Still lots of incessant whining from the right (surprise!) about how the mainstream new media isn't paying sufficient attention to the (supposedly) wildly important unfolding ACORN story. Breathless bloggers and the whole staff at Fox News continue to treat the it like a lunar landing for crying out loud.

But it terms of the serious press being reluctant or slow to pick up Fox News' ACORN scoops, staffers have their have only themselves to blame. And for two reasons. First, Fox News this year has pretty much stopped doing any straight news and instead has transformed itself into an openly partisan and political operation. And because Fox News has turned itself into the Opposition Party to the Obama White House, traditional journalists, of course, are going to treat everything Fox News reports with skepticism, especially it's so-called exclusives.

Fox News presents so little programming that still resembles journalism (i.e. Who, what, where, when, and why), that when it stumbles across an actual news story, or more specifically, when right-wing activists do all the leg work and give Fox News a news story, it's no surprise that the story airs with extraordinary baggage attached. And that people who not associated with the right-wing movement in American view it with skepticism.

Fox actually uncovering news? It's like Bizarro World.

And sure enough, Fox News confirmed everyone's suspicions when Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck erroneously claimed that an ACORN staffer in California had killed her husband. (She did no such thing.)

And that brings me to the second reason the press was correctly skeptical about Fox News' ACORN reporting--during the fall campaign last year Rupert Murdoch's team went batshit crazy over ACORN, referencing the org nearly 1,500 times during the closing weeks of the campaign. And guess what? Fox News didn't uncover one new fact in the process. Not one.

Meaning, there's a Cried Wolf syndrome at play here. Last year Fox News launched a crusade/charade and turned itself into all-ACORN-all-the-time last year. But it terms of actual news, it produced zero. Nada. Zilch. It contributed nothing journalistically to the story. It simply fomented fear for a relatively obscure community organizing group. So perhaps it's not surprising that for this year's ACORN Crusade 2.0, journalists aren't quite sure what to make of it, given the fact that the first one was such a farce.

The bottom line is Fox News suddenly wants to be taken seriously as a news outlet. It wants real journalists to pick up on its big scoops. Great, but if Fox News actually practiced journalism on a regularly basis, and if Fox News hadn't spent last October scapegoating ACORN for all of America's ills, other journalists might actually take its scoops more seriously.