James O'Keefe built a career with his infamous Acorn video which, despite having been proven to be heavily edited and highly misleading, was successful in effectively destroying the organization. Given the total disregard O'Keefe (and his mentor, Andrew Breitbart) showed for facts and truth in disseminating the Acorn video, it was hardly surprising to see that O'Keefe next "stunt," a bizarre scheme involving trespassing at Senator Landrieu's office in Louisiana, resulted in his arrest.
A $1,500 fine and one hundred hours of community service later, James O'Keefe is back at it again, this time with an even stranger plot involving CNN and one of its journalists, Abbie Boudreau.
The plot involved two stages. In the first stage, O'Keefe and his cohorts were going to falsify video and audio so it would include "evidence" of things such as Tea Party racism. Then, when CNN ran the falsified video and audio as a news report, O'Keefe and his allies would demonstrate that the productions were false and embarrass CNN. Their goal, as expressed on an internal memorandum prepared by an O'Keefe accomplice, was to demonstrate that CNN is biased against conservatives and the Tea Party. To ensure Fox News (an organization they call a "friendly") did not also run with the story, they planned to notify Fox in advance of their master plan so Fox could join in the CNN attacks as well.
While the plot itself is beyond absurd, it's revealing that O'Keefe and his allies clearly believed the plot could work. This suggests they believed Fox News would cooperate with their scheme by not only withholding the scheme from CNN but actively mocking CNN for reporting a story that Fox News knew was intentionally prepared to deceive CNN. Either O'Keefe is correct that Fox would act as a willing accomplice, which means Fox News is every bit the Faux News its critics believe it to be, or O'Keefe views Fox News as so incredibly biased towards the right that in his mind, Fox could credibly cooperate.
If CNN is as biased as O'Keefe clearly believes it to be, one wonders why O'Keefe would have to go to such lengths to falsify video and audio for CNN to run. The O'Keefe memorandum even notes that "the video evidence would need to be sufficient to get by potential fact-checkers at CNN who might analyze the video and audio."
By pairing the two pieces of evidence above, we actually get an amusing portrayal of the two news organizations, Fox and CNN, from a strong Fox News supporter, and the portrayal favors... CNN! In O'Keefe's mind, Fox News would happily work with O'Keefe to deceive both CNN and its viewers in order to discredit CNN, but the stunt could only work if video and audio evidence was fabricated professionally enough that it could get past CNN's fact-checkers. Based on the fact that the news report of this plot was uncovered and reported by CNN, it looks like O'Keefe's respect for the CNN fact-checkers didn't go far enough.
Part two of O'Keefe's plot delved into the perverted and disturbing. For reasons which still remain somewhat unclear, O'Keefe invited CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau to travel to his office for a conversation. When Boudreau arrived, a female friend of O'Keefe tipped off Boudreau that O'Keefe intended to lure her aboard his boat and attempt to seduce her on camera. O'Keefe filled the boat with sex toys, a sex cam, a "pleasure palace" sign, and more. At best, it was a perverted and misguided prank designed to make a female CNN reporter feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. At worst, it was sexual predation and deviant behavior (with possibly criminal intentions). Either way, it was reprehensible.
The irony is that the CNN piece Ms. Boudreau was preparing on O'Keefe and other young conservatives, entitled "Right on the Edge," was fairly favorable for the other young conservatives profiled in the one hour piece (including the portion on Hannah Giles who played the part of the prostitute in O'Keefe's discredited Acorn video). Even Boudreau's description of O'Keefe's attempted "punking" of her was about as tame as O'Keefe could have hoped.
It's nice to see conservative media establishments criticizing O'Keefe's tired act following this disastrous plan. Such criticism is several years overdue.
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