Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Alex G]

"...James O'Keefe's "exposé" of a meeting between two NPR fundraisers and two men purporting to be members of the made-up Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) drew criticism from an unexpected quarter last week. Glenn Beck's website, "The Blaze," ran a critique titled, "Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?" The short answer: Yes.


James O'Keefe and Journalistic Malpractice
By Lindsay Beyerstein | Posted 03/14/2011 at 09:43 AM
http://prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=03&year=2011&base_name=james_okeefe_and_journalistic

"That's the thing I don't like about this country, people like to make snap judgements," NPR's top fundraising officer, Ron Schiller, told two prospective "donors" at a tony Georgetown trattoria. Schiller didn't know he was being covertly recorded by two operatives from James O'Keefe's right-wing propaganda outlet, Project Veritas.

James O'Keefe's "exposé" of a meeting between two NPR fundraisers and two men purporting to be members of the made-up Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) drew criticism from an unexpected quarter last week. Glenn Beck's website, "The Blaze," ran a critique titled, "Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?" The short answer: Yes.

The post compares sections of the heavily edited video segment that O'Keefe released last week with what O'Keefe claims is the raw video of the two-hour lunch meeting. The author of the post, Scott Baker, and his colleague, video producer Pam Key, demonstrate how the tapes were dishonestly edited. The release of the video prompted NPR's top fundraiser to re-resign. Schiller had already announced his departure for a new job the week before, but in classic NPR style he felt it necessary to preemptively re-resign. The head of NPR, Vivian Schiller (no relation), resigned or was fired shortly thereafter.

The Blaze identifies eight questionable aspects of the edited video, ranging from how much the NPR execs supposedly knew about MEAC to possible audio tampering.

I don't usually regard The Blaze as a credible source, and I wonder why a Glenn Beck platform is giving space to debunk James O'Keefe -- but their critique seemed plausible enough that I was moved to watch the entire two-hour meeting to see for myself. Baker and Key did a bang-up job.

If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O'Keefe's provocateurs didn't get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason. Schiller pointedly informs the fake donors that NPR broke with some very generous Jewish benefactors who had supported NPR for over a decade because they tried to tell NPR that it "couldn't have so much Palestinian coverage."

"And we said, 'sorry,'" Schiller says, "And we lost their funding, and it's gone."

In light of the Blaze post, James Poniewozik of TIME's "Tuned In" blog admits that he reposted O'Keefe's video without watching the entire two-hour exchange and suggests that many other reporters did the same.

Poniewozik speculates that O’Keefe posted the extended video because he was confident that “by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people's minds and the ideological battle won.”

The real scandal is not whether Schiller holds a grudge against the anti-intellectual wing of the GOP that is constantly trying to defund NPR to score political points. He pretty clearly does, but his fate shows that his stated misgivings were more than justified. Federal funding accounts for about 2% of NPR’s total budget but the network spends an inordinate amount of time defending itself from Republican ideologues in Congress. Republicans set out to defund NPR last year because the network fired commentator Juan Williams after he confessed to Bill O’Reilly that he’s afraid to fly with anyone sporting “Muslim garb.”

More importantly, this brings us to question the mainstream media’s ongoing credulity towards James O’Keefe. He has done this before. Many newspaper reports identified O’Keefe as the activist who brought down ACORN with an undercover sting. In 2009, O’Keefe and a confederate claimed to be a pimp and a prostitute seeking help from ACORN for various nefarious activities. The videos sparked a national scandal that led to Congress defunding ACORN without due process.

In the wake of the NPR sting, the Saint Petersburg Times was one of the few papers to mention that O’Keefe’s most famous work did not hold up to scrutiny. Even today, media reports continue to allege that O’Keefe wore a pimp costume when he met with ACORN workers. In fact, he dressed casually for the office visits, but he wore a blacksploitation-style outfit on his post-sting media blitz and invited the inference that he wore the getup during the sting.

At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O'Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice. O’Keefe is openly proffering propaganda. That alone should be enough to make news outlets and pundits disregard his work. On top of that, he has been caught distorting videos in ways that would get any real reporter fired. Yet media outlets are willing to launder O'Keefe videos by presenting them as real news, even though they know he's not a trustworthy source.

Nothing O’Keefe produces should be taken at face value. Nothing he edits should be taken seriously at all. Given his track record, the rule should be: Raw footage, independently vetted by an independent forensic analyst, or it didn't happen.