March 14, 2011

To: All "liberal" institutions and the press

This post from Lindsay Beyerstein explains why you don't have a knee-jerk reaction to videos from James O'Keefe or any of his imitators (like Andrew Breitbart).

Glenn Beck's website, "The Blaze," ran a critique titled, "Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?" The short answer: Yes.

The post compares sections of the heavily edited video segment that O'Keefe released last week with what O'Keefe claims is the raw video of the two-hour lunch meeting. The author of the post, Scott Baker, and his colleague, video producer Pam Key, demonstrate how the tapes were dishonestly edited. The release of the video prompted NPR's top fundraiser to re-resign. Schiller had already announced his departure for a new job the week before, but in classic NPR style he felt it necessary to preemptively re-resign. The head of NPR, Vivian Schiller (no relation), resigned or was fired shortly thereafter.

There are two conclusions to be drawn here:
  1. Any institution (NPR, Acorn, CNN) which O'Keefe and his fellow conservatives believe has liberal leanings can be a target for their scams, and that those institutions shouldn't take any hasty action when these phony videos first appear. Wait.
  2. The press should immediately begin digging into the story before taking any video from O'Keefe or his crowd seriously, and it certainly shouldn't just run the video as though it were gospel.
As Ms. Beyerstein says
At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O'Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice. O’Keefe is openly proffering propaganda. That alone should be enough to make news outlets and pundits disregard his work. On top of that, he has been caught distorting videos in ways that would get any real reporter fired. Yet media outlets are willing to launder O'Keefe videos by presenting them as real news, even though they know he's not a trustworthy source.
Amen to that.

Posted by Linkmeister at March 14, 2011 03:05 PM | TrackBack
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