Yes, James O’Keefe is a journalist
One of my former U.S. students insists that the conservative filmmaker — famed for taking down NPR executives and the liberal activist group ACORN — is not a journalist. She recently asked for my opinion, and I hesitated to reply. I suspect she objects to O’Keefe’s methods — he gathers information through deceptive means and I’m certainly one who frowns upon journalists who lie or mislead their audiences or subjects. But, I think she also objects to O’Keefe’s ideology — but only she knows which objection carries more weight.
This recent NY Times Magazine profile of O’Keefe helps shed light on these issues. Take the time to read it–it’s well-written and largely unbiased. In it, two professors of journalism speak to the issue of whether O’Keefe’s methods are outside the norms of journalism:
“Undercover journalism goes back to at least the 1820s in this country,” says Brooke Kroeger, the director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who has written a book on the subject, to be published next year. “And the use of hidden cameras to do it came into prominence after World War II.” Muckrakers, of course, are advocates, loved or despised according to the targets they choose. “For years, advocacy groups such as those for a better government have partnered with journalistic organizations,” Kroeger says. “Last year the Humane Society released an undercover video of the inhumane treatment of pigs in Virginia that got picked up by media around the country and won applause from animal lovers. Many of those same people vociferously went after O’Keefe for his exposé of NPR. It’s basically a question of what you care about and what side you are on.”
Earlier this year, two of O’Keefe’s actors, posing as fictitious representatives of a Muslim philanthropic organization, had lunch with Ron Schiller, NPR’s senior vice president for development. In the course of ingratiating himself with these potential donors, Schiller was caught denigrating Tea Party members and Republicans in language that the corporation later said it was appalled by. The scandal hastened the departures of both Schiller and his boss, Vivian Schiller (no relation). When it was suggested that the tapes had been dishonestly edited, O’Keefe invited people to watch them in their entirety. “He said it, that’s just a fact,” Dana Davis Rehm, a spokesman for NPR, said of Ron Schiller. In the aftermath, NPR conducted sessions on ethics for its support and operational staff and is planning to publish updated ethics guidelines in September.
His takedown of Acorn was even more devastating, although Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s former chief executive, contends that the videos were dishonest. “He is demon, a liar and a cheat,” she says. “What he did was despicable. He created a fiction.” Bertha Lewis still insists that Acorn did not offer advice on how to break the law. Clark Hoyt, a former public editor for The New York Times, reviewed O’Keefe’s raw footage and edited tapes and concluded that “the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context.”
There is no doubt that O’Keefe disseminated only the material that supported his thesis about Acorn, but this kind of selectivity is the norm in advocacy journalism. “I put James O’Keefe in the same category as Michael Moore,” says Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. “Some ethicists say it is never right for a journalist to deceive for any reason, but there are wrongs in the world that will never be exposed without some kind of subterfuge.”
I agree. I think O’Keefe’s methods are questionable but not outside the norms of journalism. His tactics looks quite similar to liberal provocateur Michael Moore, and I certainly consider him a journalist as well. But, they both represent a certain type of “muckraking” journalism — one that belongs on the media fringes, not not on the evening newscasts or metropolitan dailies.
In the end, these partisan journalists add something to media landscape that their more “objective” brethren can’t. And I’d argue that we’re all better off for it.
How to write good
“Do not put statements in the negative form. And don’t start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.”
– William Safire
On Journalism
“With many young reporters the notion exists that a newspaper man is not at his best unless he is finding fault. They go out of their way to employ ridicule and sarcasm, and pride themselves on their ability to annoy and hurt. Some of them get so bad that they are always ready to stretch the truth for the sake of setting down what they think are particularly telling examples of their own smartness; and it must be confessed that occasionally experienced newspaper men who pose as fair judges are the worst offenders.”
On laughter
“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.”
On Work
From Marge Piercy’s poem “To be of use“:
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
On defending the ethics of journalism
Every journalist who is not stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the “public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
– “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm
On knowledge
Here’s a great quote from Shakespeare:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– “Hamlet”, Act 1 scene 5
When he says philosophy, he’s talking about science.
On Stereotypes
Here’s a great quote from Walter Lippmann, author of “Public Opinion.” When he talks about stereotypes, he’s not just talking about being racist — he means all of the subconscious assumptions we make about how the world works:
What matters is the character of the stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon those inclusive patterns which constitute our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind.
Well said.
E.B. White on traveling to Maine
What happens to me when I cross the Piscataqua and plunge rapidly into Maine at a cost of seventy-five cents in tolls? I cannot describe it. I do not ordinarily spy a partridge in a pear tree, or three French hens, but I do have the sensation of having received a gift of true love. And when, five hours later, I dip down across the Narramissic and look back at the tiny town of Orland, the white spire of its church against the pale-red sky stirs me in a way that Chartres could never do. It was the Narramissic that once received as fine a lyrical tribute as was ever paid to a river — a line in a poem by a schoolboy, who wrote of it, “It flows through Orland every day.” I never cross that mild stream without thinking of his testimonial to the constancy, the dependability of small, familiar rivers.
– E. B. White
“Essays of E.B. White”
