Ever since the late great Andrew
Breitbart spearheaded a revolt against the monolithic, leftist mainstream media,
the “citizen journalist” outside the mainstream has become a serious threat to
the activist media’s complicity in political fraud and coverups. No one better
exemplifies the spirit of citizen journalism than Breitbart’s young protégé James
O’Keefe, who tells his story in the new book Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose
Fraud and Save Democracy.
O’Keefe was only 25 when he shot
to national prominence in 2009 as one-half (with Hannah Giles) of the
undercover team that presented themselves as a pimp and his prostitute seeking advice
from the helpful employees at ACORN
on how to safely run a house full of underage El Salvadoran sex slaves. The
undercover videos he shot at various ACORN offices exposed those employees
encouraging the illicit business and offering tips on defrauding the
government. The subsequent controversy marked the beginning of the end for
ACORN, and the beginning of a new era in journalistic integrity.
O’Keefe, like his progressive opponents, recognized early on
that law school is not the way to change the world – journalism is. And
journalism in the Obama era has been all about protecting the progressive
Messiah and furthering his agenda. “The nation’s progressives have been
controlling the media narrative for a century,” he says, and “[m]any of these
journalists [see] everything through a lens of ‘racial justice.” The way to break
their stranglehold on that narrative, O’Keefe realized, is with the powerful
evidence of hard-hitting, strategic video – like that taken in the ACORN sting
by guerrillas outside the mainstream news media.
In another era,
or with a different target, every major newsroom in America would have
unleashed its own Woodward and Bernstein to follow up on our work and track
this corruption to its source, but that’s not the way the media roll if you’re
investigating and exposing big government.
Realizing he was a threat,
critics rushed to decry his unofficial status and modus operandi. He wasn’t a “real” journalist, they said. He was
just a young “prankster” pulling a “stunt” – as if journalists suddenly decided
that undercover video stings were immoral and beneath them. In fact, he was exposing
not just ACORN but the big media who conspired to suppress the truth. “The
beauty of video, especially as amplified by the internet,” O’Keefe explains, “is
to allow a handful of citizen journalists working on a shoestring to end-run
the biggest news organizations in the world.”
But he had no illusions about
what this meant for himself and others like him. As a thorn in the mainstream
media’s side,
[t]here would be no Pulitzers
waiting for us at the end of the day, no speaking engagements at prestigious
J-schools. Instead we would face a continuing blizzard of legal challenges, a
swarm of snippy media crickets, and a tsunami of insider outrage at the slightest
accusation of impropriety.
Ironically, the book that primarily inspired O’Keefe’s work is
Saul
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the
Bible of the radical left. As other influences, he lists Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe, the
last half of which is about hustlers fleecing the corrupt, hapless bureaucrats
of San Francisco anti-poverty
programs, and everything by British conservative G.K. Chesterton.
O’Keefe went on to become the founder of Project Veritas, which investigates
and exposes “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other
misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more
ethical and transparent society.” The group pursues that aim by launching
specific journalistic investigations and widely publicizing the results;
conducting training workshops to teach others how to become modern-day
muckrakers; and creating a method for the public to alert journalists of issues
and institutions that need to be investigated.
His book also takes us along for the ride on other video
stings: posing as a donor offering a race-based donation to a willing Planned
Parenthood; his partners posing as representatives of a Muslim group offering a
substantial donation to a conservative-hating National Public Radio exec; Medicaid fraud in offices in six states;
New Jersey Teachers Union voter fraud; New Hampshire voter fraud; and a plan to
commit voter fraud by the son and campaign director of Congressman Jim Moran.
Breakthrough’s chapters
are essentially elaborations on O’Keefe’s guidelines for citizen journalism, what
he calls the Veritas Rules, clearly inspired by Alinsky and learned sometimes through
hard experience. Rule #3, for example, is “Use their own flawed construct to
put them into a position where either way they can’t win.” Rule #19: “When the
content is strong enough, the publicity will take care of itself.” Rule #22: “Expect
to be held to a higher standard than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.” These
rules, he writes, “are shaped by my larger vision to make the world a more
virtuous place.”
O’Keefe is quick to clarify exactly how the little guys of
citizen journalism upend traditional news media. “We [at Project Veritas] don’t
have the wherewithal to discredit the media,” he says:
We merely scoop them. They
discredit themselves by refusing to cover stories with national implications
that much of America already knows to be news. Once discredited, however, the
media do not apologize or reform. They dig in, knowing that their “competitors”
have as much interest as they do in protecting the myth that the major media “really,
really try to be unbiased.”
Breakthrough is a
quick, easy, and compelling read – even an inspirational one for conservatives
who are frustrated by the untrustworthy big media – about this empowering
frontier of citizen journalism. “By showing what is true and what is not,” James
O’Keefe concludes, “journalists can help forge a more ethical and transparent
society.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/12/13)
