American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  Trump advisor Steve Bannon was echoing the sentiments of millions of distrustful Americans when he dared to say, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” Bannon defiantly said this on the record, adding, “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”12 Almost universally, the media reacted as the New York Times did, putting the “keep its mouth shut” part in the headline and feigning outrage over an imagined threat to the First Amendment. Columnist Derek Hunter got it right when he wrote in response, “Outrage is cheap and self-reflection is hard.”13

  I thought Hunter’s quote and McBride’s above about “relevance” were so spot on I tweeted them out. One of my Twitter followers tweeted back, “The moment they begin to publish truth is the moment they become relevant.”14 Truth appears to be something the media are not yet prepared to handle. After a few semi-honest days of post-election soul searching, the media doubled down on the spin. Why? As Dinesh D’Souza tweeted during the height of the Russian hysteria, “The media instinctively knows that either they or @realDonaldTrump will survive this—it’s a political fight to the finish.”15

  Instead of dispassionately reporting the facts, the major media, with the Times and the Post leading the way, slipped into a self-righteous frenzy, feeding their own wounded pride and their audience’s bewildered angst with whatever made everyone feel better, truth be damned. More annoyingly, they took to posturing as defenders of the First Amendment, chest-thumping all the way. The Washington Post adopted a new motto and proudly displayed it on the paper’s front page, “Democracy dies in darkness.” The New York Times launched a major ad campaign called simply, “The Truth.” For the first time ever, the paper ran an ad during the Oscars. The ad took several explicit shots at Trump and concluded, “The truth is hard/the truth is hard to know/the truth is more important than ever,” followed by the logo of the New York Times.16 “Now more than ever, our mission is clear,” reads CNN’s new promotional mission statement. According to the Daily Wire, “The self-promotional ad frames Donald Trump’s presidency as ushering in new heights of mendacity in national politics, with CNN’s operatives committed to delivering truths to its audience.”17 The smugness kept getting more and more unbearable, but behind it was the media’s sad search for relevance and even survival.

  The major media have entered an unprecedented new phase. Their corporate survival model now demands that they feed a beast increasingly hungry not for truth but for revenge. To preserve the self-image of all involved, the resulting vendetta has had to masquerade as a defense of the First Amendment. Any one of us, whether citizen journalist or the president himself, who tugged on the mask of the producers of this bizarre dumb show risked reprisal.

  Since the creation of Project Veritas, the major media have impeded us at almost every step and continue to do so. I have to agree with President Trump that the “fake news media” are not his enemy but “the enemy of the American People.”18 As an enemy, they remain formidable. Their reign will end, I suspect, not with a bang and not with a whimper but with a tantrum. We have been experiencing that phase every day since the election.

  Manufacturing Consent

  In my previous book, Breakthrough, I argued that modern journalists fail to properly inform the American population for several reasons—lack of access to their sources, fear of seeming different, and shared political ideology with their subjects high among them. In the years since, I have had to add a few more reasons for journalistic failure—corporate and market pressures, managers without integrity, and, perhaps most critically, fear of being sued.

  It is so much easier today to aggregate information and take shortcuts than it is to dig deep, take risks, and spend the time and money needed to do serious long-term investigative journalism. In their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that the media relied overly “on information provided by the government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power.”1 In the thirty years since, the major media have become even more dependent on those sources. At the same time, media executives have become increasingly wary of sources “that are not prima facie credible, or that will elicit criticism and threats.”2 These sources tend to add time and expense to the fact-checking process and anxiety among upper management.

  What Herman and Chomsky did not anticipate was that the internet would shift the balance of informational power. Today, I have more raw information within easy reach than the entire New York Times newsroom did twenty years ago. The corollary evolution in video technology has given people like me the ability to create and distribute video that three networks controlled as recently as thirty years ago. As a result of these power shifts, conflict was inevitable, especially since the media establishment was much more willing to abandon traditional American values than was the citizenry. The task of preserving those values was left almost inevitably to people operating outside the existing power structure, Samizdat journalists like Project Veritas.

  On June 1, 2017, Robert Creamer made good on his earlier threats and served us with a lawsuit. He and Democracy Partners and the Strategic Consulting Group were suing me, Project Veritas, Project Veritas Action, the real Angela Brandt, and the real Charles Roth. The allegations were that we had violated federal wiretap laws, intercepted oral communications, trespassed, fraudulently misrepresented ourselves, engaged in a civil conspiracy, and forced dogs and cats to live together. Only the last charge was made up—the others just seemed that way. Creamer’s attorney, Yael Bromberg, represents the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law. That his institute would throw in with the powers that be against a small operation like ours shows just how much the truth has threatened what economist F. A. Hayek called “the whole apparatus.”

  On July 28, 2017, we filed a motion to dismiss. We began with an affirmation of the First Amendment: “Undercover journalism plays an important role in creating positive social and legal changes. Without it, many frauds perpetrated upon society would go undetected and rampant abuse would remain hidden. From revealing the sad state of affairs at slaughterhouses to exposing medical fraud, America is a better place because of undercover journalism.”3 As of this writing the Creamer suit is still pending. We are waiting for the judge to set a hearing date, but there is no deadline for the judge to act.

  Yes, we did engage in a civil conspiracy, a pretty clever one, to show the world the truth. And the truth hurt. Nowhere in the lawsuit did Creamer deny saying anything we caught him saying. Of course, we were not the first truth-tellers to get sued. Nor will we be the last. One of the cautionary tales journalists tell about undercover work concerns the supermarket chain Food Lion. In 1992, two ABC producers took jobs at a particular Food Lion store. Their source had told them that Food Lion was selling spoiled meat. That information proved to be accurate. Using cameras hidden in their hats and bras, the producers recorded workers repacking expired meat as though it were fresh. They aired the fruits of their work on ABC’s Primetime Live.

  If the exposé were in print, a large corporation could calm an ocean of unease just by denying everything—one man’s word against another. But video is the rock to print’s scissors. Rock beats scissors every time. Paper covers rock, but only if that paper comes from a process server.

  The larger the corporation, the more dangerous the rock and the more expensive the paper. After ABC aired its program, Food Lion’s stock plummeted a whopping 15 percent. To compensate, the grocery store chain launched a campaign alleging ABC had distorted the truth. Company president Tom E. Smith said something we hear after every successful sting: “It was pretty obvious that a lot of that was faked.”4

  In the next sentence, Smith claimed the employees with the hidden cameras “had an ax
e to grind against Food Lion.” This claim was not true, but Food Lion hoped to position ABC not as a truth-teller but as a corporate giant with a grudge. Having been embarrassed as badly as the doctors at Nellie Bly’s Bellevue, Food Lion executives promptly sued ABC for $4.7 billion. They did not argue that ABC had falsified the report in the way NBC News famously did when it staged a fuel tank explosion on a General Motors vehicle. Rather, the execs claimed the producers had falsified their job applications.

  At trial, the jurors were prevented from watching the video. Lest they be swayed emotionally by the imagery, the jurors were instructed only to comment on the technique, and yes, the producers had falsified the information on their job applications. It seemed the journalism was almost beside the point.

  The case against ABC slogged on for five expensive years. Finally, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, overturned a huge jury award granted by a lower court. In its decision, the court ruled that Food Lion failed to demonstrate lasting damage from the Primetime Live report, but that same court scolded ABC for the trickery involved in its investigative technique.5 If Food Lion did not exactly win, ABC News and other news agencies clearly lost. Food Lion showed just how much pain a large organization could inflict on a news-gathering agency for a story of minimal scope. As a result, ABC eventually stopped doing hidden-camera journalism.

  In 1994, CBS News had to go to the Supreme Court to get permission to air videotape secretly shot at a South Dakota slaughterhouse. Judge Harry Blackmun approved the use of the footage just hours before it was scheduled to be shown as part of a 48 Hours episode called “Bum Steer.”

  The road to the Supreme Court exacted a heavy toll. Unlike the Food Lion story with its plants from ABC, for the 48 Hours episode an employee of the South Dakota packing plant had shot the footage of contaminated meat for CBS. He had to falsify nothing. That did not stop federal beef processors from suing. A South Dakota circuit court issued a court order blocking CBS from showing the footage on the mind-boggling grounds that it would hurt the company’s business and the South Dakota economy. The South Dakota Supreme Court upheld the injunction.

  Blackmun had little patience for the lower courts’ arguments. “For many years,” he wrote, “it has been clearly established that any prior restraint on expression comes to this court with a heavy presumption against its constitutionality.” He noted, for instance, that in the 1971 case New York Times v. United States, the Supreme Court refused to suppress publication even of those documents stolen from the Pentagon.6

  Emboldened perhaps by Blackmun’s decision, ABC returned to South Dakota and in 2012 ran a series of broadcasts exposing Beef Products Inc. (BPI), specifically its lean finely textured beef. ABC used the term “pink slime” more than 350 times on its various platforms to describe the product. The broadcasts almost destroyed the company. This time, with ample evidence of ABC’s recklessness and bias, BPI sued ABC, and in July 2017 ABC settled the suit for a huge but undisclosed sum. ABC, CBS, and NBC responded by circling the wagons. None of the networks covered the settlement of the suit either on a broadcast or on a website.7

  I cite these suits to put in perspective one of the “Bingo” charges constantly dredged up to discredit our work. As late as June 2017, the Washington Post was reminding its readers that in 2013 “O’Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to a former ACORN employee who said he was illegally recorded.”8 In the world of media litigation, this was lunch money, but journalists were still feasting on it years later.

  In the case in question, ACORN fired a San Diego staffer named Juan Carlos Vera after our undercover video captured him advising us on how to get underage sex slaves across the border. Vera claimed he called the police after our visit, but ACORN fired him despite that claim. We believed—and still do—that an organization dependent on public money had no expectation of privacy. As we were learning, however, the legal environment in California is as hostile to reform as it is in New Orleans, and so we settled.

  As we were coming to see, the Creamer suit may represent something of a strategy. In August 2017, the League of Conservation Voters initiated a legal action against us in California, specifically asking for my criminal prosecution. The suit contends that three people who might be associated with Project Veritas may have used a hidden camera to record them. In October 2017, the Michigan chapter of the American Teachers Federation initiated a legal action against us because they think that a person who might be connected to Project Veritas may have recorded them with a hidden camera and may have taken confidential documents. Both of these organizations are affiliated with Democracy Partners.

  Creamer learned in October 2016 what United Airlines would learn in April 2017 when video captured one of its passengers being dragged off the plane screaming. United, however, had no one to sue. Besides, the image had too much visceral power to leave in the hands of a jury, no matter where the trial was held. Creamer did have someone to sue, and he was confident he would have the media establishment behind his suit. Project Veritas was pure irritant to the deep state—seemingly right wing, fake, criminal, discredited. If Creamer succeeded in securing a jury trial in a city that gave Donald Trump 4 percent of its vote, he might even win. I suspect, though, that his real goal was to discourage operations like ours from reporting the truth and to punish those who dared. He was loyal enough of a Democrat to play the long game.

  We are scrappy enough to play the long game as well. As a nonprofit, Project Veritas does not have to worry about its shareholders the way ABC and CBS did. Unlike those networks, we have literally millions of Americans behind us who believe in our mission. We do not see these people as customers. We see them as compatriots, and we are no more likely to roll over than they are.

  On occasion, to be able to do our job, we have to make a preemptive legal strike. On March 4, 2016, we did just that in Massachusetts federal court. Eight months after we filed suit to challenge Massachusetts’ restrictive recording laws, just four days before the presidential election, we got our day in court. Our suit went by the name PVA v. Conley. The “PVA” is Project Veritas Action. The “Conley” is Suffolk County, Massachusetts, district attorney Daniel Conley.9

  Many states have two-party consent law. This usually means we cannot record a conversation without consent of everyone involved. The exception is if we are in a place where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, such as, say, the middle of a crowded restaurant. Legislators inevitably claim they pass these laws to protect the privacy of their constituents. Some legislators may actually believe that, but the more cunning among them know that these laws do more to protect the legislators than the taxpayers.

  No state protects its own the way Massachusetts does. Massachusetts prohibits citizens from secretly recording oral communications in any situation, whether there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy or not. The law is so broad you could be penalized for secretly recording someone giving a speech in a park. No joke. The commonwealth’s Supreme Court has, in fact, described the recording of such a speech as “unequivocally banned.”

  This law essentially prevents PVA from doing any work at all within Massachusetts. If we were caught violating the law—which would not be hard to do since we publish the proof online—we could face up to $10,000 in fines and imprisonment of up to five years. That is just the half of it. The “victims” of our crime could bring civil lawsuits against us. With the mainstream media at their back, I am confident they would.

  The federal First Circuit Court of Appeals has issued several opinions that call the Massachusetts law into question. In a 2011 case, Glik v. Cuniffe, the First Circuit ruled that “[t]he filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within [First Amendment] principles.”10

  From the media’s perspective, however, police are fair game just about anywhere. Election officials, we have
learned, are not fair game. The reason is simple enough. The established media have repeatedly declared there is little or no voter fraud. “How does a lie come to be widely taken as the truth?” the New York Times opined in September 2016. “The answer is disturbingly simple: Repeat it over and over again. When faced with facts that contradict the lie, repeat it louder. This, in a nutshell, is the story of claims of voting fraud in America—and particularly of voter impersonation fraud, the only kind that voter ID laws can possibly prevent.”11

  There you have it. So, in our many stings in which we have shown just how pathetically porous the safeguards are that protect the vote, the media have almost inevitably attacked us. Our crime was undermining their narrative and embarrassing them. If the media sympathize with a given cause, they will put a not-so-subtle pressure on judges to favor that cause. We had little reason to believe the First Circuit would protect us if we violated existing commonwealth law. We figured it was more prudent to challenge the law preemptively.

  When we filed in March 2016, five years had passed since the Glik ruling, and during that time Massachusetts made no progress toward amending its unequivocal ban on citizen interception. Keep in mind that many of our biggest scoops have occurred while recording individuals in public spaces. These are all felonies in Massachusetts, and we would not put it past the state to bring charges. As our attorney Stephen Klein observed, “It is no comfort for PVA to litigate under the Civil Rights Act after its journalists are charged under an unconstitutional law.”

  Our suit was bold and straightforward. In it, we asked for more than the right to record government officials engaged in public duties. We argued for the right to record secretly anyone who did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when speaking. We had no interest in subverting legitimate privacy protection. Our goal was to ensure the free flow of information and hold institutions accountable for their actions.12