A big NYT Magazine article about James O'Keefe — written by Zev Chafets.

Zev Chafets is that NYT contributor who wrote that book about Rush Limbaugh that Limbaugh was so pleased with. So let's read the new article.

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.”....

O'Keefe — on probation for 3 years after he pleaded guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses —  can't leave New Jersey without court approval. (Hey, don't plead guilty if you can't do the time.)

His takedown of Acorn was... devastating, although Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s former chief executive, contends that the videos were dishonest. “He is demon, a liar and a cheat,” she says. “What he did was despicable. He created a fiction.” Bertha Lewis still insists that Acorn did not offer advice on how to break the law. Clark Hoyt, a former public editor for The New York Times, reviewed O’Keefe’s raw footage and edited tapes and concluded that “the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context.”

There is no doubt that O’Keefe disseminated only the material that supported his thesis about Acorn, but this kind of selectivity is the norm in advocacy journalism. “I put James O’Keefe in the same category as Michael Moore,” says Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. “Some ethicists say it is never right for a journalist to deceive for any reason, but there are wrongs in the world that will never be exposed without some kind of subterfuge.”

“People can’t control me,” O’Keefe says. “No one tells me what to investigate.” But that freedom from oversight means he has no one to offer a second opinion. Andrew Breitbart, summing it up after the fact, called the Landrieu sting a “high risk, low reward” mistake. O’Keefe himself acknowledges that he used bad judgment in that operation. “If I had it to do over again, I’d do it outside a federal building.”

Hundreds of people contact James O’Keefe with suggestions for investigations and stings. He looks for situations that illustrate what he sees as larger injustices. He also recruits activists. “It takes a lot of what you could call courage to go into the opposition’s presence and tell a story under a false name,” he says. “People ready to improvise and maybe get caught.”

Time columnist says James O'Keefe edited his NPR videos unfairly, but the firings speak for themselves.

This piece from James Poniewozik is quite lame:

[Ron] Schiller did say some bad things.... But the short video took them out of context, like a bad reality show, and made them sound worse....

The full video hardly clears Schiller....

O'Keefe did post the full video...

By the time anyone scrutinized his NPR video, O'Keefe had already claimed a scalp and framed the narrative....

Oh, bullshit. If O'Keefe is to blame, NPR should have defended Schiller. It didn't. The full video was there. If it undercut O'Keefe's edit, NPR could have reframed the narrative. Such an effort would have gotten plenty of play in the media. But NPR didn't even try. Of course, O'Keefe put his video together in a strong way to make his point, but he exposed himself to a powerful counterattack... that didn't happen. QED.

"Their arrogance and condescension... just amazing."

It is their own self-love that makes them so vulnerable.

W.C. Fields said "You can't cheat an honest man," and I say "You can't punk a self-deprecating man."

NPR's Vivian Schiller resigns... and she's not even related to Ronald Schiller, the NPR guy who's reputation went to hell yesterday.

What's the matter with NPR?

NPR exec Ron Schiller on the Tea Party: "they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people."

Caught on video by conservative pranksters posing as potential donors from a Muslim Brotherhood front group:

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives"...

When [one of the pranksters] suggests to Schiller that “Jews do kind of control the media or, I mean, certainly the Zionists and the people who have the interests in swaying media coverage toward a favorable direction of Israel,” Schiller does not rebut him or stop eating. He just nods his head slightly.

When one person says something and another keeps silent, what should we think of the silent person? I recently discussed exactly that with Slate's Timonthy Noah, who was keen on using silence against a Republican Congressman who didn't immediately jump on a constituent who said "Who is going to shoot Obama"?



Somehow I predict that Noah will let Schiller off the hook for that, and I, being consistent with myself,  will too. As I said in the Bloggingheads, it depends on the context. Schiller was in a different context. Congressman Broun was at a public meeting. Schiller was having a seemingly private meal with prospective donors. You're not going to fund-raise very well if you scold people or make them feel uncomfortable. And in any kind of a private meeting, you might humor your interlocutors as a strategy to obtain more information about them.

The pranksters were trying to trap Schiller into sounding anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, and I would defend Schiller for what he said in response to that prodding. What does look really bad, though, is his virulent hostility toward social conservatives and his twisted image of the people in the Tea Party movement. What's completely predictable — we're familiar with NPR — is the preening self-love of the liberal who's so sure he and his people are the smart ones. Not smart enough not to get pranked, though.

Remember when Scott Walker got pranked the other day by a phone call purporting to be from David Koch? His opponents couldn't get enough of calling him stupid for that, and even though he said nothing inconsistent with his public talking points and seemed the same as he is in public, they fine-tooth-combed his remarks to find little things they could blow up and portray as evil. Forget empathy and fairness — use whatever you find as brutally as you can.

Now here's this choice new material from Schiller, giving conservatives the chance to punch back twice as hard (to use the old Obama WH motto).

ADDED: David Weigel notes that Schiller is no longer with NPR. And he has the text of the Schiller quote about the firing of Juan Williams:

What NPR did I'm very proud of. What NPR stood for is a non-racist, non-bigoted, straightforward telling of the news. Our feeling is that if a person expresses his or her personal opinion, which anyone is entitled to do in a free society, they are compromised as a journalist. They can no longer fairly report. And the question we asked internally was, can Juan Williams, when he makes a statement like that, can he report to the Muslim population, and be believed, for example? And the answer is no. He lost all credibility and that breaks your ethics as a journalist.

O'Keefe on Hannity.

Explaining the Landrieu incident.

The link goes to Gawker, which strains to make every little thing sound awful, but the video is there. I thought Jim O'Keefe did a good job justifying himself while showing some remorse related to security issues. He admitted that he needed to think more carefully in the future about how he does his exposés, but he defended the practice of tricking people to do an investigation. I note that the government tricks people when it does undercover investigations, so how wrong is it to pretend to be someone you are not to try to find out something valuable?

ADDED: This seems important:

O'Keefe... was "framed" by the media and the U.S. attorney's office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

Hours later, Jim Letten, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, recused himself from the case....

"James O'Keefe sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney, while the U.S. attorney leaked the information about his arrest, helping the media frame it as 'Watergate Junior,'" Breitbart said.

The charge against O'Keefe is entering federal property under false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony. What felony does the government say they intended to commit?