Right-wing media sting hitman O'Keefe targets Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen over Occupy Wall Street

[Video Link: "To Catch a Journalist."]

On the website of Andrew Breitbart, who wasn't always like this, this item today:

Earlier this morning, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released a new video that sheds light on the way the New York Times promotes its favored candidates and causes, from Barack Obama to Occupy Wall Street.

Veritas, my ass. Their video is above, and the rest of the mess is here. Rosen says, "They tried to entrap us." He tells me they'll respond shortly.

• [bklynchris]

  Really?  Shirky and Rosen?  They’re setting themselves some pretty lofty goals, does their Veritas really have that kind of gravitas?  Me thinks not…

  btw-I can’t watch the video, O’Keefe is hard to wash off the eyeballs.

• [GuyInMilwaukee]

  Catch them doing what? Having an opinion? O’Keefe is certifiable.

• [Doran]

  There’s an increasing whiff of desperation coming from the Right Wing.

• [Guest]

  This is my phoned in ad hominem comment about O’Keefe. Not worth actual effort.

• [DavidKayMLS]

  they misspelled Shirky’s name in the video?!  Are those guys idiots?

  • [JProffitt71]

    they misspelled Shirky’s name in the video?!  Are those guys idiots?

    And it was at that instant when people realized that something wasn’t right.

    Haha : p

  • [Cowicide]

    Are those guys idiots?

    Nobody does unhinged, obtuse, cognitive dissonant, (and did I mention obtuse?) idiocy better than conservatives.

    Nobody.

• [GawainLavers]

  Andrew Breitbart, who wasn’t always like this

  ?  Must have been before I was born.

  • [GawainLavers]

    He changed his political views after experiencing an “epiphany” during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and now describes himself as “a Reagan conservative” with libertarian sympathies.[Wikipedia]

    I can’t even begin to make any sense out of that.

  • [JonCarter]

    What is Xeni even talking about? Andrew Beitbart didn’t even write the post. Joel Pollak did. Also, the post isn’t event that bad. Did you only look at the video?

• [Leanne Palmer]

  Why anyone in their right mind would even give O’Keefe the time of day puzzles me.

• [CSBD]

  What happened to O’keefe going to federal prison for trying to illegally wiretap a US Congresswoman’s office?

  • [Matthew]

    He got a plea deal, 100 hours of community service, and a fine.  Good lawyers.

  • [RB]

    Hi, CSBD. You should get out more. Those charges were dropped. He plead to a misdemeanor for entering a federal building under false pretenses.

    I hate to be the one who breaks it to you.

    • [Snig]

      So, any of OWS who dressed up as a phone repair man, entered a Republican’s  congressman’s office and proceeded to tap a phone line would get only one night in jail, a $15oo fine and be placed on double secret probation for three years?  We know charges were dropped, the fact they were shows the system is broken. He belongs to a long line of privileged Republican Ratfuckers who believe the law is for other people.

• [Matthew]

  Am I supposed to be outraged about something?  Sounds like a typical journalism class discussion.  I’m not sure what point the conservative team is trying to show.

• [Idon’t Know]

  Breitbart is a rich kid who has never had a job in his life.  But he is an angry little thing anyway.

• [CSBD]

  Google-fu has given quite an interesting read on this douche (O’Keefe) and his getting out of some serious jail time for the attempted wiretapping(due to friends in the republican party)

  http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7863

  Why didnt the Watergate people get to plea their way out of it?

  • [Jack Feerick]

    O’Keefe avoided jail time, yeah, but he is under house arrest — his trip to NYC could violate the terms of his parole, since he is supposed to notify the authorities any time he leaves his home state of New Jersey. So this little stunt could cost him big-time.

    I won’t go so far as to actively wish him ill; but if he does end up busting rocks in Leavenworth over this, I’m going to say it’s no great loss to our free society.

    • [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

      Aw, come on. Don’t send him to Kansas. We’ve got enough idiots. 

• [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

  When did the Times start loving Occupy Wall Street? I must have missed that coverage. 

  • [Strato Head]

    http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/occupy_wall_street/index.html?inline=nyt-org

    “love” might be a strong word… but they certainly have plenty of online coverage.

• [Crispian]

  The comments on how the NYT should/does cover stories certainly wasn’t flattering about journalism. These two guys were clearly giving their opinion on why they thought the NYT covers stories as it does (and thus are quite possibly wrong) but the fact they are apparently teaching journalism in such a way is discouraging.

  As for the persons O’Keefe and Breitbart: most people don’t care who they are. Most people won’t care about this story. It won’t impact any election. This is political minutae that gets internet folks all worked up. It encourages people to hate the most minor of characters on the political battlefield.

  For any of us who happen to continue following this story (let’s be honest, very very few of us will), we’ll see how Rosen responds.

  • [Lurking_Grue]

    > but the fact they are apparently teaching journalism in such a way is discouraging.

    I suppose it’s just being honest.

• [Jonathan]

  As I understand it, ownership intervention in NYT coverage is normal, as I would imagine it is in any newspaper.

  Here’s a good read on the “blue notes” that NYT owner Arthur Sulzberger used to send his editors to influence coverage: An Interested Reader: Measuring Ownership Control at the New York Times.

  NYT pushing for Obama: sure. NYT pushing for OWS: harder to swallow. If anything, they’re economically incentivized to *not* support OWS. Their ownership is firmly in the 1%. The wealthiest man in the world even owns a 6.4% stake in the paper.

  I think the far-left does a much better job of criticizing NYT than the far-right.

  • [jerwin]

    It’s also available here, should you prefer the comparable sanity of a pdf or a single page of text over clicking through 30 ad laden pages.

• [Brainspore]

  I can’t stomach ten minutes of O’Keefe. Can someone please summarize the terrible truths they uncovered in this latest exposé?

• [Roanhouse]

  Isn’t this proof that James O’Keefe violated his probation that mandated who couldn’t leave New Jersey (where he resides with his parents) with out it being cleared by a judge?

  • [opendna]

    Yeah, so? It’s at least the second time he’s violated his probation in a month. (He also made a trip down to OWS.)

• [ill lich]

  O’Keefe and Breitbart realize one important thing: it doesn’t matter how honest or dishonest their own reporting is, it doesn’t matter that they edit the tapes to imply something other than what is actually being said, the end result is  they will get publicity, and the truth of what was actually said will be lost.  To this day most people who know of the original O’Keefe “sting” with Acorn don’t know that the unedited tapes show that the Acorn volunteers were often humoring him or in fact tried to get him removed from their offices either because they realized he was a crank (really?  that ridiculous pimp outfit?) or because they thought he might have been telling the truth (in some cases they actually called the police.)

  As for this video– there is a certain implication that Rosen  is somehow revealing actual NYT policy, when he is just a professor talking about the media as a whole (let’s see O’Keefe delve into Fox News policy, or Rosen’s thoughts about Fox News, which would be equally as damning if he were revealing actual company policy .)   In fact his use of the word “elite” is more a tongue in cheek reference to how the right likes to portray the media than any kind of serious admission that he IS one of the elites (except, as he says, because he and the journalism students actually look at the whole picture, unlike most Americans), but that won’t matter to the loyal Fox News minions who will point and say “SEE SEE?! MEDIA ELITES!!”

• [Roanhouse]

  I find it directly disgusting that they would censor their own cellphone number but not censor Rosen’s. I hope James O’keefe gets caught in a very uncomfortable position in the back of a Volkswagen 

• [Incipient Madness]

  I found this video interesting and informative. Not at all what I expected.

  How is this supposed to be scary? O”Keefe is losing his touch. 

• [Cowicide]

  This is basically O’Keefe bringing a “hidden camera” to a TED talk.

  • [Kevin Pierce]

    Except he’d also have to sneak in.

• [Gunn]

  It’s a 9-minute video. Most people wouldn’t watch the whole thing if it were run on prime-time Fox News. (Not to imply that there is an actual prime time for Fox News.)

   The reason for doing the video is to give Breitbart and his allies something to point to and make accusations about, whatever they are. The accusations don’t have to be borne out in the video, because most people won’t watch it.

• [Jeff Rodman]

  Veritas fugit.

• [mwiik]

  I liked the edgy cigarette smoking bit at the end.

• [Jenonymous]

  O’Queef and Sightfart are odious creatures.  I am NO great fan of the NYT (turned into a decent restaurant and culture guide with occasional news years ago) or Clay for that matter (has lots of good points but the ones that are off are WAY WAY off), but I would still love to see a real-live cagematch between the two teams.

• [Emo Pinata]

  All I know Breitbart from is handing Opie & Anthony a picture of Rep. Weiner’s cock and being surprised that they managed to leak the photo to twitter.

• [kmoser]

  Everybody knows the NYT is liberally-biased. Everybody knows that all journalistic entities pick and choose which stories to run for political reasons. When conservatives call the NYT “elitist” it’s not news, but when the NYT calls itself “elitist” it’s suddenly damning? I don’t get it. Where’s the story here?

• [Mark A]

  So the proof of liberal bias is that the Times didn’t cover Obama and Occupy Wall Street until they became too newsworthy to ignore any more? Isn’t that actually conservative bias?

  • [Navin_Johnson]

    Seriously, the NYT was first ignoring, then mocking, then finally paying attention just like most of the MSM was.

• [Navin_Johnson]

  So do they all get freaky in his boat at the end of the video?

• [darue keller]

  did this little shit-for-brains get permission from his probation officer to travel this time?

• [Mark Wintle]

  Am I understanding this right, James O’Keefe is trying to imply that only Politicians should have views & opinions on politics, politicians and the news, anyone who reports or teaches how to be an effective reporter  should have no opinions, no views no experiences in the real world to bring to their teaching/reporting.
   Just wanting to check because I seriously think there are parts of American society that are really broken, and the one that I see more and more from way over here in the UK is the denial of the existence of differing opinions, I’m really perturbed that a supposedly democratic society finds it difficult to handle opinions?
    Seriously speaking  a society is broken when peoples opinions have no value because they don’t share an agreed, (agreed by some arbitrary people who in school would’ve been called bullies) , world view that precludes any independent free thinking.
  And sadly that culture of criticising critical thinking is appearing here in the UK and many other  so called democracies who fear a questioning, critical population may judge poorly the behaviour of those in power and how they were caught asleep at the controls of their economies after letting industry & financial markets  dictate economic policy and not our elected representatives who we voted to look after our best interests and those of our families & children and their children, you know the whole looking at our respective nations long term welfare. And just to be clear I use the term nation to mean the people who live, breath, eat, sleep and vote in our countries!

• [JonCarter]

  The issue of the video is that the NYTimes is biased toward the Left of American politics – which they are – and everyone knows it.  Rosen thinks they should be more honest about it – which the should be.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    The issue of the video is that the NYTimes is biased toward the Left of American politics

    I suppose that’s true if you’re so far to the right that you’re actually inside yourself.  I regard the NYT as center right.

  • [Lurking_Grue]

    Yes, they should be more fair and balanced and tell the world outright that they have a bias… Like Fox news does.

    Oh wait…

• [doggo]

  (I’ll suffer the disemvoweling to say it like I mean it.) Somebody needs to punk that shithead, O’Keefe, but good, and permanently discredit him, even among his own brand of Republican asshats.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Will no-one rid me of this turbulent pimp?

  • [Mark_Frauenfelder]

    It won’t work. Among the kind of people who have respect for O’Keefe, it’s ideology — not behavior or ethics — that matters.

• [James Patrick Gordon]

  And it ends with some random dude smoking! Between this and the Herman Cain ad, I’m sensing a pattern.

  Is the Tea Party trying to make smoking cool again? Or at least a symbol of conservatism and Real America?

  • [jerwin]

    The Nazis were determined to stamp out smoking on the grounds of public health. Since Naziism is* the end stage of liberalism, it follows that conservatives must promote the freedom to smoke tobacco.

    *at least according to “true” conservatives.

• [daniel couldve]

  I only watched the opening and their first fuck up is that the Graduate School of Journalism founded by Joseph Pulitzer is at Columbia, not NYU (which is the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute).

• [Palomino]

  So?

  The comment “-until they had a cultural core that was solid enough to absorb that traffic.”

  Republican’s aren’t even close to being that intelligent much less think that far into the future.

• [skyhawk1]

  Why isn’t he videotaping his jail cell honeymoon for wiretaping a congressman?

• [Nathaniel Isaacson]

  It is also apparently bad journalism to look for a way to air your opinion that doesn’t immediately betray personal bias, while it is good journalism to sneak into a classroom, secretly videotape someone, edit it to make it as damning as possible (not very damning here, just a class on how media works), and then use it to air your own grievances with a third party (NYT) that was essentially uninvolved in the conversation. 

• [autark]

  what is up with the date/time stamp on that video? 21st of June? OWS?

  probably O’Keefe just doesn’t know how to set the time on his camcorder… but if you’re doing “investigative journalism” don’t you think it’s to your credit to have your “evidence” correctly time stamped??

• [Taylor]

  Quite possibly the lamest thing I’ve seen in a while. HOLD ON PEOPLE HE’S BLOWING OPEN THE DOORS ON MODERN-DAY JOURNALISM! Thanks for cluing me in guy, I had no idea.

• [JammitTimmaj]

  I wonder if I could convince O’Keefe to do this with Fox News. (It felt ugly to capitalize that).

  • [lewis_stoole]

    free your soul, brother; free your soul.
    capitalization is overrated.

• [Tim Murtaugh]

  I wonder if he licensed the music… Someone should alert the Buggles.