Citizen Journalism: James O’Keefe’s Lying Ways
Table of Contents: Citizen Journalism
He’s surreptitiously filmed teachers, cafeteria workers, employees for ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and NPR and posted the results to YouTube. Is video evidence so collected “true”? “Real”? Is it refutable? 1. My Brush with Celebrity: The Other Side of Cyber-Spying My first experience with James O’Keefe is discussed as a way to introduce the broader topic of surreptitious recording in the Web 2.0 world. 2. “Welcome to America:” A Brief Prehistory of Citizen Journalism 2.0 The murkiness of the term...
read moreMy Brush with Celebrity: The Other Side of Cyber-Spying
OK, I admit it. This is my one real brush with a real celebrity. Sure, I’ve had one or two near brushes with real celebrity. Who hasn’t? For example, I did see Richard Gere once while having dinner in the city with a celebrity job candidate. But that was from afar and the more memorable part of the evening was finding a gray, shattered chicken bone in whatever vegetarian glop I had ordered. So, in the memory ranking, Gere still gets second billing to my retroactively free meal. But he deserves it. I bet he probably didn’t...
read more“Welcome to America:” A Brief Prehistory of Citizen Journalism 2.0
As the year-long celebration of Reagan’s centennial gets underway, it’s worth thinking for just a few moments about what might have been. With the Democratic Party gearing up to regain the White House at the end of Reagan’s second term, Gary Hart positioned himself as the early frontrunner. In the press release officially announcing his candidacy on April 13th, 1987, Hart invoked the special interests controlling the election process and the erosion of ethical standards for public officials. Looking ahead, he...
read moreWho Needs the News Media? Make Your Own News!
Is this citizen journalism? A “pimp” and a “prostitute” enter a federally-funded facility seeking financial assistance for their criminal activities. The camera is rolling while the person behind the desk blithely counsels the seeming criminals on how to subvert the law. Later the video is posted to YouTube, exposing the federally-funded organization as criminally negligent. Sound familiar? This scenario was acted out to devastating effect by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles at ACORN offices across the country in...
read moreVeritas This! I’ve Got Your NPR Right Here!
I watch the videos of our new celebrity journalists and I don’t see exactly what they want me to see. Take any one of the game-changing ACORN videos, for example. I see what O’Keefe and his Girl Friday have pieced together. A young white guy with his scantily clad girl come in off the street with an outrageous story and the local Community Organization employees are only too eager to help: “All right, then. Lemme get this straight. You’re hoping to fund your future campaign for office in the Democratic Party; this...
read moreBaltimore, My Baltimore
What happened to Baltimore? Here are some numbers to try to wrap your brain around: The population of Baltimore City was 900K in 1970. In 2010? 645K. That’s a loss of more than a quarter of the population over the past forty years. Over that same period, Baltimore City went from being responsible for nearly one out of three jobs in the state to providing just over 10% jobs statewide. That’s an urban center that is hemorrhaging people and employment opportunities. And the relative buying power of those who’ve...
read moreBaltimore, My Baltimore, Part II: Down to the Wire
How did celebrity journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles get to the ACORN office in Baltimore, the first stop on their barn burning tour of Eastern Seaboard ACORN offices? In my previous post, I entertained the possibility that they could’ve taken a route that allowed them to drive by both the plot in the center of the city where Memorial Stadium used to be and the two new stadiums down by the Inner Harbor. That route would have afforded them a study in contrasts. Alternately, they might have elected to visit shot locations...
read moreOther Offices, Other Conversations
Here’s a shot of Baltimore taken from a police helicopter on a beautiful day: As it happens, Officer H. Graham Smith took this picture above 25th Street , where Baltimore City’s ACORN office used to be–two or three blocks out of the lower right frame. The major thoroughfare on the left heading downtown is Greenmount Ave. And way in the upper right corner you can see the outfield bleachers of the Baltimore Orioles’ Camden Yards. The Inner Harbor beckons in the distance, just beyond the cluster of high rises. The...
read moreThe Road Not Taken
Since my last post, O’Keefe and the Hole in the Veritas Gang have crawled back into the headlines. NPR is the latest victim of the smash-and-grab journalist. The MO for the entire arc of the news story remains the same: secret recordings released revealing that employees at X taxpayer-supported entity are exactly what conservatives have always said they were (criminals, liberals, baby killers); rash of firings, recriminations, public statements of outrage follow; the argument for defunding entity X (ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR) gains...
read moreCriminal Journalism and Corporate Responsibility: Rupert Murdoch Just Says No
About the hacking scandal and its consequences, a friend wrote to say: “I’ve been looking forward to news of Rupert Murdoch’s death for years; this may just be better.” I share the feeling, even as a part of me is stunned by just how many stars had to align to bring Murdoch before Parliament to testify on what he described, incoherently, as “the most humble day” of his life. It has been a matter of record for years that the now suddenly–indeed, miraculously–defunct News of the World violated the...
read moreOur Hands Are Clean: Rupert Murdoch and the Betrayal of the Public Trust
One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl! The one bad apple argument is extraordinarily resilient. Here’s President Bush on Abu Ghraib in a speech at the US Army War College in 2004: “A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” And here’s Rupert Murdoch testifying in...
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