I called Korte’s claim of being unable to verify the location of the recording “laughable.” I questioned, in fact, whether Schimel’s office did any investigation at all or whether Schimel had even watched the tapes we sent him. “If the state of Wisconsin is not going to do their job,” I said to Schimel via video, “you should be investigated. We should investigate you and you should lose your job.”4 This video takedown led to a remarkable series of events.
On that same morning, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel posted a follow-up article headlined “Conservative James O’Keefe Threatens to Investigate Attorney General Brad Schimel over Video Flap.”5 As the reader will note, I was identified as a “conservative” in the first word of the headline. This was a routine way of slighting our work, but here the designation serves an additional purpose. It tells the reader that if a conservative is attacking Schimel, the Journal Sentinel cannot be accused of liberal bias for piling on. In the third paragraph, readers are reminded, as they almost inevitably are, that I had once “pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.”
I followed up with an email blast to eighty thousand supporters at 2:15 p.m. on that same April day with a request to send a tweet to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Embedded was my video and the tweet, “@WisDOJ Why did Roy Korte refuse to investigate voter fraud? Korte did not interview @PVeritas_Action or Foval/Creamer. Why? #Veritas.”6 Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of tweets aimed right at the attorney general’s office echoed my tweet. Some added their own unique spin, such as this one from LaurenNann: “yes, @WisDOJ WHY?! @PVeritas_Action stay on these crooks!”7 And even the haters pitched in with the predictable “O’Keefe as criminal” theme: “Because you’ve thoroughly established that Veritas’ work is untrustworthy. The only successful prosecution has been yours.”8
As this Twitter tsunami was rolling across cyberspace, Brad Schimel appeared on Wisconsin public radio, reiterating the claim that the investigation was closed. He also defended his decision in light of my pushback: “We did take it seriously and looked at this to see whether there was something we could pursue . . . and just concluded there’s not anything that presented itself as a viable investigatory lead.” He added unconvincingly, “If it’s not specific enough that we can identify who did something, where they did it, we don’t even know where to start.”9 I’m no attorney, but I have seen enough legal shows on TV to think that interviewing witnesses, maybe Scott Foval himself, might have been a good place to start.
Schimel was facing criticism from both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, he deserved it. It probably threw NPR and the Journal Sentinel that their “conservative” poster boy was challenging a Republican attorney general. As the Journal Sentinel did acknowledge, however, this was not the first time I took on a Wisconsin Republican. In 2014, we caught Wisconsin State Senate president Michael Ellis (R–19) on hidden camera explaining how he planned to circumvent state campaign finance laws.10 That video led him to drop out of his senate race.
In the midst of this, Steve Klein, one of our attorneys, cautioned Ben Barr, our main general counsel, about my challenging the attorney general. But at that moment, something interesting started to happen. Paul Connell, a former federal prosecutor who was appointed Schimel’s top deputy in 2016, called my criminal defense attorney and told him that the AG’s office was caught up in a “tempest.” According to Connell, the Korte memo was one person’s view, not the department’s position. He added that Project Veritas was “doing the Lord’s work” and was perplexed that his office had never sent anyone to interview Foval. That was about to change. Connell requested the “third” Foval video and promised a fresh start.
As that phone call was in progress, Schimel went on another radio program, this one with Mark Belling, a conservative radio host out of Milwaukee. Now, Schimel was reinforcing what Connell was telling us privately, that an assistant AG cannot close an investigation. “I appreciate the work that groups like Project Veritas do to expose corruption and criminal conspiracies,” said Schimel, “but the war of words that has sparked up in the last twenty-four hours is incited by fake news, Mark. There’s no story here. There’s nothing to report yet.”
“Is the investigation over?” Belling asked.
“No!”11
I tweeted out in the midst of this fury, “WOW. Wisconsin AG appears to be backtracking as a result of our video exposing their Refusal to investigate. Good work, internet.”12
Then came the inevitable headline from the Journal Sentinel a few hours later, “Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel Contradicts Self, Says Voter Fraud Probe Is Open.” As glad as I was that Schimel swung around, the Journal Sentinel was right: he did contradict himself. Life would be easier for everyone if he had not, especially Schimel himself.
By the following day, Schimel was saying the memo had been “released in error.” The Journal Sentinel was accusing Schimel of creating “fake news,” and Schimel was accusing the Journal Sentinel of the very same thing. The Journal Sentinel concluded its editorial of April 28 on this absurd note, “So we ask again: What game are you playing, Mr. Schimel? Is your job to serve justice for the citizens of Wisconsin? Or to serve the special interests of partisans who threaten you?”13
“Special interests of partisans?” There is a new one for an updated political lexicon. Those partisans were doing nothing more than seeking “justice for the citizens of Wisconsin.” The media today are too conflicted to distinguish ordinary citizens from special interest groups and justice from partisanship.
By week’s end, an Associated Press story on the controversy had found its way into both the New York Times and the Washington Post. The story had just enough negative Republican fallout to get Scott Foval and his troublemaking allies back into the news. All it took was the creation of a short video challenging a sitting AG and the balls to post it.
Editing the News
As our media betters learned on election night, there is a profound shift of power taking place in our country. All the deep state’s newswomen and all its newsmen could not elect its chosen candidate again. This came as a horrible shock. For months, journalists had been smugly mocking Trump, sharing polls with their fans, predicting landslides.
By Wednesday morning, November 9, it was obvious even in America’s newsrooms that the traditional media had failed in their job to keep their audiences informed. As the journalists emerged from their stupor, they were beginning to see how much ground they had yielded to the alternative media. Ordinary citizens had undermined the interests of entrenched media moguls, often through the very channels the elite introduced and now struggled to control, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
To rationalize the humiliation of the deep state–media complex, the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof accused the Trump camp of “fake news,” using those very words.1 Reeling from Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat, the media imagined a surge in “fake news,” much of it allegedly produced by Russia, as a way of explaining a reality that defied them. In the days since, opposing camps have been lobbing charges of fake news at each other the way armies did gas canisters in World War I. In both cases, much has gotten lost in the smoke.
Although the term has been around for at least a century, “fake news” gained currency in recent years with the emergence of Fox News, or, as many in the media preferred to call it, the Faux News Network. Said The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart in 2003, “I do believe we need to go to a 24-hour fake news channel. Fox can’t be the only fake news channel out there!”2 In 2007, liberal journalist Eric Alterman wrote an article for the Nation titled “The Real ‘Fake News,’ ” in which he too blasted Fox News for its alleged fabrications.3 The assumption all along was that fake news, whether on Fox or elsewhere, was a phenomenon of the right. I could not begin to count the number of times our work product at Project Veritas has been called “fake” or “false” or “fraudulent” or “discredited.”
Al
ways defiant, Donald Trump turned the phrase back on the media. He focused particularly on CNN, and once he did, the use of the term by people on the right exploded. The major media proved vulnerable to the accusation if for no other reason than that they create the vast majority of new stories, especially high-profile news stories. As should be obvious, their news creators tend to advance ideas very similar to one another. Given their shared agendas, they do not do a very good job of policing their competitors.
At present, the term “fake news” is being defined in many ways, most of them irrelevant. Fully false or satirical stories die a quick death on the internet with the first salvos usually coming from the side the story is supposed to please. The most dangerous news stories are those with at least some basis in truth and generated by people or institutions with some credibility. The late commentator Christopher Hitchens offered a useful understanding of such deception in his critique of the film Fahrenheit 9/11 by Academy Award–winner Michael Moore. Said Hitchens:
So I know, thanks, before you tell me, that a documentary must have a “POV” or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your “narrative” a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don’t even care that one bit of rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, than you have betrayed your craft.4
All journalists edit selectively. We do as well. We have to. Few people would be willing to watch hours of unstructured raw video. Many edit deceptively—Michael Moore–style. Forget the silly “Pope Backs Trump” stories floating around on Facebook. Call it fake or deceptive or selective, ideologically driven editing by the major media is the real problem with the news today.
The establishment media’s contempt for the creators of fake news would be understandable if they had a deep and consistent commitment to journalistic ethics, but they do not. This was made abundantly clear in their treatment of Katie Couric’s documentary Under the Gun.5 In the critical scene of the documentary, aired in May 2016 to influence the election, Couric is seen earnestly interviewing several members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun-rights organization. “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from walking into say a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?” Couric asks. Each of the next three camera moves catches a different activist looking perplexed, if not confused, as though he or she had not heard this question before and had no good answer. After about eight or nine seconds of empty airtime, the documentary cuts to the cylinder of a revolver being dramatically locked into place.
Unfortunately for Couric, the Virginia activists had the foresight to make a recording of the interview. They also found editors willing to publish their complaint at the Washington Free Beacon, a largely conservative online journal “dedicated to uncovering the stories that the powers that be hope will never see the light of day.”
The audio revealed Couric prefacing her question with something of a disclaimer, “I know how you all are going to answer this but I’m asking anyway.” As she surely expected, an activist answered immediately. As the audio recording made clear, the activists chewed the answer around with Couric for about four minutes. Unlike Couric, they knew what they were talking about. The Beacon coverage forced the story into the mainstream, and the establishment media were quick to cover for Couric—remarkably quick. The Beacon article was posted on May 25, 2016.6 So, impressively, was a New York Times article on the brewing controversy.
“A conservative news site posted . . . ,” so began Katie Rogers’s article in the Times. The word “conservative” is used here to alert readers that the charge to follow—namely that filmmakers “deliberately edited video to portray gun-rights activists as unable to answer questions about background checks”—is not to be taken too seriously.7
Rogers contacted Stephanie Soechtig, the director of the film, who assured her that the editing was not intended to make the activists look ignorant. “My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans’ opinions on background checks,” Soechtig dissembled. “I never intended to make anyone look bad and I apologize if anyone felt that way.” Couric had Soechtig’s back. “I support Stephanie’s statement and am very proud of the film,” she told the Times.
The network that broadcast Under the Gun lined up with all the other media worthies. “Epix stands behind Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig, and their creative and editorial judgment,” said Nora Ryan, the company’s chief of staff. “We encourage people to watch the film and decide for themselves.”
The problem for the producers was that millions of viewers did as Ryan suggested. Thanks to the internet, they were able to watch the video and listen to the audio and make up their own minds. The evidence was undeniable. Soechtig had inserted a video shot out of sequence to create a false effect. This was textbook selective and deceptive editing, Michael Moore–style. It is precisely this kind of journalistic hubris that people rejected when voting for Trump. In 2017, Yahoo! News failed to renew Couric’s $10 million-a-year “Global Anchor” contract when it was purchased by Verizon. Couric made the mistake of getting caught.
Were it not for the internet and the alternative media, Couric and her cronies would have gotten away with their scam. Were it not for the internet, CBS anchor Dan Rather might well have sunk George Bush’s reelection chances in 2004 with the forged documents that discredited Bush’s service with the Texas National Guard. “Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says,”8 so claimed the New York Times in a now famous effort to prop up a story that citizen journalists were rightfully tearing down.
This was a pivotal moment in the history of online citizen journalism. A former CBS News executive, Jonathan Klein, defined the conflict with imagery for the ages. On one side, he told Bill O’Reilly, you have a professional news bureaucracy with “multiple layers of checks and balances.” On the other side, he snickered, you have “a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”9 This taunt lit up the internet and inspired the launch of the now powerful site PJ Media. Ten years later, Hollywood tried to rehabilitate Rather with a movie improbably titled Truth. It seems somehow fitting that actor Robert Redford played Rather forty years after he played Watergate hero Bob Woodward. Over those years, truth has corroded as visibly in Hollywood as it has in America’s newsrooms. One wonders if there is a Katie Couric movie in the works.
Journalists have been in the fake news business for quite a while. If it is okay now to blame Russia, I would trace the introduction of consciously fake news back about ninety or so years to Soviet meddling in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Working through their Western cutouts, Soviet propagandists “framed” the two anarchist killers as innocent victims of a xenophobic America. For the next eighty years, the media routinely framed the guilty as innocent—Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Without an alternative media, much of that fake news has become fake history. In spite of the best efforts of citizen journalists, the media have of late taken a much darker turn. Today, they are willing to frame the innocent as guilty.
In the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 and Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014, for instance, the media ignored all journalist canons and employed various editing tricks in a vain effort to send two innocent men to prison for the rest of their lives. The truth emerged in court in both cases, but in the court of public opinion, the men were condemned and their futures severely damaged.
Even more unmoored from reality has been the media’s coverage of the Trump presidency. For a fuller rendition of the media’s use of fake news to subvert the Trump ascension, I would recommend The Smear by former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, but allow me to provide a couple of everyday examples to give the flavor.
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sider this top-of-the-fold Washington Post story from May 15, 2017: “Trump Revealed Highly Classified Information to Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador.” This is high-stakes fake news.10 For sources, the Post turned to “current and former U.S. officials,” a “U.S. official familiar with the matter,” and, worse, “a former senior U.S. official who is close to current administration officials.” All the sources were anonymous. It is likely that the best of them was dealing in hearsay.
More perversely still, it was not until the seventh paragraph that the reader learned that Trump did nothing wrong. “As president,” wrote the Post reporters, “Trump has broad authority to declassify government secrets, making it unlikely that his disclosures broke the law.” Said veteran columnist Daniel Greenfield of the Post article above, “This isn’t journalism. It’s a joke.”11
The media twisting of an unremarkable cabinet meeting in June 2017 stands out for its gratuitousness. The meeting was recorded and broadcast on cable news. What made it newsworthy at all was that it was the first time, given the protracted approval process, that Trump was able to get all of his appointees to the table. To begin, the cabinet members went around the table and introduced themselves.
Andrew Ferguson analyzed the media reaction in a publication largely hostile to Trump, the Weekly Standard.12 Watching Morning Joe on MSNBC, Ferguson was taken aback by the hosts’ disgust with what appeared to be the fawning attitude of a few of Trump’s appointees. “Whoa,” said Joe Scarborough. “That was some sad stuff.” Cohost Mika Brzezinski was even more appalled. “That was sick,” she added.
Listening to NPR that same morning, Ferguson heard more of the same. A scholar, troubled by the “display,” told the NPR reporter, “That’s a more common occurrence in nondemocratic regimes, which are trying to portray themselves as being popular.”
American Pravda Page 27
