“Investigative reporters have used, quote, unquote, false pretenses, like To Catch a Predator, or ABC’s Primetime Live,” I answered. “Even Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes went undercover. You go undercover in order to get to the truth. Now, is it lying? It’s a form of guerrilla theater. You’re posing as something you’re not in order to capture candid conversations from your subject. But I wouldn’t characterize it as lying.”
The obvious distinction here was that we don’t deceive the audience. We deceive the target in order to get the truth to the audience. Tucker Carlson defended the NPR investigation, saying, “I may have aesthetic qualms about it, but the point of journalism is the story. The main question you ask is, is it true?”14 But Garfield’s question wasn’t really about the techniques—not in the abstract—nor about the truth.
Underlying Garfield’s questioning was politics—the political consequences of the work as well as the assumed political motivations. He asked, “Why believe anything you have to say?” because we dared to investigate organizations that to him were sacred. If we had used deception to infiltrate and unmask KKK members, Garfield would not have dared to question our motives or our methodology. To quote Ben Shapiro, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”15
As my answer suggested, however, by 2011 undercover video reporting had devolved from exposing real abuse, as the Sun-Times did at the Mirage Tavern or as Rivera did at Willowbrook, to catching would-be predators hot on the trail of imaginary girls. Hidden cameras had become a magnet for litigation, and the legal risks had become too great to justify the rewards in either ratings or prestige to challenge powerful interests. A great art form had been all but lost. Fortunately, we were on the scene to help revive it.
Swilling Chardonnay
If the practice of journalism was faltering, preaching about journalism was more fevered than ever. Long before the 1990s, journalists had created their own university programs and a professoriate to staff them.
Prominent among the preachers was Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute. Steele worked in local TV news for ten years before becoming a career academic. In 1995, he codified “a deception/hidden cameras checklist” and handed it down to working journalists as though he had received it from a burning bush. “You Must Fulfill All of the Criteria to Justify Your Actions,” he insisted. To understand the establishment flavor of these widely accepted rules, it is useful to share in full the conditions under which Steele would approve the use of hidden cameras:
When the information obtained is of profound importance. It must be of vital public interest, such as revealing great system failure at the top levels, or it must prevent profound harm to individuals.
When all other alternatives for obtaining the same information have been exhausted.
When the journalists involved are willing to disclose the nature of the deception and the reason for it.
When the harm prevented by the information revealed through deception outweighs any harm caused by the act of deception.
When the individuals involved and their news organization apply excellence, through outstanding craftsmanship as well as the commitment of time and funding needed to pursue the story fully.
When the journalists involved have conducted a meaningful, collaborative, and deliberative decision-making process on the ethical and legal issues.1
The Poynter Institute lent its authority to these rules by reposting them in 2002. The internet was mature enough by this time and video technology was advanced enough to render some of these rules obsolete on delivery. By limiting the use of hidden cameras to those at a “news organization” with ample time and funding to pursue stories “fully,” Steele disallowed operations like Project Veritas from even thinking about using hidden cameras.
For sure, when Hannah Giles and I brought down ACORN in 2009, funding our sting on credit cards, we were not exactly the kind of “news organization” Steele had in mind. And yet our target, certainly from our perspective, was one of “profound importance,” one whose continued operation revealed “great system failure at the top levels.” Had we “exhausted” all other alternatives? No, but the media, liberal and conservative, apparently had. In fact, the deep scandal here was why a twenty-five-year-old with a Sony mini-cam was able to do in a few days what the major media had failed to do over decades.
We understood our medium better than Steele ever could. Technology had broadened the citizen journalist’s ability to get information everywhere and anywhere. We did not reject journalistic ethics. We simply had to create those ethics anew. Chicago journalists had to do the same. “[Undercover journalism] had its own peculiar system of ethics,” said veteran Chicago Daily News columnist Robert J. Casey of the city’s press, “justifiable only in behalf of the undefinable, somewhat nebulous service to a public that had only halfheartedly asked for it—the discovery, extraction, and presentation of the news.”2
On one occasion, for instance, a subject of one of our stings suggested that a couple of Veritas reporters go to her hotel room and engage in a friendly ménage à trois. This invitation had nothing to do with the public malfeasance we were investigating. It had to do with someone’s personal sexual decisions. We took it out of the finished product. We also scrubbed the identity of an NPR reporter in Libya out of a hidden-camera tape in the NPR sting to protect that journalist. As veteran reporter Philip Meyer observed, and I tend to agree, undercover journalism “is honorable when the truth provides a social benefit greater than the embarrassment to those deceived.”3
And that brings us to the underlying fallacy of Steele’s rules. There was no longer any national consensus, if there ever was one, as to what constituted a “social benefit” or a “vital public interest.” In the absence of consensus, we have expanded Steele’s rules as to what constitutes a vital interest. By 2009, ACORN had more than five hundred thousand members distributed among some twelve hundred neighborhood chapters. The organization appeared to us to be one of profound importance. It had been scamming the American taxpayer, intimidating businesses, and stealing votes for nearly forty years, protected all along by its powerful alliances. Yet, the journalists who honored Steele’s rules responded with something close to complete indifference. Writing in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review, Greg Marx dismissed our work because our “focus on ACORN was the product of a worldview that vastly exaggerated that group’s practical political importance.”4 Says who? There again is that sentiment that some topics, no matter how important, are untouchable. This sentiment is unconscionable. A simple, walk-in video report proved to be fatal because no sunlight had ever penetrated the ACORN operation.
In 2012 and 2013, when Project Veritas turned to election fraud, we showed the gap once again between what people could see for themselves and what the media were willing to acknowledge. According to the media, voter fraud was almost impossible to pull off and, as a result, rare enough to be inconsequential. What our undercover videos showed was how pathetically easy it was to secure a ballot in someone else’s name, living or dead.
In one case, we secured the ballot of the sitting attorney general, Eric Holder. What made this doubly embarrassing for Holder is that he had been chief among those dismissing voter fraud as a problem. “There is no proof that our elections are marred by in-person voter fraud,” Holder insisted on one occasion.5 But now even he had to face a congressional grilling about his own ballot being offered to someone who was not Eric Holder.
Historically, in the rough-and-ready days of broadcast journalism, journalists were workaday people with a nose for a good story. Many did not go to college or even high school. Like Nellie Bly or even Geraldo Rivera, they made their reputations through daring and ingenuity. By the end of the twentieth century, a new caste of journalists controlled the media. In 2011, a Project Veritas undercover reporter caught up with two of these journalists at NYU of all places
.
In a large lecture hall, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and his guest, Clay Shirky, a new-media guru, told the students just who it was that set the news agenda. “We are all in this room insiders,” said Shirky. “We are the most elite news [creators.]” By “we” Shirky meant “us chardonnay-swilling news junkies.” Rosen added, “We are the one percent.” He wasn’t kidding. The two of them related how they and their colleagues promoted the causes they wanted to see advance. “Elites are perfectly comfortable with there being information about how they make their decisions and what their biases are,” said Shirky, “as long as that only circulates among other elites.”6
With little attempt to conceal their biases, Rosen and Shirky let the students know what they were supposed to think about contemporary politics. Having worked with the New York Times on projects, Shirky explained how the paper’s Republican-free newsroom manipulated the news to promote Obama’s candidacy in 2008. This he saw as a good thing. The Republican candidates, after all, were “crazy” and “insane.” A good tagline for the Times, he suggested, was, “Go ahead and imagine two things: President Rick Perry and no New York Times.” He made these comments, all seconded by Rosen, assuming that the students agreed with him. By 2011, the students understood that if they wanted a career in journalism they had better do just that.
Despite its good work creating the undercover database, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU represents much of what is wrong with the profession. “At New York University, we believe that journalism has a serious public mission, and can make a difference in the world,” reads its website. “We want to educate those who agree.” What helps in that education, the would-be student learns, is that NYU is located in New York City, “where power and wealth concentrate, news and culture originate.”7 The confluence of these interests we captured in Professor Rosen’s classroom: the chardonnay-swilling 1 percent of Shirky’s imagination telling the 99 percent what is news and what is not.
“Values” arbiter Bob Steele wrote his “rules” for these very people. What was of “profound importance” to the 1 percent, as we saw in the 2016 presidential election, was not necessarily of profound importance to the rest of America. The media entirely missed the story of the election because their journalists were too busy sounding out each other over glasses of chardonnay in those citadels—New York, Washington, Hollywood, Silicon Valley—where “power and wealth concentrate.”
As to the other 99 percent, the forgotten men and women of America, who really cared? We did. While my passion is to show reality, I, like most journalists past and present, have an inherent desire to improve reality. The hidden-camera stories we do are the best vehicle to accomplish that, maybe the only vehicle. Visuals can shock the conscience in a way print cannot, and moving images have more power than static ones. Video can outrage the public and quickly change the moral consensus. If Upton Sinclair had access to button cameras in 1906, you can bet he would have used them.
Practicing Magic
If prostitution is the oldest profession, intelligence-gathering is a close second. It seems somehow fitting that in our first major operation, the ACORN infiltration, we managed to combine both, or at least the appearance of both.
It is from the intelligence world that our reporters learn their greatest lessons. We never deceive our audience. We admittedly use deception against our targets as a means to obtain access to them. With access, we can report the hidden truth about what the target is thinking or doing when the public isn’t looking. After all, this is when people are their most honest and most true.
Many journalists prefer not to know. They prefer not to look beyond the artifice that sustains the institutions they admire, left or right. During the Obama years, in particular, they preferred to report what the administration told them. The White House sensed this weakness and exploited it.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old,” White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes told David Samuels of the New York Times, “and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, explained to Samuels that he would tee up the White House line, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”1 I cannot say I invented the phrase, “This isn’t journalism. This is stenography,” but it sure as hell fit.
At Project Veritas, we recruit and train reporters from anywhere—except Washington, DC. To get past the steno pool and into the heart of a story, our Veritas reporters become who they need to be. To succeed, they need to be believed. For lessons on how not to get burned we have turned to military intelligence.
When people think about gathering intel, they think about Glock handguns, Omega watches, fake rocks with embedded data, fancy disguises, and the sneaky pilfering of documents à la Charlie Sheen’s Bud Fox character in Wall Street. The temptation for our new recruits is to lose themselves in the cover—the disguises, the scripts, the elaborate backstories. The truth is, however, that the better our journalists master the arts of mau-mauing and interpersonal communications, the less the cover matters.
In the movie, Imperium, for instance, an undercover rookie is told by his handler that the one tool an intelligence officer really needs is the Dale Carnegie classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. There is some truth to that observation. Undercover work is almost all about what the professionals call “cultivation.” Cultivation takes empathy, chemistry, charm. It might take a monthlong internship to cultivate a source, but then again it might take a thirty-second elevator ride. The undercover, or “u/c,” has to know the time limits and form the operational plan accordingly.
The so-called “Moscow rules” tell us, “Do not look back; you are never completely alone.” Assuming they are always under observation, our u/c’s have to remind themselves that everything is a test: what they do, what they say, how they behave. It is essential they maintain their composure and their cover. The Uber driver may have a grudge. The waiter may be listening in. The young woman at the bar may be a plant. Until they lock the bedroom door of their own home, undercovers are at risk of exposure.
You would think, then, that the people who work undercover have no integrity, but the opposite is true. It is the liars and con artists who do not do well in this business. We screen them out. We look for people with a clean conscience and a moral compass. They will be tested even when they think they are not. The better they remember this, the less vulnerable they become. In an unjust media world bent on revenge, Project Veritas journalists are every bit a target as the sources they themselves target, perhaps more. And while we “deceive in order not to be deceived,” we never deceive the public. Unlike intelligence operatives, we usually reveal the undercover techniques we use to get the information. Although sly with our targets, we are an open book to the American people.
That being said, there is much I cannot say about how Project Veritas conducts its business. There are many investigations, methods, and sources I cannot talk about. And although we are usually very systematic in what we do, especially in our “deep cover” investigations, sometimes we just stumble into stuff.
Yet stumbling at Veritas is not just about luck. We get lucky by always being ready when we discover something or someone interesting. Call it “controlled discovery.” As Alinsky noted, “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have.”2 Our journalists prepare for moments of opportunity and strive to keep their cool at all times. They try not to forget an important Veritas rule: Everything is a test.
The star of one of our best and most entertaining discoveries was a fellow named Robert Klein, a stocky, fortysomething, New Jersey health teacher with an accent right out of The Sopranos. I include his story for several reasons. For one, it is a compact case study of a successful sting,
albeit unplanned. And for a second, the story is really funny—unless, of course, you’re Robert Klein. Most importantly, education reform should be the civil rights issue of our time. The reason it is not is because public education is a sacred cow, a very nearly untouchable subject. The lack of critical external exposure breeds internal decay.
Our investigations into public education repeatedly find a corrupt and complacent establishment, one that trumpets altruism but in fact resists reform. For many in the establishment, retaining power takes precedence over educating children. A textbook publisher in our Common Core investigation said out loud what many must think: “I hate kids. I’m in it to sell books. Don’t even kid yourself for a heartbeat.”3 We covertly filmed the president of the teachers union in Yonkers, New York, saying, “Don’t you fucking tell anybody anything” about the supposed sexual abuse of children.4 These videos produced results. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt fired accounts manager Dianne Barrow.5 The Yonkers School District brought charges against Yonkers Teacher Federation president Patricia Puleo. Although the charges against Puleo were later dropped, Yonkers Inspector General Brendan McGrath validated the integrity of our reporting.6 Given our resources, we can only expose the tip of the iceberg, but every time we explore public education, we find more and more iceberg.
Our reporters met Klein in November 2015 at a New Jersey Educational Association (NJEA) meeting at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City, the state’s gambling Mecca, an all too appropriate setting for the NJEA. Our work began with targeting. We targeted this teachers union for a reason. Its leaders had grown fat and happy by ensuring that the students in the poorest schools remained trapped in the public education system. To them words like “voucher” and “charter” were hate speech.
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