Conservative sting activist James O’Keefe is defending his latest project, an attempt at exposing malfeasance at CNN, from critics who say it flopped in large part because the undercover tapes O’Keefe released are nearly a decade old.
“Well, the Trump-pussy tape was from 2005,” O’Keefe said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “So, that’s not a consistent criticism from the media.”
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O’Keefe was referring to the 2005 tape released in October showing President Trump, before his bid for office, making lewd comments about how he comes on to women.
The activist, who has orchestrated several sting operations aimed at revealing the way left-leaning groups operate, said his tapes of CNN employees are important because they show how younger workers were being taught, and how they are likely to think today as older workers.
“It’s past is prelude,” O’Keefe said. “If the guy is a mid-level editor in 2009, and he’s literally training journalists how to do their journalism, he’s talking about the philosophy of journalism to, apparently, a room filled with cub reporters, and he’s [now] the current senior vice president, that’s fair play. It’s a perfect analogy to draw. If audio is relevant 11 years ago in the context of what someone says on a bus to someone bragging about what women are allowing me to do, then a newsroom with a current vice president of CNN, that’s relevant, too.”
The difference between that tape and the material O’Keefe has released so far on CNN is that the Trump tape clearly showed Trump saying something many voters would find offensive and compare it to the man on the ballot, whereas the CNN tapes have yet to bring forth anything so clear cut. But he said when all the CNN material is released, it will be “hundreds” of hours long.
In one of the clips O’Keefe featured in a tease for all the audio, Richard Griffiths, who is now CNN’s vice president and senior editorial director, is heard describing his philosophy on journalism.
“Aid the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To a degree, right?” Griffiths says, citing a common journalism trope. “Is that not part of the traditional role of a journalist? It’s actually one of the things I can be most proud of as a journalist.”
In another clip, Joe Sterling, who at the time worked as an online editor for CNN, is heard saying “there is no debate” over the science on climate change and he likens it to “born-agains” who say there remains a debate over creationism.
O’Keefe, who is often criticized for deceptive editing and unethical media tactics, called Sterling’s comments evidence of “blatant bias against Republicans.”
While O’Keefe is promising more, his critics, many of which are journalists, said his latest sting failed to live up to its hype. The Washington Post called it “totally overrated.”
Unlike with prior sting projects, O’Keefe did not release a fully produced video to expose some type of left-wing foul play. Instead, he dumped hours of what he says is audio surreptitiously recorded inside CNN’s Atlanta headquarters.
He has called on supporters and the media to search through the audio themselves to find anything newsworthy.
“We really kind of let the tape speak for themselves and that’s why we don’t really want to go through and try to — we really want to let the tapes speak for themselves,” O’Keefe told the Washington Examiner. “We just want to let the people talk and if you think [what they say is] fine, that’s fine. If you think that’s normal, that’s fine. But we want people to be held to account inside these networks.”
