Snopes (10/18/16)
Factchecking website Snopes (10/18/16) cited FAIR’s work, among others, in warning readers not to take at face value videos by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas alleging Democratic election skullduggery.
After quoting critiques of O’Keefe’s work from Columbia Journalism Review, Snopes‘ Kim LaCapria wrote:
The Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) organization also regularly covered O’Keefe’s efforts in 2011 and 2012, lamenting how often the details of the purported stings are misreported before being thoroughly investigated.
The website then quoted excerpts from FAIR’s work criticizing media coverage of O’Keefe’s work:
USA Today has a long piece by Martha Moore about video hoax artist James O’Keefe’s NPR project. The article does a pretty good job of running down the deceptions in O’Keefe’s video. That’s good. This, however, is not:
… The sting’s impact was magnified by the quick dissemination-without-scrutiny that is a hallmark of Internet-driven media.
O’Keefe’s video has nothing to do with muckraking. And please don’t blame the Internet for the fact that journalists apparently can’t be bothered to care whether a source is reliable.
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From NBC Nightly News, courtesy of reporter Lisa Myers:
We last saw O’Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN.
No we didn’t…. As should be well-known by now, O’Keefe used footage of himself wearing a “pimp” costume in his ACORN videos — but didn’t wear the ridiculous costume during his “undercover stings.” Media accounts acted as though he did, though — it took a lot of effort to get the New York Times to finally admit its errors on this count.
If reporters don’t know these facts, they’re bound to get fooled by O’Keefe again.
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After his fraudulent ACORN videos, the lesson media should have learned about right-wing “citizen journalist” James O’Keefe is not to trust him. But they didn’t, so here we are with his NPR stunt, which allegedly shows NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller saying mean things about the Tea Party in a meeting with phony Muslim Brotherhood-connected donors.
But it appears that, once again, O’Keefe’s videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck–affiliated website. Over there, Scott Baker pointed to a few problems. In one part of the video, NPR‘s Schiller seems to laugh about the phony Muslim group’s position on Sharia law. Baker says it’s out of context.
NPR has done at least two reports on the video. It’s not quite a Shirley Sherrod moment — where the right-wing video was edited to totally turn her message around — but it’s clear that things aren’t exactly what they first seemed. O’Keefe’s history should give media outlets serious reservations about taking him at face value on anything … which goes to show you that the argument that the media is tilted to the left remains totally unconvincing.
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As Exhibit A, look at James O’Keefe, who famously and proudly passed off his partner as a prostitute while secretly videotaping ACORN staffers. Who in the debate over O’Keefe’s work took the position that because the colleague was not actually a prostitute, the entire project was unethical and therefore all of his videotapes should be ignored? The actual objection to O’Keefe’s work was that he deceived the public — misleadingly editing his footage to create false impressions, including the popular delusion that O’Keefe had gone into ACORN offices wearing an outlandish Superfly costume. Nevertheless, he got overwhelmingly positive coverage from right-wing and centrist news outlets alike, with the result that his mendacious reporting had the successful result of helping to bring ACORN down.
The evidence may be building that this tape is mostly a hoax, also (see, for example, HuffPo’s article with quotes from one of the tape’s subjects). If O’Keefe is not willing to release the full tapes, we can all feel pretty good about dismissing the entire thing as another barrel of lies. If he does, and his claims are substantiated, well then of course action should be taken against those “caught out.” But for now, he is not releasing anything. I hope he gets sued in a large way; that’ll bring the truth out, one must hope.
So, I’m assuming that Hillary’s not releasing all of her emails had the same impact on your thinking i.e. that we can all feel pretty good about dismissing the entire thing (her saying they were of yoga classes, Bill emails and about Chelsea’s wedding) as another barrel of lies?
Snopes is a real joke of a site. For one thing, I don’t see any educational credentials under Kim LaCapria’s biography. Did she even go to college? Why is she in a position to be the ultimate arbiter of all things in the news? Second, notice how Snopes does not have a comments sections. The reason for this is because is obviously because they don’t want people pointing out mistakes or flaws in their arguments. You will notice a direct correlation these days between propaganda and a lock of comments sections.