Why he’s a more honest journalist than most of the MSM:
O’Keefe has revealed them to be fools, remarkably unsophisticated in their response to his revelations. (Jeff Zucker, et al., looked like dimwits walking into the most obvious trap by dismissing Bonifield as a mere “medical” producer with the famous Van Jones already queued up for humiliation.) At this point, only the most naive believe what the MSM says. CNN is already a joke, but the NYT, WaPo, etc. are not far behind. We are all reading Pravda now.
We always were, it’s just become so much more obvious.
[Update a while later]
…starting now, we’re instituting new policies for handling Russia stories. Stop groaning! This important! From now on, we’re going to need your Russia stories to all have an element of truth.”
The room erupted into chaos.
“What the hell?” screeched Wolf Blitzer. “Preposterous!”
“Wolf, your name is sort of like my puppy Woofy’s!” said Chris Cuomo. “Sort of.”
“Never!” snorted Christiane Amanpour, who had been annoying Jake Tapper because her enormous pink gyno hat was blocking his view.
“Look at it spin!” piped up Chris Cuomo between delighted giggles.
Jim Acosta stood up and adjusted his tie. “I want to register my outrage and disapproval of this hateful attack on the free press in the strongest possible terms!”
“Oh, knock it off, Jimmy. There’s no camera here,” Zucker said. “From now on, your anonymous sources have to actually exist. That’s final. I’m sorry people – calm down! – but you can’t quote sources who don’t exist.”
From the back, Don Lemon finished his drink and howled, “The voices tell me MANY THINGS!”
“Look,” said Jim Sciutto. “Like my friend Don, I deeply believe that invisible voices in our heads can be legitimate news sources. Especially if a different voice in our head confirms what the first voice told us.”
“But don’t you understand,” stuttered an indignant Brian Stelter. “Don’t you know that democracy will die in darkness if you impose arbitrary rules on us that limit our ability to report things that never happened?”
Kurt is a cruel man, but fair.
I like some of Project Veritas’ work, but I wish he would just publish the unedited version right off the bat instead of playing games. When he publishes an edited video, and then it turns out that the full unedited version looks very different, I was his victim. And this has happened a few times – along with some other times where the unedited version supported his story.
There is no reason for him to be jerking people like me around. Being more honest than the MSM is not the same as being honest.
That’s an insult to Pravda!
Editing is the perfect rebuttal. Everything is always edited/censored. No matter what is said you can respond with, “what about what wasn’t said?”
When dems talk about editing it’s just more projection.
So politicians talk out of both sides of their mouths. “I didn’t say terrorism; I clearly identified it as terrorism.”
You have to catch the rats telling the truth and you have to focus on it (edit other stuff out) because the media damned sure will not show the hypocrisy and lies.
This isn’t hard. You publish the full unedited video along with one with the good stuff.
O’Keefe often does not do that, though he always promises to. AFAIK the unedited videos from the Acorn investigations were never published after constant promises; the State of California subpoenaed them and decided that he doctored them. The rest of us can’t judge differently because O’Keefe never released them. And when he does release them, most of his fans ignore that the unedited video often is significantly different and sometimes has been completely rearranged.
For instance, in the NPR video: ‘A quote in which Schiller seems to respond amusedly to a reference on the fake group’s website to promoting Sharia law–“Really? That’s what they said?”–is _lifted from an entirely unrelated part of the lunch_ [italics mine].’ Trivial example (there are more). Anyone here think that’s okay? Anyone here think that this single example isn’t enough to prove that someone is out to scam us listeners?
Look, maybe you need agitprop to win a war. If so, go for it. But don’t be stupid enough to believe it yourself.
I agree with you in principle MikeR, but here’s the problem… there is no such thing as the full unedited video because that itself would be excused as leaving out an even bigger picture.
The question is honesty and integrity. If O’Keefe is a mirror of Katie Couric, that’s a problem.
Who can we trust? We know the left are liars. O’Keefe may not be providing the definitive proof, but he is pulling back the curtain.
“there is no such thing as the full unedited video” Meh. The video needs to contain a nice stretch of time before and after anything interesting. I’m not interested in gotchas; I’m also not interested in a five-second snapshot of what Van Jones said with nothing before or after. That’s ridiculous. For all I know, they asked him what he thought of the Clinton email scandal and he said it was a nothing-burger, and they patched it together with a question about the Russia investigation.
Once I don’t trust them, crazy stuff like that becomes a reasonable possibility. They’ve done it before.
A single release can be weathered. A series of releases exposing how the response to the previous one is a lie, not so much.
O’Keefe isn’t doing what he does to serve the egos of his supporters. He’s doing it to bring down the institutions that hate his supporters.
From the back, Don Lemon finished his drink and howled, “The voices tell me MANY THINGS!”
I am sure the DNC media has many sources in government and the administration. The problem is that the DNC reporters can’t, or are unwilling, to tell the different between someone running their mouth and an authoritative source for actual facts.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/what-the-nyt-magazine-doesnt-say-about-james-okeefe/242714/
This is more-or-less how I feel. O’Keefe has found some good stuff, but has also victimized supporters like me with his incompetence and unscrupulous use of edited clips. One can’t trust anything he says until unedited clips are posted, and even then one can’t trust it without actually watching the unedited clips to see if they yield the same conclusion he’s trying to create.
James O’Keefe editing pales in comparison to CNN, CBS, et al. Hell, this week CNN has been going on claiming Trump “declared war on the media” and called the media “an enemy of the state”, but that didn’t happen. Cuomo said those things by paraphrasing no what Trump said but the things the Trump WH did, such as treat Jim Acosta like the self-serving diva that he is. Take the camera off Jim Acosta, and its WWIII to CNN.
As for undercover videos, I grew up watching 60 minutes make bank by doing undercover videos. They were always edited. But compare editing a video to making up evidence out of whole cloth, such as claiming a MS Word typed letter, crinkled up, is a historic record from 30 years ago from a government typewriter.
Michael Crichton wrote about all this nearly 15 years ago in State of Fear. He saw it from the inside and found it repulsive. In the intervening time, the media has only gotten worse. But sure, let’s clutch at pearls because O’Keefe uses their tactics, our side is supposed to be better than this, right? Well, I watched our side behave better back in 2010 and 2012, and despite helping to win back Congress; peaceful conservatives were derided as murderous thugs inciting violence every time some loser, if not left then most often apolitical, attacked someone. Now they claim war, incite violence, and we clutch at pearls because some one uses peaceful tactics to show they really do hate us.
Schlichter’s article was hilarious! Thanks for posting it.