James O'Keefe and a Media Movement Gone Mad

by Eric Boehlert
September 30, 2010 10:12 am ET
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201009300012

What is wrong with these people?

That's a refrain that goes through my brain many times
each week, and I'm sure goes through the minds of my
Media Matters colleagues as we monitor the right-wing
media and continue to be dumbstruck by what passes for
content. Granted, players there have never gotten
bogged down in details, and have rarely let the facts
get in the way of a good, liberal-hating yarn. This is,
after all, a team that's led onto the field everyday by
a chronic liar, Rush Limbaugh.

So the bar has never been set very high. But since
Obama's Inauguration, there has been a frightening,
wholesale change within the oxymoronic world known as
"conservative journalism."

Bottom line: There's no adult supervision, which allows
the likes of James O'Keefe to rush to the front of the
right-wing media line. And to be honest, he doesn't
look that out of place standing along side such
committed fabricators as Glenn Beck or Pam Geller or
Jim Hoft or Andrew Breitbart, or Fill In the Blank for
whomever is making right-wing headlines these days
describing Obama in the most fanatical and hateful way
possible.

This is what the right-wing media now looks like. It
looks like O'Keefe and his reportedly skeevy plan to
lure a reporter into some pseudo sex den for a gotcha
punk. It looks like Glenn Beck warning about
progressive "killers" who loom on the horizon. And it
sounds like Rush Limbaugh spitting out "Ayatollah
Obama," when referring to the President of the United
States on the AM dial

And folks, that's just from just this week.

I see that handful of conservative activists and media
voices have offered up tsk-tsking condemnations of
O'Keefe's latest tale. (But not mentor Breitbart. His
Big Journalism bloggers remained uniformly mum about
the O'Keefe fiasco on Wednesday.) And I assume those
handful of conservative O'Keefe critics are embarrassed
by his actions, embarrassed that he's viewed as an
influential young gun in right-wing media circles, and
embarrassed that Breitbart once lobbied for a Pulitzer
Prize on O'Keefe's behalf.

But allegedly planning to lure a reporter onto a
floating sex palace in order to surreptitiously film an
uncomfortable seduction, is precisely what you get when
a movement announces there no rules, when there are no
adults around to oversee things, and there's not even a
minimal expectation for coherency. It's what you get
when inmates run the media asylum. So nobody should be
surprised.

The sad truth? O'Keefe is a product --a creation-- of
the right-wing media culture that now eagerly pushes
partisan propaganda as a placeholder for "journalism,"
and doesn't care how that "journalism" is produced.

So of course, conservatives have only themselves to
blame for what's the latest bout of O'Keefe-related
humiliation. (You remember the telephone repairmen,
right?) Because where were those right-wing voices of
concern last winter, for instance, when it became
obvious O'Keefe had used deceptive editing in order to
create the mirage that he had entered ACORN offices
dressed as a pimp. When it was plain that the self-
styled prankster had pushed a phony tale to reporters
about his pimp costume, and even deceived Breitbart to
make it happen? That he had dishonestly edited out
exculpatory material without telling anyone. Why didn't
anyone on his side call foul? Why wasn't O'Keefe kicked
out of the club? Why didn't anyone in a leadership
position within conservative media point out the
obvious: That even right-wing attack journalists
shouldn't be in the business of secretly videotaping
people, editing the clips to make them more scandalous
than they really were, and then calling it `news'?

I certainly didn't hear many inter-squad protests last
winter. Why? Because O'Keefe's a loyal member of the
Obama-haters, and that media movement in the last 20
months has eliminated all standards of decency and fair
play. Because members no longer care if allegations are
easily debunked and provably false. They've left the
murky waters of quasi-truthiness far behind and are now
comfortably swimming in the waters of pure deception.

I think a turning point came in July 2009, when Fox
News' Glenn Beck announced on national television that
Obama, whose mother is white and who was raised by his
white grandparents, had a "deep-seated hatred of white
people," of "white culture," and was a "racist." At
that point, the far-right press had a decision to make:
Defend Beck's jaw-dropping, race-baiting claim, or
denounce them (however gently) as misguided and out of
bounds for a wannabe mainstream American political
movement.

At the cornerstone conservative publication National
Review, Jonah Goldberg sent a clear message regarding
Beck when the high-profile pundit, who often appears on
Beck's television show (it's exposure that helps
Goldberg sell copies of his books),rushed to Beck's
defense over the "racist" rhetoric and argued that if
Beck thought Obama was racist, then he ought to say so.

Message to the movement: Anything goes! Which for this
crew is like yelling "Open Bar!" during a campus Happy
Hour.

The conservative movement, and specifically its media
wing, now makes absolutely no attempt to police itself;
to maintain the slightest semblance of standards and
common sense. I mean, c'mon it's an environment where a
habitual liar like Jim Hoft has risen to the ranks of a
trusted General.

And here's the thing: The other side knows it. They
know O'Keefe is a two-bit prankster who can't tell the
truth, and that Hoft probably isn't even right twice a
day. When Media Matters' Ben Dimiero recently posted a
complete and unequivocal take-down of Hoft's fact-free
madness, detailing the long laundry list of open
fabrications that Hoft posts under the guise of `news,'
the silent response from the right-wing blogosphere was
deafening. Nobody that I saw even tried to defend
Hoft's work. I took that as a not-very-subtle
acknowledgement that Hoft's posts are basically made up
-concocted-but that the right-wing blogosphere doesn't
care and has no problem linking to his Obama-hating
fantasies on a daily basis.

But this is what the conservative media now condone and
embrace, so like it or not, James O'Keefe fits right
in.

_____________________________________________

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