VIDEO: Founder of Project Veritas James O’Keefe Discusses the State of American Journalism

During this year’s edition of FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Nevada, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe sat down with C-SPAN’s Peter Slen to discuss the current state of American media.

James talked about the core themes of his latest book, “American Muckraker,” and why it is a true guide for those who aspire to become investigative journalists in the modern age.

You can watch the highlights of his interview on C-SPAN2

TRANSCRIPT

Peter Slen, C-SPAN: Is it okay to deceive a subject you’re investigating?

James O’Keefe, Project Veritas: Your question is an interesting one, because it’s a question of relative deception. Because either you deceive your subject that you’re investigating to tell the truth to your audience, or you don’t deceive your subject and you tell untruths to your audience. In other words, if you just take what your subject is saying at face value, you’ll be disseminating perhaps falsehoods to millions of people. So, there’s an ethicist named Lewis Hodges who argues in a thesis paper: you have a moral imperative to deceive your subject if your mission is to tell the truth to your audience. This is also written about in a book called, ‘The Journalist and The Murderer,’ which is a famous book in the 1990s. Janet Malcolm, who is a legendary journalist, wrote that a journalist always deceives their subject. It’s a confidence game that you must play if your intention is to do investigative reporting. If your intention is to read off teleprompters, to play a stenographer, and to tell the public what the two-star general wants you to know, well, I would argue that’s a worse deception. You must choose between these two types of “deceptions,” but it’s paramount that you tell the truth to your audience. That’s what a journalist is supposed to do. There has always been a tension in journalism between what I call in this book [American Muckraker], access and autonomy. There’s always a tension there, because some people need to get really close to their sources and sometimes need to aggressively, and adversarially investigate their sources. So, you have to strike that balance just perfectly. But these days in journalism — its become too out of balance in the early 21st century. I think in the mid 20th century, investigative reporting was — you had the Chicago Sun Times doing these investigations where they’re posing as bartenders, you had, you know, most famously Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair was [celebrated] by journalists in New York for what he did. You don’t really see that anymore, right? You don’t on cable news. People just sort of sit up there and opine and talk about what they think. You know, none of these journalists on cable have really broken big aggressive stories. Most of the stories are broken through people like me. For example, The Washington Post won a Pulitzer surprise for investigating me — not corruption in the government. So, you need to have the spirit of investigative reporting, and citizens need to do it. You kind of have a [need for a] Renaissance and go back to what was done decades ago.

Slen: Has there ever been a moment in your career where you said, “I just can’t do this again.” I mean, this is really hard. This is really uncomfortable.

O’Keefe: Yes. In the first chapter of this book, American Muckraker, which is a journalism textbook, it’s about suffering. You might say, why would you write a chapter in a journalism book about such a theme like that? Because I think there’s a lot of trauma that has occurred in my life and in the lives of the people that work for me. Whether you’re being a whistleblower and you’re violating your nondisclosure agreement, you’re, you know, you’re fired from your job. I was arrested in 2010 by the FBI, eventually exonerated from what they accused me of. I was — we [Project Veritas] were raided by the FBI in November. These are federal agents taking journalists’ work product, rifling through anonymous sources in order to find out if you’ve committed crimes. These are traumatizing things that shake the foundation of what it means to be a journalist, what it means to be an American.

Slen: Do you think it’s because of some of the topics that you’re addressing that were ignored, edited, or ridiculed by the mainstream media?

O’Keefe: I don’t know if it’s so much politics as it is power. There is, you know, as Noam Chomsky wrote about, which I refer to in American Muckraker — he wrote a book called Manufacturing Consent. There is a symbiotic relationship between people in power and the media due to kind of a reciprocity of interest. For example, CNN, one of their main advertisers is Pfizer pharmaceutical in the commercial break. You actually hear it. You know, it’s become a cliche, “Brought to you by Pfizer.” So, we kind of take that for granted on the commercials, but if you are literally paid by a billion-dollar corporation, can you investigate that corporation? Of course not. We take this for granted growing up in America. We grow up seeing the media operate the way it does, but these are not right-wing arguments. I mean, Noam Chomsky is not a right-winger. Glenn Greenwald is not a right-winger. You begin to realize there’s more of us than there are of them in the sense that there’s more people that believe in truth and transparency than believe in darkness and corruption. There’s a place in the world for people like that. Without people like that, investigative journalists can’t do their jobs. It’s the bread and butter of what it means to be an American and the right to report [news]. What someone tells you is being fundamentally — fundamentally is in jeopardy right now. In our case with the FBI, they’re trying to take that right away from us right here. I had ACLU lawyers in my office last month telling me, by the way, they’re defending us. The ACLU is writing to the judge, trying to unseal the warrants against me. They said this has never happened before in American history. “James O’Keefe what’s happened to you has never happened before to any journalist.” Now they’re starting to point guns at us and take our reporters’ notebooks. That’s never happened before. So, I do admire people like Ed Snowden. I admire Julian Assange. I admire Dan Ellsberg. I admire Mike Wallace. I don’t know what’s happened. I don’t know why the billion-dollar [media] corporations aren’t doing the job — it’s left to scrappy, broke, entrepreneurial, enterprising people. But so be it.

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