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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Media Idiots Open Thread: O’Keefe & the Power of a Truly TERRIBLE Example

Media Idiots Open Thread: O’Keefe & the Power of a Truly TERRIBLE Example

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Maybe I’m just a wide-eyed optimist, but O’Keefe’s latest failed “prank” feels like it might be some kind of media tipping point… he’s just such a clown luzer, like a wafer-thin mint after Mr. Creosote’s dinner…


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Even the Establishment Wingnut Wurlitzer apparatchiks are embarrassed / annoyed!


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And here’s an interesting point…

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  4. 4.

    Kay

    James O’Keefe was paid 200k last year. A statehouse reporter in Ohio makes about 30k. State law, so education, health care, criminal justice, courts, voting rights- in other words everything that impacts regular people every day..

    There is something going badly wrong with the media market. It’s broken. It pays huge sums for crap and nothing for value.

    You saw the debates. How much does that morning show anchor make, the one who asked about NOTHING that actually impacts people? Millions. Every year. This market rewards crap and punishes value. It’s not working.

  5. 5.

    Big Ole Hound

    And now the right wing gets caught creating the famous “FAKE NEWS”. Lets see if 45 says a word. It will be “vewy vewy quiet”.

  6. 6.

    trollhattan

    @DCrefugee:
    Nope. They’ll keep swatting at ruses like a kitten going for the same old ball of yarn.

    Republicans and their skeevy operatives keep trying these pranks not so much out of the calculation that some percentage will succeed as much as they believe their own myths on how corrupt and inept their “enemies” are–enemy meaning every Democrat and sliver of media they do not expressly control. “Crooked Hillary is crooked.”

  7. 7.

    Kay

    I blame media for this. They all played those O’Keefe tapes as if they were some real time depiction of actual events in the acorn situation.

    They had no fucking idea if those tapes were doctored. They recklessly smeared those people. No one does that. You can’t submit tape in a court case and say “I took this so that makes it true”- of course he fucking screwed with it. They were more than willing to go along with O’Keefe when acorn activists were smeared. He was a “journalist” then. What happened?

  8. 8.

    randy khan

    To any objective observer, this story shows that the Post is careful, does its research, and is vigilant about false claims. (As an aside, the Post’s lawyers must have loved this story, and the video in particular.) To people who still support Moore, it means nothing.

  9. 9.

    Jeffro

    PULL IT!! PULL THAT GREAT “BIG DANGLING (MOTHERFUCKING) THREAD!” Let’s have a field day, media people – you owe it to yourselves!! And when you’re done eviscerating O’Keefe, ask Orangemandias what he thinks about #FakeNews now!!

    BOOM in eleventy-thousand point type…BOOM!!

  10. 10.

    Gin & Tonic

    Somehow I can’t imagine the NYT being as thorough as the WaPo was on this story. Look at the timeline – basically over Thanksgiving weekend they decided to have someone staking out O’Keefe’s office in Westchester on Monday morning.

  11. 11.

    Kay

    Remember when they were all gleefully broadcasting the Acorn smear? That was presented AS FACT by news media, because who cares about the reputation of a lowly liberal activist? At that time O’Keefe was presented as a ‘gonzo journalist”

    “It seems that the master of the cleverly edited—if highly deceptive—video reel is now being required to pay the sum of $100,000 to Juan Carlos Vera, a one time California employee of ACORN. Mr. Vera had been portrayed by O’Keefe as being a willing participant when O’Keefe and his accomplice, Hanna Giles, proposed smuggling young women into the United States to work as prostitutes.”

    They created this monster and they only objected when he went after THEM.

  12. 12.

    Jacel

    Another person working at Project Veritas is Robert J. Halderman, the TV producer who finished serving his jail time after blackmailing David Letterman. O’Keefe attracts the cream of the crop.

  13. 13.

    lurker dean

    speaking of media, saw on twitter that olbermann is completely disengaging from politics. kind of strange considering how anti-trump he’s been. and now today, joe scarborough said he’s taking down his anti-trump tweets. could be complete coincidence i guess, but seems too coincidental.

    i sent a bunch of faxes today. collins and murkowski seemed to take a while to go through, hopefully a good sign.

  14. 14.

    Roger Moore

    Not sure it would serve a purpose. Who are the persuadables who would be reached?

    I think the goal would be to embarrass their enablers in the media by showing just how stupid and awful they are.

  17. 17.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Considering how bad the conformation bias is with conservatives now I am honestly surprised that no one on the Right is screaming this video is proof the Washington Post fabricates their stories.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    @Humboldtblue: Loved the video. And loved the translation one person provided:

    Full translation from french, for the curious
    At the beginning: GIRL: “Mets-toi a l’envers!” Place yourself upside down!
    DAD: “Oui, on y va!” Yeah, let’s go!
    GIRL: “Encore! Encore!” Again! Again!
    DAD: “Ca va?” How are you?
    DAD (at the end): ” Ben voyons, on se repose. Deux minutes.” Come on, we will take a break. Two minutes.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    Here’s the (horrible) NYTimes making O’Keefe out to be some sort of brave muckraker:

    To him, this was the most galling restriction. O’Keefe aspires to more than making movies. He seems to be styling himself as the organizer and commander in chief of a vast guerrilla army of young conservatives trained in his methods and inspired by his example. “There are already dozens of teams out there working,” he told me. “And there are thousands more who want to learn and get involved. The more they restrict me, the more they inspire me.” He extracted a cellphone from the pocket of his work shirt. “Have you ever heard of a Russian named Solzhenitsyn?” he asked. The question reminded me that O’Keefe, who in some ways is knowing and cynical, is also just 27. For a moment I thought he was going to call the Soviet dissident, who died in 2008, but he simply wanted to access and declaim a few lines of a Solzhenitsyn speech on liberty, law and the abuse of government power, which he thought I should find relevant to his predicament.

    this was 6 years ago.

    AFTER the NYTimes had to publish an explanation for why they promoted the acorn smear as fact when the tape was doctored. They were still treating him like a hero.

  20. 20.

    piratedan

    @Kay: agreed Kay, the people doing the face time are idiots and it makes you wonder what special set of skills are needed to be a face on the magic screen. I guess you have to be able to listen to the voice in your head and read the words from the prompter and have no innate sense of awareness about anything to qualify, who knew that these kinds of skills were in demand?

  22. 22.

    Humboldtblue

    Wildfires destroyed more than 8,000 homes and killed 43 people in October and it was a tragic end to a bitter fire season here in northern California where hundreds of thousands of acres of wildlands burned.

    One of the tactics used by wildland firefighters is the use of retardants dropped from planes in an effort to slow the spread of the fire so that hand crews have time to construct containment lines.

    Two studies now show that the retardant is very bad for water quality and is a killer of chinook salmon.

  23. 23.

    West of the Cascades

    James O’Keefe deciding to go up against a team led by Marty Baron backed by Jeff Bezos’s money was like the day in October 1916 that Cumberland College decided to play Georgia Tech (coached by John Heisman of later Trophy fame) in a football game — although the final score of that game (222-0) wasn’t quite as lopsided as the Post’s obliteration of O’Keefe here.

  25. 25.

    Kay

    @piratedan:

    By the time they all corrected their reports Acorn was all but gone. mission accomplished. O’Keefe couldn’t have pulled it off BUT FOR the endorsement of ‘real’ journalists.

    they need to uphold their own (supposed) standards – if they want to be considered reliable they should stop promoting these frauds.

    But Breitbart told me that, after doing his own examination, “I am under the impression that at no time was he ever dressed as an elaborate pimp” in the offices. Because O’Keefe was apparently carrying the hidden camera, he is generally not visible in the videos, but he is seen briefly entering the Baltimore office wearing a blue shirt and chinos.
    I could not reach O’Keefe — who is facing federal criminal charges of tampering with a Democratic senator’s phone in a different attempted sting — or Giles. But I am satisfied that The Times was wrong on this point, and I have been wrong in defending the paper’s phrasing. Editors say they are considering a correction.

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Considering how bad the conformation bias is with conservatives now I am honestly surprised that no one on the Right is screaming this video is proof the Washington Post fabricates their stories.

    Oh, they will. They will.

  28. 28.

    Tilda Swintons Bald Cap

    I guess we can all agree that the NYT is a failed institution that does actual harm to us all. What do we do about it?

  29. 29.

    gratuitous

    Golly, doesn’t James O’Keefe have the worst luck? Some random woman visits the Washington Post – of all places – trying to peddle a fake story about misconduct by Roy Moore. But instead of fooling the reporters, she gets exposed as a liar, and then she goes to the offices of Project Veritas – of all places – to hide out for an hour or so. Such a total coincidence and a confluence of unlikely events that it boggles the mind to contemplate all the happenstance that mixed together to victimize poor James, who is, of course, the REAL victim here.

  30. 30.

    No Drought No More

    Accept that some of the American people can be fooled all the time, and it stands to reason other people will feast on their gullibility. To be sure, O’Keeferino has turned malicious incompetence into high art. As has the republican party, across the board. The card tricks the GOP has been playing since diving off the board into an empty pool in 1980 been all played out. We’ve already hit rock bottom with a republican party traitor in the White House.

    RUSSIA OWNS TRUMP.

    THE 2017 REPUBLICAN PARTY ARE ACTIVE AND WILLING PARTICIPANTS IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S ONGOING TREASON.

    CONGRESS IS SOVEREIGN, AND WHAT’S UNFOLDING BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES DOES NOT REQUIRE ROBERT MUELLER’S OKEE-DOKE TO ATTACK AS BEING A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE VERY LIFE BLOOD OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. THE UNITED STATES IS UNDER ATTACK ITSELF FROM WITHIN, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS THE ATTACKING CANCER.

  31. 31.

    SFAW

    Is it too much to hope that Chuckles Johnson (Rage Furby?) tries the same shit, and is then publicly humiliated? [Actually, I’d prefer that he dox-es the wrong person, and the public humiliation comes in the form of a savage beat-down. But that’s because I’m an evil bastard. I guess it’s 10 Ave Marias and 10 Pater Nosters for me.]

  33. 33.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Kay: I don’t know, you could read in between the lines of that quote that the NYT is saying reporter is O’Keefe is this clueless kid who wants the appearance of heroically fighting the system but understands nothing. Then again, why doesn’t the reporter say that outright? Perhaps that is not a popular position with the NYT management.

  34. 34.

    Ruviana

    All of this is why I’ve been less than enthusiastic about jumping on the “Let’s get Franken” bandwagon, complete with anonymous sources.

  36. 36.

    PIGL

    @Kay: Most of today’s markets “reward crap and punish value”. And nom they are not working. It’s the destruction without the creative part. The problem is the intrusion of a narrow business-school version of the market idea into every field of endeavour.

  37. 37.

    Brachiator

    @Tilda Swintons Bald Cap:

    I guess we can all agree that the NYT is a failed institution that does actual harm to us all.

    Really?

    What do we do about it?

    Don’t buy it? Don’t visit the site? Support superior journalism efforts?

  42. 42.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Kay: This why he’s never targeted The New York Nazi Times. They bought him off with their kiss-ass press coverage.

  44. 44.

    quakerinabasement

    So I assume that this means, in the fever swamps of InfoWars, that O’Keefe is actually an MSM stooge?

  46. 46.

    Cacti

    @Ruviana:

    All of this is why I’ve been less than enthusiastic about jumping on the “Let’s get Franken” bandwagon, complete with anonymous sources.

    But knee jerk assumptions of guilt are so much easier.

  47. 47.

    germy

    I wonder if the woman who accused Franken of “inviting her into a bathroom” was involved in a similar scam. That particular accusation seems to have fizzled out.

  50. 50.

    gvg

    If this turns out to be a turning point, it will be in showing a way for ethical media to turn the tables on liars. We have been complaining about it for years, that journalists don’t out sources that lied.
    It’s actually tricky, because people legitimately can be wrong and if you out everyone, the real leaks that are needed won’t come out. but to me it has looked like some of those sources the last 20+ years were telling lies for gain and not paying. Also corrections and retractions weren’t changing the original story. If this heads off most of the nonsense outrage ion the right and the Post looks good in the story, then other media will start doing it too…slowly.

  51. 51.

    TenguPhule

    Maybe I’m just a wide-eyed optimist, but O’Keefe’s latest failed “prank” feels like it might be some kind of media tipping point

    You’re a wild eyed optimist.

    He’s going to try and try again.

    He only has to get lucky once. The media has to catch him every time.

  53. 53.

    TenguPhule

    @Kay:

    This market rewards crap and punishes value. It’s not working.

    Feature, not a bug.

    The Republicans want ignorance to sell.

  54. 54.

    Cacti

    @gvg:

    If this turns out to be a turning point, it will be in showing a way for ethical media to turn the tables on liars.

    And the secret was, committing basic journalism and exercising due diligence.

  55. 55.

    Kay

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    they’re horrible They cover everything like it’s all delightful lifestyle choices. I don’t know- isn’t this stuff supposed to go on the pages with recipes and rich people getting married?

    o’keffe smeared real people. he made them out to be pimps. real damage was done. They promoted it.

  56. 56.

    trollhattan

    @Humboldtblue:
    We drove through the Atlas Fire zone on Thursday. A lot of the burn pattern was checkerboard-y but it went on for a looong way. Of course the farther west we were the more razed homes we encountered. Napa Valley was alive with major construction equipment running around despite its being Thanksgiving.

  57. 57.

    Brachiator

    @divF:

    @The Simp in the Suit: Pied.
    @Daddio7: Pied.

    They are out in force today.

    A sad indication that these morons will not pipe down when people like O’Keefe are shown to be frauds.

    It’s just nuts that people like this cannot be reasoned with.

  58. 58.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Kay:

    James O’Keefe was paid 200k last year. A statehouse reporter in Ohio makes about 30k. State law, so education, health care, criminal justice, courts, voting rights- in other words everything that impacts regular people every day..

    There is something going badly wrong with the media market. It’s broken. It pays huge sums for crap and nothing for value.

    You saw the debates. How much does that morning show anchor make, the one who asked about NOTHING that actually impacts people? Millions. Every year. This market rewards crap and punishes value. It’s not working.

    It was always going to do a certain amount of that. But back when the FCC still expected broadcasters to serve “the public interest, convenience, and necessity” in a meaningful way, there were some guardrails on how bad it could get.

    Then Reagan’s FCC chair, Mark Fowler (may he be spat upon every time he steps outside his door), decided that the market sufficed to determine what the public interest, etc., was, and the guardrails were off. So from then on (that was 1981, IIRC), the broadcasters needed to only pay for whatever pulled in the viewers.

    (Fowler was also the guy who deep-sixed the Fairness Doctrine a few years later, which is why Fox News and right-wing talk radio can be ‘safe spaces’ for wingnuts. But that’s another story.)

  59. 59.

    Kay

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch:

    They also carefully ignored the race angle of o’keefe’s “early work”. He targeted ACORN because they register minority voters.

    His bullshit Ohio “sting” consisted of trying to smear a social worker for offering public benefits. She makes 30k a year. Truth to power! Yeah, right

    christ the FOX hosts make more in a week than she makes in a year but they were all thrilled at the prospect that he had caught the black lady doing something or other

    they DESERVE O’Keefe. They made him

  60. 60.

    JustRuss

    @randy khan: Just as importantly, it show that if you fuck with the Post, they will burn you. Seems like the FTFNYT is too eager to say “We got played by an anonymous source, but we can’t say who, because that just wouldn’t be ethical.”

  62. 62.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Vhh:

    Marty Baron took on the Boston diocese of the Catholic Church. He is not to be trifled with.

    Charles P. Pierce was always a big fan of Marty Baron, but Pierce reads the Boston Globe and I don’t. Now that Baron’s at the WaPo, it’s become clear to me just why Pierce respects him so much.

  64. 64.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Kay: ACORN was such a great organization. At my local library they used to have tax preparers at night to help people file their returns for free. They used to give classes on credit repair and how to save and construct a budget. Perhaps their biggest class was on how to buy a house and qualify for special below market mortgages (le programs for city workers, first time buyers, etc.). They did it all for free. Didn’t matter what your income was.

    Or course, elitists in the media had no use for such services or even libraries so had no knowledge of the breath of their work and eagerly joined the feeding frenzy to prove they aren’t liburel and “both sides”.

  66. 66.

    James E. Powell

    @Kay:

    To the corporate press/media, value means advertising revenue. They publish and broadcast whatever brings the biggest audience. Anyone claiming that the press/media serve a higher purpose than generating income for the owners should be regarded as an idiot or a liar.

  69. 69.

    Barbara

    @NickM: O’Keefe also tried to get some public employees in South Carolina fired after they gave him an application for welfare benefits when he showed up at their office in a kilt talking in a pretend Scottish accent about how he had just arrived and wanted to sign up for welfare. I am guessing that he wasn’t the oddest person who wandered into their office even on that day, and of course, they give an application to anyone — they don’t determine eligibility based on a personal encounter. That’s what the application is for. These were not well-funded media employees who have more resources to defend themselves. O’Keefe is a racist fuck who has found his own special niche in the gravy train that funds people just for being racist fucks.

  71. 71.

    sharl

    @David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: ACORN was such a great organization. At my local library they used to have tax preparers at night to help people file their returns for free. They used to give classes on credit repair and how to save and construct a budget. Perhaps their biggest class was on how to buy a house and qualify for special below market mortgages (le programs for city workers, first time buyers, etc.). They did it all for free. Didn’t matter what your income was.

    ~
    ~

    the lost history is that ACORN warned about the housing bubble/mortgage fraud before anyone and that is why they were destroyed https://t.co/vh3bR0pY4m— Atrios (@Atrios) November 27, 2017

    white journalists bought the ACORN smear because they are racists,but aside from that ACORN knew what was up before the financial press
    ~
    I went to an ACORN presidential forum in.. 2007? they were all there. obama, edwards, clinton. Every question was about mortgage fraud and they candidates were all clueless
    ~
    I’m exaggerating a bit and my memory is not perfect but…

    KFalcon‏ @songbird145A

    I was familiar with their work in Brooklyn and found them to be dedicated to the promotion of civil rights and neighborhood preservation. Good people with an honorable mission.

    As someone noted in atrios’ thread, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) was also on this well before the 2008 financial/housing collapse hit in full. But he and ACORN were relatively rare exceptions.

    I agree with Atrios that the targeting of ACORN was not by coincidence. Like the Black Lives Matter movement – also under constant attack – it was a group with the knowledge, skill and determination to fight for the disadvantaged, despite having very limited resources. There are groups with deep pockets who clearly find them a threat.

  72. 72.

    But her emails!!!

    @germy:

    He’s fundraising off of it. And probably being flooded with donations.

    O’Keefe’s organization gets much of its funding from larger donors. I think something like half of its revenue was from two sources of 1 million or larger and over 75% from donations of over 5K. Collecting small donations from garden variety wingnuts isn’t what really pays his salary.

  73. 73.

    Ridnik Chrome

    @divF: Think you’re misreading the Simp. He’s saying the WaPo is unfair to Democrats, not that they’re mean to Republicans. That’s how it looks to me, anyway.

  74. 74.

    Noncarborundum

    @low-tech cyclist:
    As I understand it, Fox News as a cable, not broadcast, outlet would never have been subject to the Fairness Doctrine. But it would certainly have had an impact on talk radio.

  75. 75.

    sharl

    @But her emails!!!: Do you happen to recall where you saw the information about Veritas’ major donors? A lot of people are wondering about the identities of those Sugar Daddies, myself included. The $10K Veritas got from the Trump Org., and the $10-30K from Peter Thiel are both known, but those amounts come nowhere close to accounting for what Veritas has been receiving since 2012, per the 2016 tax filing attached to this tweet:

    2016 tax filing for James O'Keefe's Project Veritas is now publicly available. Their income, and O'Keefe's compensation (he made $240k in 2015), both increased considerably pic.twitter.com/Ca4agehVT4— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) November 27, 2017

    ~
    The large sums received by Veritas seem likely to have come from very major donors – as in, individual 6 or 7-figure donations – rather than these reported low 5-figure amounts. But the 2016 tax filing by Veritas doesn’t provide donor IDs (I assume they’re not required to report that, though I’m not a tax lawyer, so don’t actually know).

  77. 77.

    But her emails!!!

    @sharl:

    I don’t recall where I saw the information, but I don’t believe the name of the donors was attached. Looking at the form 990 for 2015, you can see total donations of 1.5 and 1 million respectively for the year for single donors. You just can’t ID who/what those donors are because they’re blacked out. That’s two donors providing 2.5 million out of 3.7 million in total revenue for the year. That’s over 2/3.

  78. 78.

    sharl

    @But her emails!!!: Thanks! The solid confirmation of the existence of such major individual donors – even though they’re unidentified – is farther along that I had gotten to date (and is no surprise).

  79. 79.

    J R in WV

    @Noncarborundum:

    You are correct as to the original Fairness Doctrine, which applied to broadcast media. But that isn’t carved in stone, as we saw when it melted away in the powerful heat generated by Reagan’s lies and appointees.

    But there is nothing to stop legislatures from defining a fairness doctrine somewhat like the original Fairness Doctrine, and using the fact that these corporations are using valuable things granted to them by the government, like the eminent domain right to run fiber and cables across other’s property, like the use of orbital space owned by the government(s) like the right to narrowcast data to and from those orbital receiver/transmitters, etc. Not to mention the First Amendment, which protects the media; it does not allow them to lie about cause and effect, to lie about people’s goals, etc.

    And I think that if judges and justices attempted to overturn that Fairness Doctrine, those anti-American anti-free press judges and justices should be impeached for aiding and abetting those seek to overthrow our way of life. Just my opinion, worth every penny you all paid for it!

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