“Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics To Entrap Nixon”
Dan Calabrese asks, “Imagine this headline and lead appearing in any newspaper, save for the Washington Post, in 1972:”
Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon
The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.
Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.
As Calabrese writes:
Absurd? Of course. Not even the Republican National Committee would have attempted so shamelessly to turn the Watergate scandal into an indictment of Woodward and Bernstein themselves. And if anyone had, the Post would have screamed bloody murder.
Yet look what the very same Washington Post wrote on Friday about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the two independent journalists who exposed what appear to be highly illegal activities by the community organizing group ACORN:
O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.
Why, exactly, do O’Keefe and Giles now have to defend themselves and their independence, when the result of their work clearly speaks for itself?
Part of the issue is obviously ideological bias. The mainstream media is far less happy to see a left-wing organization exposed as a criminal fraud, especially one so closely connected to the left-wing president in which they have so much invested.
But there is more to it than that.
O’Keefe and Giles represent the kind of new reality that threatens the very existence of media dinosaurs like the Washington Post. These two individuals, ages 25 and 20, respectively, met on Facebook, got to talking about ACORN and decided to travel the country dressed as a pimp and a hooker, shoot some secret videos and – if they found anything good – post them on YouTube.
With the help of Andrew Brietbart and his burgeoning web site BigGovernment.com, the videos became an instant viral sensation. But with all due respect to Brietbart, who does excellent work and is a solid journalist in his own right, I wonder if his involvement was even necessary.
If O’Keefe and Giles had merely posted the videos on YouTube and e-mailed some of the leading conservative bloggers, they would have been just as big a sensation. That’s how information is spread these days, and that may be the even bigger reason their expose upsets the establishment media.
Though of course, as Breitbart himself writes in his latest Washington Times column, the result could have been even further stonewalling from the state-run media, or an immediate drive-by hit on the character of O’Keefe and Giles:
Once the American public saw with its own eyes the grotesque, common practices of ACORN’s housing offices, Mr. O’Keefe and Miss Giles could no longer be a legitimate focus of media scrutiny. Kill the messenger doesn’t work with the American people when they realize that the message is so devastating and honest. I think the video exposed the misuse of public funds and systemic manipulation of the tax code in the name of “helping the poor.”
If Mr. O’Keefe dumped the videos on YouTube, the political powers would have killed the expose before it got traction. I half-joked that he should secretly tape pitching the major television networks exclusive use of his videos for their nightly news broadcasts. But a simpler, less controversial method proved as fruitful.
I told him that in addition to launching his compelling and stylized Web videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released.We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O’Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com.
Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.
There are lots of stories that percolate through the conservative Blogosphere and/or become “underground” viral videos via YouTube. But they’re very often bottled up by the gatekeepers of the legacy media. For the moment, Breitbart seems to have found a way to break that logjam, and remind the viewers at home who care about such things, how much information they’re not being told.
Related: “Strangers to Dissent, Liberals Try to Stifle It”, Michael Barone adds.
Related: “We’re being out-Alinskyed by the anti-Alinskys’ — Ben Jealous, NAACP president, on the ACORN story and other conservative Internet exposes.”
Update (9/22/09): The Post retracts their modified limited hangout, adding this correction above the article, albeit in teeny-tiny type:
This article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically mention them.
Moe Lane adds:
While I’m glad to see that the Washington Post has retracted the racism charges made by their staff writers Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig, it would be better if the newspaper did not permit such charges to be alleged without cause in the first place. Such activities are completely unsuitable for a national newspaper – particularly one that prides itself on objective news reporting.
I dunno about the MSM thinking that they can save their hides by dissing the newbies. They’d have to have some inkling that they were putting themselves in danger of irrelevancy when they chose, with eyes wide open, to advocate for one candidate and one political party. The saying “putting all your eggs in one basket” is very well known.
I’m still willing to believe that the MSM is moving against these two upstarts simply because they threaten “The One” and not because they threaten the MSM. Their own actions have to be known by them to threaten the fourth estate more than anything these two have done.
The Nixon story was worse than that because the “secret source” wasn’t just a whistleblower but the #2 guy in the FBI. The Nixon takedown was a coup and WaPo was a co-conspirator. Oh well, that’s ancient history.
I like the label “captive media” much better!
Another parallel/double standard.
It is somehow relevant that Hannah Gile’s father is a minister in a conservative church. Yet no one would dare to tie Bernstein’s work back to his fellow traveling and/or Communist family.
Even today and even though he wrote a book about it, the MSM never mentions it when they talk about the WaPo and Watergate.
I guess this just makes Freidman’s point that only the sacred trinity and the dead tree press can be trusted to fact check their stories. Heh
Nixon cheated, lied, and broke the law. He got what he deserved. ALL of these politicians who do the same, deserve the same. It shouldn’t matter what side of the aisle they sit, or which side of the aisle you prefer.
A crook is a crook.
I didn’t see anyone here defending Nixon.
I guess we know now why Obama says he’s “open” to newspaper bailouts.
“Such activities are completely unsuitable for a national newspaper – particularly one that prides itself on objective news reporting.”
Yes? And what does that have to do with the WaPo? As we speak they are trying their best to get a Democrat elected to the Senate in Virginia. This follows up their success in getting Webb elected over Allen, a result entirely due to non-stop coverage in the Post. The WaPo is The Nation with broader circlation.
Does this mean that the Dems will be investigating Michael Moore? His entire schtick seems to involve filiming people without asking permission and then broadcasting the results, usually with some creative editing.
Three cheers for Woodward and Bernstein. So they bent a few rules already. Big deal. Nixon was the worst kind of Republican — snuggling up to a war criminal like Kissinger, imposing (or trying to) price controls, launching the OSHA and EPA bureaucracies. I could go on, but readers of this blog are an astute and informed lot, so there is no need to list Nixon’s many other crimes against conservatism.
By knocking of Nixon, they paved the way for Jimmah, who was such a deplorable piece of excresence that the voters turned to Ronald Reagan. Thank God for W&B. We wouldn’t have had the Reagan renaisance without them, bless their little Red hearts.
So can we expect to see Leo DiCaprio and Scarlett Johansson portraying O’Keefe and Giles in the Ron Howard directed feature film about these two brave heroes who took on the powers that be? If only.
Andrew Breitbart understands that while Acorn is a corrupt institution that aids and abets the Democrat party, the mainstream media is an equally corrupt institution that does ten times more to aid and abet the Democrat party.
Breitbart smartly sees taking down Acorn as a means to an end, with the end being the take down of the mainstream media.
He knows that it’s simply not enough to have polls showing that a solid majority of Americans distrust the media. Lots of people thought the media was unfair to Sarah Palin, but that alone did not make them any more aware of the skeletons in Obama’s closet that the media was keeping mum about.
There are plenty of political moderates who will only grudgingly admit to the presence of “some degree” of liberal bias in the media. Many of them voted for Obama because they refused to be influenced by Conservatives who were screaming over Rev. Wright and William Ayers. If someone pointed out to them how hypocritical it was that the media wasn’t saying squat about Black Liberation Theology, when they would certainly be doing in depth reporting on any controversial schools of thought that any Republican Presidential hopeful had ties to, these moderates just shrugged and said “c’mon, this stuff just isn’t that important”.
Breitbart is on a mission to change these peoples opinions about the media. If he succeeds, then we will go from having a majority of Americans distrusting the media to having a majority of Americans viewing the media as a flat out propaganda machine for the Democrat party.
I am one who firmly believes that without the help of the media, the entertainment industry, and academia, the Democrat party would either never win elections, or would be controlled by moderates like Rep. Dan Boren in order to remain relevant.
Breitbart isn’t content to merely chip away at the media’s falling credibility. He wants to smash it to bits, because he knows how devastating it would be to Democrats. Kudos to him for believing that this goal is attainable.