To recap:
O'Keefe and the attractive young Hannah Giles did a kind of amateur sting. They played pimp and ho, went to a few ACORN offices and pretended to be seeking mortgages to set up shop -- including, in some cases, the use of illegal alien minors to serve as prostitutes.
It looks like several ACORN employees took the bait and actively counseled the two on "how to" file fraudulent mortgage applications.
PROBLEM: when O'Keefe and Giles released the fruits of their labors in video format to the world, they did not acknowledge that they had engaged in some editing. That need not be a major problem. All actual news organizations edit. But if the editing STILTS the message being sent, it is not fair and it is not valid journalism.
It APPEARS that the edits done by O'Keefe were on the unfair and misleading side -- to some extent.
HERE is a link to several of the CALIFORNIA tapes (courtesy of that nut-job AG, former Governor, Jerry Brown):
News & Alerts - California Dept. of Justice - Office of the Attorney General
OR, Mr. O'Keefe himself offers some of the full unedited tapes HERE:
James O'Keefe - Big Government
My take on this is pretty straightforward. Editing improperly is piss-poor "journalism" and undercuts O'Keefe's otherwise solid claim to some cred. ON THE OTHER HAND, the ACORN workers did, by and large (but not universally) offer to assist or did provide some forms of assistance to a pimp and a ho (so they thought) in the prospective filing of fraudulent mortgage documents.
O'Keefe MIGHT come out with a small ethical/journalistic black eye. and to the extent he did a hack job of editing, he deserves it.
But ACORN still gets JUSTIFIABLY and VALIDLY EXPOSED for what their own employees were recorded saying. The context is still crystal clear -- poor editing job notwithstanding.