James O’Keefe’s undercover investigations of various liberal institutions have resulted in everything from congressional action to criminal charges filed against the conservative provocateur. His latest exposé reveals an important truth, but maybe not the one he intended.
Last July, he launched a series called American Pravda focused on CNN that aimed to show just how liberal the American media is, and in particular, how hostile they are to President Trump. He recently turned his hidden cameras toward the New York Times. Right off the bat, there’s a gambling-in-this-casino aspect to the premise, and it’s not helped by O’Keefe’s signature sledgehammer subtlety in the way he presents the complex issues involved in the media landscape.
But somehow, in O’Keefe’s latest chapter, he has stumbled across a very interesting, and miraculously nuanced, discussion of what’s going on at the New York Times. O’Keefe captured undercover video of New York Times London Senior Staff Editor Desiree Shoe at a bar freely discussing the nature of working at the Times and how the paper goes about catering to its audience.
The key revelations are as follows: One, quelle surprise, Shoe is a liberal who doesn’t much care for Mike Pence. (She’s at least somewhat nuanced in the way she presents her contention that Pence might have kinda sorta once-upon-a-time supported electroshock conversion therapy for gay people.) And two, yes, the New York Times is a liberal paper appealing to a liberal audience—but that the reasons for this are as much a result of structural economic forces in an ailing news industry as they are about biased reporters slanting the news.
In fact, Shoe’s comments seem mostly insightful and reasonable evaluation of a machine that she’s merely a cog in. “The last couple of years [the news industry’s] changed for the bad. … The business model itself it just, you know, there’s so much panic about what to do, that you know, what else is a company supposed to do,” she says.
Narrator O’Keefe claims: “The New York Times used to have a rock solid reputation to report unbiased truth, but according to Shoe it now wants to report the truth as accepted by the left. She insists that bias is what subscribers want, and the Times wants subscribers to be happy.”
Now setting aside idea the Times had a “rock solid reputation to report unbiased truth”— certainly not in my lifetime, and I went to journalism school 20 years ago—what Shoe actually says is, I think, a fair summation of what’s going on. The fact that liberal readers gravitate to the Times “doesn’t mean we’re going to condescend to them, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be holier than thou” about giving those readers what they want.
In fact, attracting new subscribers, by hook or by crook, is an economic necessity at a time when the venerable newspaper has been forced to fire copy editors en masse. This may not ultimately be good for objectivity: Shoe notes that the paper is benefiting from what is internally referred to as a “Trump bump,” from setting itself up as an antagonistic voice to the president. And it’s clear that Shoe is not entirely comfortable with what’s happening.
“Isn’t that just feeding the monster what he wants to eat rather than giving him …” asks one of O’Keefe’s undercover interlocutors. Shoe responds, “Yeah, but what else are you supposed to do?”
The Shoe video is the third by O’Keefe in his series on the NYT. He reports that another Times employee, audience strategy editor Nicholas Dudich, who appeared in his two previous sting videos, “has been removed from the New York Times’ phone directory since last week. Project Veritas is still waiting on confirmation from the New York Times about his firing, but the evidence seems to suggest that he may have been removed from the Times.”
Let’s hope the editors of the Times take note of the fact that Shoe’s honesty about the state of the news industry was actually quite refreshing, and she acquitted herself quite well considering she didn’t know she was being filmed and the conversation took place two or three beers deep into the evening.
Shoe raised important questions about the economics of journalism and how it relates to bias. Even O’Keefe intones at one point in the video, “Shoe’s points are actually quite reasonable.” Indeed, whoever figures out how to attract a broad-based news audience without segmenting and pandering to ideological bubbles, will probably go a long way toward arresting the decline of the news industry, let alone the republic.
