What to do if you find yourself face-to-face with right-wing pretend journalist "Slimy Jim" O'Keefe (no, I mean stuff that's LEGAL)

Plus a quick note on the Zuccotti Park blitzkrieg --

DNAinfo.com caption: Sara Sitshul, 61, of Brooklyn said her son Chris O'Donnell, 23, was arrested last night. He was working in the kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. "The secrecy and organization of the arrests is just terrible."

Fortunately Howie in his late post tonight will have something to say about the storm-trooper clearing of the park undertaken under cover of darkness -- and with every effort made to minimize direct scrutiny by the outside world -- on orders from NYC's own personal plutocratic overlord, Mayor Mike. I can't tell you how much I don't want to write about this. I've been keeping up as best I can, and gathering links, and maybe will have something to say tomorrow.

Fortunately, Digby pretty well nailed the story before it happened, in a piece published yesterday on Aljazeera.com, "Militarising the police form Oakland to NYC." (The deck reads: "If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it's only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.") For more general information, you might try this link from cable news channel NY1, which was being updated through the day. And here's a 5:50pm ET DNAinfo.com link: "Occupy Wall Street Protesters Pour Back Into Zuccotti Park." -- Ken

NOW ON TO THE REAL POST . . .


You can watch this if you like. It's Columbia J-School Prof. Sree Sreenivasan's reverse-ambush of professional right-wing scumbag liar James "I Don't Have an Honest Bone in My Body" O'Keefe. I confess that I haven't watched it myself. I really, really don't enjoy watching vermin, or for that matter mounds of fecal droppings.

by Ken

So instead of writing about OWS, I'm going to write about Kim Kardashian's marital, er, woes. Ex-woes?

No, no, kidding. It's beyond my imagining why anyone would pay any attention at all to any Kardashian, though i have to say that viewing the clan as a sociological phenomenon I get a kick out of Marie Claire being stuck with a December cover story that was intended to be a "scoop" on Kim's giddily whirlwind marriage. (I read that they were able to squeeze in a reference to the awkward reality of her even whirlwindier divorce.)

OK, NOW ON TO THE REAL REAL POST

I thought instead I would pass on a charming and cheery story posted by Columbia U. J-School Dean of Student Affairs Sree Sreenivasan, who according to his DNAinfo.com bio "teaches in the digital journalism program." I've written before about my fondness for DNAinfo.com, a wonderful daily source for all sorts of "hyper-local" Manhattan news ("up-to-the-minute reports on entertainment, education, politics, crime, sports, and dining"), really getting down to the neighborhood level. But it wasn't till today that I discovered that Professor Sreenivasan is a contributing editor, each week offering one of "Sree's Tech Tips" (there's a linked list with that bio), of which the latest is "Five Things I Learned After Tangling With James O'Keefe."

Slimy Jim, Sree tells us, "showed up at Columbia Journalism School last week with mic in hand and cameras rolling to try to ask me questions about a colleague," which I gather is a polite way of saying that the little crapbrain had set his slanderous sights on someone exponentially worthier than his scummy self. "Fortunately, I recognized him," Sree writes. "Unlike his previous films, where he'd masqueraded as, among other things, a pimp, he was dressed journalist-style." Aha, an even more wildly improbably disguise than Slimy Jim's pimp getup. (As I've noted in the video-clip caption above, I haven't been able to bring myself to actually watch the little eff-er, but I' enormously tickled by the image conjured in this post comment from Susanna Speier: "Really was quite wonderful to see him retreating as you asked about his 'little outfits.'")

Sree, being after all a tech-savvy type, reacted promptly.

I pulled out my iPhone and started shooting him at the same time he was shooting me. Then a student started shooting video of me shooting O’Keefe shooting me, which he posted on YouTube. [Note: There are lots of links onsite.]

O'Keefe was on campus looking for material for his latest “To Catch a Journalist” segment for what he calls "Project Veritas," in which he goes after journalists for alleged misdeeds. In this case, he asked me about journalists using bad words in emails.

Gawker’s John Cook linked to the video and wrote about the incident on Thursday, which resulted in tens of thousands of people suddenly becoming aware of this. The whole thing also made the “Worst Persons” segment on the new “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” show on Current TV, with O’Keefe on the list.

As we'll see below, Sree hasn't been unalloyedly thrilled by the outpouring of attention this has produced. Nevertheless, I hope he won't mind my passing on what he describes as "some lessons worth learning from the incident. Here are the two I can't resist sharing:

1. IF SOMEONE AMBUSHES YOU WITH A CAMERA, AMBUSH ’EM BACK. If you get ambushed by someone with a video camera, pull out your camera phone and start filming. You end up intimidating them, not the other way around. And you have a full record of the incident, in case the other guy puts out a selectively edited version.

4. PEOPLE LIKE O’KEEFE THINK THEY ARE ACTING LIKE JOURNALISTS. They think having a camera makes them a journalist. Instead, this is a cheap caricature of journalism, down to the mic flag (you know, the “Project Veritas” logo attached to the microphone). He shows once again that ambush interviews and selective editing don’t make you into a citizen journalist.

And I would add to No. 4 the lesson I've cited so frequently which David Brock learned the hard way (and passed on in Blinded by the Right after becoming the young superstar of right-wing fake-journalism and finally coming to grips with the underlying fraud: that unlike actual journalists, who set out to get the story, the right-wing fake-journalists he'd been associated with started with a story concocted in their heads, out of their assorted delusions and obsessions, and then went out to find out what factoids and made-up stuff they could find find or twist into supporting it, doing their part for the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

As commenter Karen A. Johnson notes in response to Sree's piece: "People like O'Keefe and [his patron Andrew] Breitbart aren't embarrassed by their own sleaziness." To which Donna Morreale chimes in, "No they are actually proud of it," adding, "but if we expose them to everyone they will get less positive attention and people would understand they are nothing but a pile of bs."

I'll leave you to read about the other lessons onsite:

2. BEING EVEN IN A MINOR FIRESTORM IS IMMENSELY DISTRACTING.

3. ANYONE IN THE MEDIA CAN BE A TARGET THESE DAYS.

5. WANT MORE FOLLOWERS? BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.

In connection with this last lesson, Sree writes, "Suddenly, I’ve found dozens of politics tweeters following me, including some from both extremes of the spectrum. None more famous, however, than Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart." He adds, though: "I am hoping these political types, when they discover I almost never tweet about politics, will get bored and unfollow me. Let’s move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here."

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