In a little discussed release, National Public Radio has identified some alarming edits in the video footage released by James O’Keefe III — purportedly capturing NPR officials slamming conservatives and seemingly agreeing with radical Islamic funders. The analysis linked here shows a series of edits that produce a highly distorted picture, including the removal of statements defending conservatives and expressly warning that NPR’s coverage could never be influenced by financial support.
Ron Schiller’s comments appear heavily edited and sometimes taken out of order with immediately following material, according to the analysis.
For example, the tape released to the public shows Schiller laughing with the men as they described how their “organization sought to spread the acceptance of sharia across the world.” NPR notes that “[i]n reality, as the longer tape shows, that laughter follows an innocuous exchange as Schiller and Liley greet the two supposed donors at their table.” Other more disturbing claims of misleading edits are contained in the NPR analysis.
It make for interesting and disturbing reading.
Jonathan Turley
eniobob,
This from NPR’s post on the subject:
“O’Keefe said on CNN’s Reliable Sources that his sting was inspired by NPR’s decision to drop longtime news analyst Juan Williams last October after Williams made comments on Fox News about Muslims.
“The tape is very powerful,” O’Keefe said. “The tape is very honest. The tape cuts to the core of who these people are.”
Sure the tape is honest – honestly FUBAR.
If you go to the link on the analysis in JT’s posting, you will see that this punk’s tape doesn’t “cut to the core of who these people are.” It goes directly to the core of who he is. And, as usual, little Jimmy O’Keefe’s full of shit.
And this:
Wallace’s “Power Player” Designation For O’Keefe Ignores His History Of Deception
March 13, 2011 4:53 pm ET
For the second time, Chris Wallace named James O’Keefe Fox News Sunday’s “Power Player of the Week.” But Wallace ignored O’Keefe’s history of discredited claims and allegations that O’Keefe deceptively edits his videos, including the NPR video that earned him the latest “Power Player” designation.
http://mediamatters.org/research/201103130007
From yesterday:
James O’Keefe On CNN: My Priority Is To Go After What ‘The Media Is Refusing To Touch’
by Matt Schneider | 12:50 pm, March 13th, 2011
“James O’Keefe, the self-described investigative journalist behind the NPR sting video, appeared on Reliable Sources and told Howard Kurtz that he was motivated to look into NPR after they improperly handled the firing of former contributor Juan Williams. Kurtz questioned whether O’Keefe’s journalism tactics were unethical, but O’Keefe argued his form of investigative reporting was necessary to seek and find the truth.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/james-okeefe-on-cnn-my-priority-is-to-go-after-subjects-the-media-is-refusing-to-touch/
One big difference…the guy who owned walker published a tape UNEDITED!! If your going to be underhanded with gotcha journalism you can’t go all the way like this guy did or like Michael Moore and others do…anything with chopped footage I automatically categorize as altered and fake. Journalism is a camera running uncut, a tape running uncut. If its a story why edit it??? What is there to hide in seeing or hearing its entirety. You will note in Walkers tape its a seemless conversation uncut, not only that but the prankster hardly talked at all. Walker just kept talking and talking and talking about himself, as if to say, daddy are you proud of me??? Thanks a million! !!!!!!!!!”
House Tleilaxu, I had about two hours of sleep so forgive me, but I don’t think ANYONE besides Breitbart is calling O’Keefe a tough investigative journalist.
And I think it’s clear he edits his tapes intentionally to deceive.
That said, how is his pranksterism different from two weeks back when that guy called up Governor Walker pretending to be Koch?
Aren’t they both the descendants of Dick Tuck or Edward Abbey?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-schneider/dirty-tricks_b_450519.html
Remember, kids: asking Sarah Palin softball questions about what newspapers she reads is gotcha media; concealing your identity, videotaping someone without their consent, and publishing a highly-editted account with the simple goal to make them look bad is tough, investigative journalism.
I’m honestly curious how many of these tapes O’Keefe has. He is definitely not the brightest and has been caught trying to set up equipment, not to mention given fake answers on camera by ACORN employs when they realised he was messing with them. I’m guessing he’s got dozens of these exposees but most of them are so clearly fake and innocuous even Fox News can’t spin them into news.
Off Topic:
From Think Progress (3/14/2011)
Chamber Of Commerce’s Top SCOTUS Litigator Admits Justices Give Special Treatment to Chamber
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/03/14/scotu-hearts-the-chamber/
Excerpt:
A new study co-authored by conservative Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner confirms something that has been obvious to Supreme Court watchers for years — the Roberts Court places a huge thumb on the scale in favor of corporate interests. According to the study, the Roberts Court rules in favor of business interests 61 percent of the time, a 15 point spike from the five years before when Chief Justice Roberts joined the Court.
While the Chamber of Commerce has recently tried to downplay the favorable treatment it receives from the Supreme Court, its own top lawyer admitted a few years after Roberts joined the Court that the justices give his client special treatment:
Carter G. Phillips, who often represents the chamber and has argued more Supreme Court cases than any active lawyer in private practice, reflected on its influence. “I know from personal experience that the chamber’s support carries significant weight with the justices,” he wrote. “Except for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.”
Phillips’ confession, and the Posner study’s conclusion, corroborates other data showing the Roberts Court’s favoritism towards corporate interests. A recent study by the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center determined that every single justice is more likely to side with the Chamber than the justice who held their seat 25 years ago (the study did not include the Court’s two newest members because of an insufficiently large data sample):
**********
Check out the post that I provided a link to to see the “Support for Chamber Position by Justice” graph.
Vivian Schiller deserved to be fired because she led an “News” organization that would let itself be taken in by O’Keefe, who is famous for these sorts of misleading cuts.
After all the many times he has done that, and specifically after Schiller herself got in trouble and described how the Juan Williams thing was done too quickly, yet they fall prey to it again?
And they do the exact same thing?
No seriously, why should I care that she got fired. Buck stops here! If NPR is so gullible and quick to overreact there, at how many other times have they over reacted and over reported.
But also Professor Turley, as misleading as many of the cuts are, so are the claims that somehow this exonerates Schiller from his viewpoints, that those weren’t actually his views.
But oftentimes, they were.
So for instance,
“But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been “hijacked” by Tea Partyers and xenophobes.
In the longer tape, it’s evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.”
But if you listen to what Schiller is saying he is telling a Tom Friedman cabbie story. He’s attributing those remarks to two anonymous very top Republican friends of his. One an ambassador. He won’t name them, he just claims they exist and claims that those are their beliefs.
If we don’t believe Tom Friedman when he makes up his cabdriver stories, there is no reason to believe Ron Schiller’s anonymous Top Top Republican friends exist.
And that said, his statements, that he has these Republicans, Republicans claiming the tea party hijacked the Republicans and they are all racists,
Well, that’s been a meme floating around the liberal blogosphere for years now.
In that section of the analysis, this is basically what Ron Schiller said: “Look, I myself don’t think African Americans are threatening, but have you heard what Chris Rock and Jesse Jackson say about African Americans? They say African Americans are really scary.”
O’Keefe plays it as: “Ron Schiller says African Americans are really scary”, which is misleading.
But the original in context statement is hardly better!
NPR was a much higher quality entity when it was a smaller, less corporatized, less bureaucratic, aggregate of college stations. If they are acting this way today, esp, when they are a news organization, well, count me in as believing everyone would be better off, including NPR itself, if they lost some of their funding.
Well, at least FAUXNewz is experiencing some payback …
Fox fooled by “Muslim ban on padded bras” hoax
By Justin Elliott
A Fox News website has picked up a hoax story about an Islamic council in Pakistan protesting the use of padded and colorful bras and presented it as fact.
The story, which is still featured on Fox News’ Fox Nation website, was illustrated with a picture of a woman’s mid-section and carried the headline “Pakistan: Islamic Clerics Protest Women Wearing Padded Bras as ‘Devil’s Cushions.'” (UPDATE 9:30: Fox has now pulled the story. See the original here.) The lead of the Fox Nation story, which sources the piece to the Indian news website sify.com, reads:
The Council of Islamic Ideology in Pakistan has protested the use of padded and colourful bras by Muslim women, and recommended that Pakistani Muslim researchers should try to invent an innerwear that makes female assets unnoticeable.
The problem is, if one takes the time to track the story back to its source, the whole thing is an obvious Onion-style satire — a fact first pointed out by Arif Rafiq of the Pakistan Policy Blog.
The sify.com story linked by Fox cites a “report” from yet another site called Roznama Jawani.
Roznama Jawani, in turn, appears to be a Pakistani version of the Onion, featuring such stories as “Karachi Preparing a Huge Ass Bat to Beat the Shit Out of Kamran Akmal,” “Altaf Hussain Challenges Imran Khan to a Rap Battle to Settle Differences,” and “Man From Peshawar Sues Red Bull. Says he has no wings!”
The bra story on Roznama Jawani features a crudely photoshopped image of an Islamic council meeting with a large sign that says, “Future of Padded Bras.” The story quotes an anti-padded bra protester saying that “Padded bras are evil as they make the breasts look bigger and perky … Only devil women show off private parts.”
Click around a little on the site, and one finds a legal notice:
The stories published in Roznama Jawani might only be applicable and true in another universe. That universe might be parallel to this universe. Might even be serial. Who knows?! Maybe some one does.
Fox Nation is an openly conservative news and opinion aggregation site that is part of the Fox News network. It’s not clear what sort of editorial standards are applied to the site, which carries a mixture of hard news and catnip for conservative readers (sample headlines: “Democrats politicize tsunami” and “The President’s afternoon: A round of golf”).
Fox Nation commenters, for their part, reacted to the bra story with outrage. “If I was a woman–anywhere in the world, I’d be taking a close look at Islam and what it meant for me,” wrote commenter rebubinca. A “louisiana_mom” replied:
“How can anyone in their right mind defend this religion/cult is beyond me. The silence of NOW and other women’s rights organizations speak volumes as to where their true loyalties are (and it is not for the rights for women).I cannot believe anyone in the 21st century would even entertain the thought of allowing Sharia Law into any Western county.”
This is hardly the first time a hoax story has made its way around the Internet. A similar situation last year prompted a boycott of pop sensation Justin Bieber by opponents of the “ground zero mosque” who falsely believed that Bieber had come out in favor of the project.
UPDATE: TPM’s Josh Marshall points out that this is not the first time Fox Nation has presented satire as fact.
Justin Elliott is a Salon reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More: Justin Elliott
http://www.salon.com/news/fox_news/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/03/14/fox_nation_pakistan_padded_bras
Stamford Liberal,
Exactly
Blouise,
“NPR got acorned. Anything this guy produces should be looked at very carefully before making a decision on how to react.”
What irks me is that this is the third time that punk O’Keefe did this … you would think people would take his “journalism” with a boulder of salt. But do they? No … they report it as truth and when found heavily edited – SHOCKING – itthe follow up barely makes the news.
I’m very, VERY disappointed that it took NPR this long, and two employee’s later to figure out that the tape was highly edited and misleading. DUH!
What disturbs me is that this is discovered (or revealed) after how many days of the original story. All news outlets were so quick to give credence to the video prior to its verification. IMHO, this shows how sad our so-called “news” outlets have become, the majority of outlets are more worried about “breaking the story” than the veracity of the story itself. Kudos to NPR and this website for following up, albeit several days later.
It is illegal to commit fraud. Is it illegal to be one?
Every video this inflamed asshole has ever released has been heavily edited to make a lie of it. AND YET every video this inflamed asshole releases is treated as if it were valid news. Fool the media once shame on them, fool the media 16 times in a row and HEY – YOU’RE A GREAT SOURCE FOR NEWS!!!
This is additional evidence of how the Right controls the media, not the left as people like Maury would suggest.
AY,
You are right about the reputation and character being so bad that you just can’t harm it.
Does the law of Defamation apply in this matter? Injury to say Reputation….though its hard to injure a Republicans Reputation or Character…
A man who’s only famous for editing videos to provide propaganda for Republican causes has edited a video to provide propaganda for a Republican cause? Unpausible!
Seriously, why do any “mainstream” news sources take this guy seriously? Fool me once shame on you fool me twice… won’t get fooled again.
Spot on Blouise! The Acorn has struck again. When will progressive understand that this is a conflict or a war that the far right is waging and if we allow this kind of crap to continue with calling out the perps, then we have lost already.
NPR got acorned. Anything this guy produces should be looked at very carefully before making a decision on how to react.
Thank you for publishing this important story.