Has James O'Keefe jumped his final shark?
Written by Simon Maloy
Published
I've been thinking about it for a bit now, and I think I've finally figured out what the take-home lesson is from James O'Keefe's latest attempt at playing journalist: O'Keefe is much more interesting as a criminal than he is as a “journalist.”
It came to me after reading BigJournalism.com editor Michael Walsh's staggeringly incoherent attack on ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who interviewed O'Keefe and Breitbart yesterday morning and quite ably demonstrated that, when it comes to journalism, the duo are more sideshow than shoe leather.
The meat of Walsh's piece is that Stephanopoulos unfairly focused on O'Keefe's newly minted criminal status rather than his latest video purporting to uncover “fraud” and “corruption” in the Census Bureau. Walsh's response, however, is comically pathetic.
As a riposte to Stephanopoulos bringing up O'Keefe's guilty plea to entering the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) under false pretenses, Walsh writes: “Now, if entering a federal building under false pretenses were really a crime, then just about every member of the current Congress would have to plead guilty to the charge.” I'll leave it to someone else to explain what this has to do with anything, because I have no idea.
You can read the rest if you want, but seeing Walsh flail and struggle to muster a defense of his colleague's admitted transgressions of the law got me thinking -- why was O'Keefe even on ABC in the first place?
The ostensible reason was to debut his new undercover “expose” of the census, in which O'Keefe claims that, while hired as a census taker, he was paid for a couple of hours he didn't work. He basically engineered this elaborate sting to expose minimal and extremely localized incidents of what he describes as “fraud” at the very lowest levels of a government agency involving dollar amounts that might not even get you a full tank of gas. And, true to form, it was quickly revealed that O'Keefe had edited out exculpatory footage from the video.
So not a whole lot of news value there, which isn't surprising, but it does help to explain why O'Keefe and Breitbart got their few moments of ABC airtime -- they're clowns. The reason Stephanopoulos spent so much time on O'Keefe's criminality and so little on the census video is simply because O'Keefe's misadventures in the federal courts system are far more interesting than some shaky camera footage of improperly filled-out timecards. That's also probably the reason why even Fox News has largely ignored O'Keefe's census story, and why Breitbart's websites have been blasting out correction requests to news outlets that have improperly stated the offense to which O'Keefe pleaded guilty.
Put simply, nobody really cares about James O'Keefe, journalist.
After the ACORN videos were revealed to be heavily edited and wildly misleading, O'Keefe didn't have a whole lot of journalistic cred to boast of. Getting arrested in Landrieu's office pretty much obliterated what was left, and his latest offering of Timecard-gate certainly won't be earning any Pulitzer nods. All he has left are the few hours he spent in jail in Louisiana, and all the whining and self-serving jeremiads about the death of journalism in America that he and Breitbart can wring out of them.