So
yesterday in prime time, Fox News ran some footage from James O’Keefe’s Project
Veritas video exposé on dirty tricks implemented by various organizations
supporting the Clinton campaign. Then Fox went into overdrive to discredit
James O’Keefe. The dismissive remarks of course referenced O’Keefe’s 2010 arrest when he got caught impersonating a telephone company employee (the charge was phone tampering) while working to
expose then-Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was allegedly avoiding any and
all calls from her constituents who were upset about Obamacare. O’Keefe’s standards
as a journalist were not at issue, yet the Fox narrative claims that he is
known for phony and misleading editing.
O’Keefe
has made enemies, to be sure. His exposés on Planned Parenthood and ACORN
provoked all kinds of attacks on him, his ethics, his editorial bias, and his
selective editing. Salon describes him as “best known for selectively editing
undercover footage to get people fired.”
Let
me say something about selective editing.
I
was interviewed for a television documentary a few years ago. I was in front of
the cameras for about 2½ hours and appeared in the final cut for maybe 3-4
minutes. Before the documentary was broadcast, somebody asked me how I thought
I did. My reply was that if the producers wanted me to look good, I’d look
good. If they wanted me to look bad, I’d look bad. Ah yes, was the reply. That
ole cutting room floor.
Everything
we see on TV or read in the news has been edited. The question is: was the
edited final product faithful to the original report? You’ll decide if O’Keefe
has/had his thumb on the editorial scale or not.
From
where I’m sitting, O’Keefe is doing the investigative journalism that the
mainstream media not only refuses to do, but works aggressively to suppress and
discredit. Already, the progressives are claiming on Fox that the statements
caught on the Project Veritas video were merely hypothetical ideas that were
never implemented. Then how come two of the principal players in the undercover
videos have been fired or have resigned? That would be Democratic consultant
Robert Creamer (who visited the White House multiple times) and
Scott Foval,
national field director for Americans United for Change. (No doubt they will turn up
wearing another hat in another room real soon.)
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