gloating, outraged, they couldn't believe the evil of ACORN!
You don't play a video, use it as evidence for your outrage, and then later come back and say "Oh, we are actually not sure if it is true."
You investigate first, then report. Unless your FOX with an agenda.
Look! I can copy and paste some of the quotes MM provided down here too!
The most amusing part is, "I don't know, Nobody's asking questions."
Well, Becky, YOU WORK FOR A NEWS CHANNEL. Why don't you have anyone out there in the field asking questions? I know, with big-name advertisers jumping ship your budget may not be what it use to be, but come on.
Then WTF are you doing reporting it!
Between this and their breaking the law in VA, there's a reason such sting operations are best left to professionals.
That Fox Noise can 'report' this fake non-story as fact with such straight faces...
or
That many of the weak-minded fools that watch Fox and actually think this circus crap is real will actually believe this drivel??
I fully expect to see posters being drawn up claiming that ACORN and Obama himself helped murder the ex-husband (who is not dead of course and has publicly stated that it is patently false!) and being given air time during several future Fox Noise circus acts...er... um... news? casts.
Or, which is worse:
The fact that ACORN has registered millions of poor voters and never been convicted of voter fraud, but apparently has some people working for them with no common sense
OR
That the right wing really hates ACORN because it gets people registered who probably wouldn't vote for them, and has found a way to weaken this organization?
Which is a bigger threat to democracy, that ACORN has some bad workers, or that the right, by relentless attacks (which have been wrong in the past) can finally get rid of an organization that registers voters?
I went to youtube and watched the previous secret films of ACORN staff and the same unbelievable hooker/pimp combo. However, the real disturbing thing to me is that the ACORN workers in Baltimore & New York fell for the goofy act and gave illegal and terrible advice re: child prostitutes, income tax evasion, fradulent actions on buying houses, and on and on and on.
Tresa, an ACORN worker, didn't kill her husband and I'll assume she wasn't a hooker, either. But she does have some REAL legal problems-drugs, and a restraining order against a live husband. On her best day, she's a kook. I wonder how many other ACORN staff walk the line between kook and felonious acts of child endangerment and tax evasion?
"I fully expect to see posters being drawn up claiming that ACORN and Obama himself helped murder the ex-husband "
That comment is just dumb
If this is Beck's hero . . . wow!
Yes, I read that piece in Salon. Apparently, he was such a crazy anit-communists that even the Birchers thought he was nuts.
Mr. News
Are people on this board actually ok with an organization that is willing to aid two people to set up a brothel to exploit children through prostitution? Wow, shows you how far people will go to protect their ideology. If you can't be disgusted by people who are willing to help disguise the trafficking of children, you need a board like this to massage your weak minds. (the far right is no better but that is not an excuse)
I love how two low level employees of an organization somehow become he entire organization. Gov. Sanford cheated on his wife. By your logic, [i]ALL[i] Republicans cheat on their wives.
Except no child exploitation through prostitution actually happened.
Are nutjobs on this board actually ok with an organization (Blackwater) that is willing to exploit child prostitutes for its contractors? Because, that ACTUALLY happened.
If part of the olio of outrage concerning the previous tapes relates to the ACORN employee(s) failing to report this nefarious duo to the cops (though, as I understand it, they did at least once), how exactly do these hectoring harpies explain their pimp 'n ho likewise not reporting a woman who's just confessed to murder in their presence?
Color me flummoxed.
BTW, as with all things Republican, this will end badly for them. Think Tripp vs. Clinton, for example. Just where is the lovely Linda these days?
i'm waiting for a "news" operation to investigate haliburton..and the private military previously know as blackwater..now there's a real story..
Did she make the story up? I don't know. Nobody's asking questions.
Looks like it.
See if the mainstream media will follow this one.
No Glenn they're professionals and don't want to look like a complete idiots.
Cluster FOXed again..
Since my original post Katy Couric on CBS and other major media outlets have picked up the story. The scandal has now gone mainstream -- can't sweep it under the rug anymore and claim that it's just overblown conservative hype.
Mr. News
I think the real story are the quacks employeed at ACORN.
Details:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&group=00001-01000&file=630-638
It would appear in doing this "expose" these two trolls have committed a crime, no?
I wonder with all this attention if they will get the attention of the CA law enforcement bureaucracy.
The fact that nowadays technology has progressed to where *anyone* can spread viral video and reach millions is disturbing. Even more disturbing is that networks pick up and promote the sensational over the potentially more mundane "truthy" side of the story.
"Reality TV" has trumped all other types of programming. This programming is replicated on network news. Attention seeking individuals and groups will gravitate toward actions which allow for them to be in the limelight. Just like someone having 14 babies to make their living, Kanye acting out or horrible kids beating other kids to share on Youtube--people will arrive in droves wearing sidearms and displaying racist placards to get on television, or become the next #hashtag.
I agree with Obama when he refers to the shrill voices getting the attention. Bottom line is that there are so many easy ways for the "Joe The Plumbers" of America to get theirs. It is a cancer that is feeding upon itself. I'm just afraid that now the genie is out of the bottle and a return to normal discourse may not possible with this brave new world. That is unless major networks start refusing to carry such drivel. Fat chance given the fact that "if it bleeds it leads." It is increasingly clear to me that it is a hemorrhage at this point.