James O'Keefe

James E. O'Keefe III is a right wing activist and video provocateur who engages in deceptive and context-stripping editing to present his targets unfavorably.

Actions

ACORN

"Mr. O’Keefe...first gained notice for secretly videotaping his exchanges with workers for the community organizing group Acorn who appeared to advise him how to avoid prosecution for a variety of unsavory activities like child prostitution."

but

"O’Keefe’s incriminating ACORN video was shown to have been heavily edited—neither he nor Hannah Giles were actually in pimp and prostitute get-up when they spoke to ACORN employees, for example—and no criminal prosecutions of ACORN followed. While not letting ACORN off the hook for showing “terrible judgment” in the video, California’s then-attorney general Jerry Brown noted after an investigation into the tapes and the organization that “sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”"

NPR's Bob Garfield noted to O'Keefe,

"You lie to get into - the offices. You lie, subsequently, about the lie you told to get into the offices. You edit the pimp shot into the trailer to create the illusion that you were somehow wearing it during your sting. You go on television wearing the same pimp outfit and let interviewers observe, uncorrected, that that’s what you were wearing when you confronted the ACORN employees."

Attempt to bug Mary Landrieu's office

O'Keefe "faces federal criminal charges in an alleged plot to bug the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Federal investigators charged that James O'Keefe was among four men who created a ruse to enter the lawmaker's downtown office, saying they needed to repair her telephones. O'Keefe used his cellphone to take pictures of two men involved in the Jan. 25 plot, according to court records unsealed Tuesday. Those men, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, are accused in an FBI agent's sworn affidavit of impersonating telephone company workers, while O'Keefe and another man, Stan Dai, are accused of aiding the plot.

Alleged seduction attempt

O'Keefe "allegedly tried to "punk" CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau by luring her on to a boat and seducing her...in front of hidden cameras."

Teachers

"a video, produced by O'Keefe's Project Veritas, titled "Teacher's Unions Gone Wild."...features attendees of a New Jersey Education Association conference at a hotel in August. Unaware they were being recorded, those at the conference were captured on tape in a number of compromising or indelicate moments..."

One outcome: a 9-day suspension for a teacher who'd earlier thrown herself in front of a van to protect her students, suffering broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes.

Koch network meetup

This was Andrew Breitbart, not O'Keefe.

NPR

After O'Keefe released video of an encounter between purported Muslim would-be donors and NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller, NPR head Vivian Schiller (no relation) was forced by her board to resign. As it transpired, the video had been deceptively edited.

"Glenn Beck’s conservative website, The Blaze, was first to report on discrepancies between the first edited eleven-and-a-half minute video released on the Project Veritas website and a later, unedited two-hour version.

Ron Schiller, one of the fundraisers who lunched with two people from Veritas’s fictional Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC), is hardly saved by The Blaze’s reporting. He still said what he said and he still comes across as a right fool in some ways. But crucial context was left [out]...

In the report... The Blaze addresses "whether the donors-in-disguise had made their fake Muslim Brotherhood connections clear to Schiller and Liley, contextualizes Schiller’s ‘attacks’ on Republicans (he actually ‘expresses pride in his Republican heritage’), and shows that Schiller was echoing the opinion of two top Republicans he had spoken to when describing the Tea Party as ‘racist people.’"

"

NPR's Bob Garfield objected to the selective editing, telling O'Keefe:

"there were no fewer than six times in the raw NPR footage where Ron Schiller or his colleague took pains to tell you that, no, you cannot for five million dollars or any other sum buy coverage on NPR, you cannot influence the news organization. And yet, that is conspicuously absent. Where you edited in his amused reaction to Sharia law, he had evinced no such amused reaction to Sharia law. In fact, it had been cut from one place and dropped in another. What is that, if not obfuscation?"

Relationship to the Tea Party Movement

In November, 2009, O'Keefe served as a keynote speaker before a crowd of about 4,000 Tea Party members at a rally in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The announcer credited O'Keefe with helping end the "tyranny of the left in America." O'Keefe greeted the crowd by saying, "Pimps and ho's"

O'Keefe's justification, and criticisms thereof

From CJR:

"“Journalists have been doing this for a long time,” [O’Keefe] argued. “It’s a form of investigative reporting that you use to seek and find the truth.”

[CJR's response/reinterpretation:] In this case: Seek. Find. And then mold."

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson objected to O'Keefe's tactics saying

"Do we really want private citizens deceiving, taping and exposing the foolish weaknesses of their neighbors...?

These tactics are not a new brand of gonzo journalism. They are a sophisticated version of the political dirty trick. Would it be citizen journalism to fool a senator’s psychiatrist into revealing demeaning information about his or her patient? Or to befriend a prominent conservative pastor, goad him into making homophobic statements, then edit, exaggerate and put them on the Internet?"

Criticism from conservatives regarding O'Keefe's Landrieu attempt

After O'Keefe was charged in this telephone scandal, conservatives distanced themselves from him. The Salt Lake City Republican Party canceled his appearance as a keynote speaker at their February 4, 2010 fundraiser. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin wrote that exposing wrongdoing is not an excuse to break the law, and that O'Keefe's alleged actions should be taken seriously. Conservative radio talk show host Rick Moran told his listeners that it looked as though O'Keefe had ignored the requirement that journalists be objective.

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• ACORN
• Andrew Breitbart

External articles

Wikipedia also has an article on James O'Keefe. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

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