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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"60 Minutes" goes after (legal) congressional corruption, and even targets a fair number of Republicans!

Contrary to the impression given by the presentation of this report on the "60 Minutes Overtime" webpage, tonight's report actually targeted a bunch of crooked Republicans before giving Nancy Pelosi attention (including a shockingly hacked video clip).

by Ken

It was only by accident that I stumbled onto Steve Kroft's report on tonight's edition of 60 Minutes (it's supposed to be here on the website, but I haven't been able to bring the page up -- is everybody trying to load it?). Once upon a time -- a long, long-ago time -- 60 Minutes was weekly "must" viewing, when the broadcast actually seemed focused on holding members of the political establishment to account for their deeds. Now it seems safely enmeshed in the Village media machine, seemingly aimed mostly aimed at paying tribute to that establishment, with occasional reference to wrongdoing that the system miraculously manages to self-correct.

It was just a couple of minutes after 7pm ET, and I'd just remembered to flip to channel 2 to see whether this was a week when CBS had a football game running long, thereby pushing back the network prime-time schedule and wreaking havoc on my scheduled recording of tonight's episode of The Good Wife. By the time what seemed like a 20-minute block of commercials ended, I saw that no, 60 Minutes was indeed on the air, and Steve Kroft was about to report a story that actually grabbed my attention: on what would be considered insider trading for anyone but congressmen, who are exempt from any such legal inhibitions, and other forms of more or less legal self-enriching congressional chicanery.

The clip above is from the "60 Minutes Overtime" webpage, which also features this text report:

November 13, 2011 6:46 PM

Questioning Pelosi: Steve Kroft heads to D.C.

By Overtime Staff

"Nobody would talk to us." That's what 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft says happened when he tried to get members of Congress to talk about "insider trading" on Capitol Hill.

It turns out that it is not illegal for member of Congress to make stock trades using inside information they learn while working on legislation, and Steve had some questions about some specific stock trades.

Since nobody involved would give him an interview, Steve had to find other ways to get some answers. As you'll see on Overtime this week, Steve looked for some lawmakers at their homes, attempted to track others down in their offices, and finally ended up asking questions at press conferences held by Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner.

"You don't like to do that stuff," Kroft tells Overtime producer David Rubin. "But on the other hand, if they don't want to talk to you and they don't want to give you an interview, and they are in powerful positions and play a prominent role in the story that you're doing, then you feel like sometimes you've got to do it."

Steve's 60 Minutes piece, Insiders, was produced by Ira Rosen and Gabrielle Schonder.

When the report itself (which is supposed to be available online here, though I haven't been able to get anything to load; too much traffic following the broadcast of the report?) began, I was a little nervous, because Steve Kroft made clear that the 60 Minutes it was coordinated with an investigation into personal wealth accumulation by members of Congress during their service spearheaded by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution -- you know, "the conservative Hoover Institution," at Stanford University (Howie passes on a Media Matters report, about which more later, which notes that Schweizer is the editor-in-chief of one of right-wing superloon Andrew Breitbart's websites) -- making it sound to the underinitiated as if fighting congressional corruption is a conservative or Republican cause. The reality is that the brazenness of congressional Republicans is the leading cause of the extent, indeed the institutionalization of congressional corruption.

Which is not, let me hasten to add, to deny the extent of Democratic congressional corruption, which we have covered pretty extensively here at DWT. But let's not kid ourselves as to the affiliation of the pioneers and grand masters of the field, the visionaries who have led the way for their fellows -- of, yes, both parties. It's one of the few areas in which Congress can be seen to be functionally bipartisan.

But to get back to the 60 Minutes report, when it got down to cases my apprehension was alleviated somewhat. From what we were shown on-air, Peter Schweizer seems to have done some actual hard-headed investigating. For the record, the first subject of his investigation, and the most egregious case we were presented with, was one of the House's most expert balancers of ultra-extreme right-wing ideology and ultra-extreme personal profiteering, the singularly repellent Spencer Bachus, a longtime DWT fave, and attention was then directed to financial funny business attributed to Republican former Speaker "Planet Denny" Hastert and present Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner, before moving on to Democratic then-Speaker (now House Minority Leader) Nancy Pelosi.

IT COULD BE COINCIDENCE THAT ON THE "60 MINUTES
OVERTIME" WEBSITE THE FEATURED TARGET IS PELOSI

As you can see above, the "Overtime" Web report is headed "Questioning Pelosi: Steve Kroft heads to D.C.," and at the top only Pelosi is pictured.

Well, no, I don't think it's a coincidence at all. Yes, the text mentions "Sunny John" Boehner as well, but not Spencer Bachus or "Planet Denny" Hastert. And it sure looks like the offender "caught" by 60 Minutes is Pelosi.

Which is indeed how the Right-Wing Lie Machine is already spinning the report. (Here's the shocked "REVEALED" report on Andrew Breitbart's right-wing lie-o-rama.) And that Media Matters report I mentioned above includes a pre-air comment from Pelosi, as well as documentation of an earlier, debunked Peter Schweizer smear of Pelosi, along with a link to a YouTube version of Kroft's press-conference Q&A that's shockingly, astoundingly different, more substantive than the eviscerated version aired by 60 Minutes aired. (The aired version, by hacking out nearly all of Pelosi's answer to Kroft's question, makes it sound as if she simply ducked the question, which is an out-and-out lie. Does CBS News have an ombudsman?) Media Matters also goes into much detail about the right-wing history and associations of Peter Schweizer and his associates.

In the 60 Minutes report's defense, it devoted significant air time to an interview with former Washington State Democratic Rep. Brian Baird, talking about his long-standing, futile effort to get Congress to enact some sort of legal bar to insider trading by its members, which never attracted more than six co-sponsors.

It would be a shame if the substance of the report were allowed to be overshadowed by the corrupt-wingnut spin. But I suppose it wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened. The Lie Machine knows its business. And certainly nobody who's in, or who has friends (or contacts) in, Congress has any interest in furthering the real story.

Still, it was nice to hear it surface just a bit.

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"Language is a virus," says Tom Tomorrow, and there appears to be no vaccine against or treatment for Andrew Breitbart's lies

Language is a virus

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

DOES ANYONE ON THE RIGHT KNOW ANYONE WHO'S
EVER SPOKEN THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING?

Well, yes, when they're among themselves, or think they're safely among their own kind, free of intruders from the Outside World Where Reality Exists, they are apt to relax their guard and, amid the outpourings of psychotic delusion, speak their own actual (psychotically deluded) beliefs. Otherwise, not so much.

Just the other day I wrote about historian Rick Perlstein's terrific new Mother Jones piece, "Inside the GOP's Fact-Free
Nation," which concludes:

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence -- that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs -- the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

An ongoing demonstration of the infotainment noozemedia's indiiference-slash-incompetence-slash-collusion is the continued existence of serial liar Andrew Breitbart. While the Right continues to destroy the lives and careers of decent people by flagrantly twisting their words into weapons for the wackos' propaganda of poison, there appears to be no lie, or rather network of lies, too extreme to turn them into pariahs among decent humans.

So naturally here is the vile Breitbart at it again, and being treated with respect rather than universal choruses of "Liar!" "Scumbag!" "Devil!"

Ned Resnikoff has worked out some of the details for Media Matters:

Breitbart Starts Big Push To "Go After Teachers" With His Trademark Deception

April 29, 2011 1:59 pm ET by Ned Resnikoff

Andrew Breitbart is at it again.

A week after he promised to "go after the teachers and the union organizers," his website BigGovernment.com started running a series of choppy, heavily edited videos taken from labor studies courses taught at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. The posts promoting these videos claim, among other things, that the professors "instruct students on how fear, intimidation, and, even, industrial sabotage are important and, often, necessary tools," and that they teach their students that the US flag is "racist."

But given Breitbart's history of dishonesty and his declared intention to "go after" teachers and unions, do we have any reason to think Big Government's claims are credible?

In a word, no. And in fact a quick review of the full context of these clips reveals that Breitbart is up to his old tricks again.

The fraudulent editing is neatly laid out onsite, if you're up for the gory details.

Why do they lie? Because there are propaganda victories to be won, and no price to be paid.

Why are they allowed to continue lying? Because the people whose job it is to call them out are (take your pick) stupid, lazy, incompetent, or outright corrupt. (This is not multiple-choice. Pick as many answers as you like.)

Sigh.


OH YES, DON'T MISS ANDREW BREITBART TOMORROW
AT THE L.A. TIMES'S 2011 FESTIVAL OF BOOKS AT USC

He's to be interviewed by the paper's Robin Abcarian. (He's got a book out, remember, presumably on the theory that the world isn't beset with enough misinformation, not to mention disinformation.) The event, originally scheduled for the Campus Center Ballroom at 12:30, has been moved to Etc. Stage at 3:30. I'm totally unfamiliar with the venues, so I don't know what if any bearing that may have, and I haven't been able to find any explanation.

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