When a daring young man named James O’Keefe and a 20-year-old young woman named Hannah Giles rigged up some hidden video recorders and revealed the true depths of depravity of Barack Obama’s ACORN, you might have expected these whistleblowers to be treated like heroes in the media.

After all, they were doing the media’s work – the work the media had failed to do for so long, as this corrosive and corrupt gangster organization got fatter and meaner while collecting hundreds of millions from taxpayers.

Instead of welcoming O’Keefe and Giles into the fraternity and giving them awards for courage and making job offers, the media were downright hostile to the pair.

They weren’t asked how they did it. They weren’t even asked why they did it. They weren’t asked about the objects of their sting. There was little outrage or even concern expressed about ACORN officials willingly participating in exploiting under-age foreign girls as prostitutes or their eagerness to break other laws.

What did the media want to know about the ACORN tapes?

They wanted to know if O’Keefe, the 25-year-old mastermind of the operation, had been trained at the infamous Leadership Institute, a conservative political organization in Washington.

It was as if his motivations were somehow the issue.

Who cares where he was trained? It’s not like they taught Obi Won Kenobi Jedi-style mind control tricks at the Leadership Institute.

But that’s the point. To most of my colleagues in the media, it’s perfectly all right to lie about what Rush Limbaugh says and believes. It’s just not OK to give ACORN members an opportunity to reveal the kind of monsters they truly are.

I’m ashamed of my profession.

At least I’m ashamed of most of those who claim to be practitioners of my profession.

The arrogance, self-righteousness and cluelessness they exhibit is truly breathtaking.

I saw it again last week when we rolled out the new book “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Here is a story about three brave men – authors Paul Sperry, P. David Gaubatz and his son, Chris – who chronicled stunning new details about the secret operations of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, based in part on a covert six-month-long penetration of the group.

And how did the media react?

A typical story is one written by the Politico. It was so biased toward the unindicted terrorist co-conspirators that it was actually posted on CAIR’s website.

Nobody at Politico dreamed of talking to the authors to see what they had actually found. The entire story was constructed around the “wrongs” perpetrated against the innocent bystanders who make up one of the most important American beachheads of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same organization that spawned al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah.

It’s like a collective madness has overcome my colleagues. They’ve lost the ability to think clearly, reason and recognize real threats to freedom, justice and decency.

The worst threat they can see is an imaginary one – that always comes from that “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

The “extremists” they see are not people like Van Jones and John Holdren and Cass Sunstein and Kevin Jennings – people serving in the highest levels of government. Instead, the “extremists” they see are people like me – running an independent news agency on a virtual shoestring, or people like Sperry and the Gaubatzes, or people like O’Keefe and Giles.

Let me tell you something.

I’m no threat to your freedom. Neither are Sperry, the Gaubatzes, O’Keefe or Giles.

But if you want to discourage people like us from doing what we do, who is going to do it? If you want to give carte blanche to the ACORNs and CAIRs of the world to do their thing immune from exposure, where do you think that will lead?