On Monday, June 26, three “prominent” CNN journalists were forced to resign after CNN execs realized they could not substantiate their story on the ties of a Trump ally to Russia. “The resignations are a black eye at a sensitive moment for the news organization, which has emerged as a regular target of Mr. Trump and his supporters,” lamented the New York Times. For Trump, the news came as vindication. “Wow,” he tweeted, “CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!”6
At Project Veritas we knew what pressure CNN journalists were under to produce stories. A few of them had been unwittingly telling our undercover reporters about that pressure for some time. The day following the resignation of the three CNN employees, we shared what they had been telling us in the first of the videos in our “American Pravda” series.
The next two weeks turned out to be one of the more troubling stretches in CNN history. Late on June 26, I teased the series on Twitter: “Independence Day is approaching, but this year the fireworks come early. Stay tuned.”7 As soon as that tweet went out, all of us at Project Veritas realized how far the soon-to-be-released story would reach and how hard it would hit CNN. In fact, the content was so compelling that footage from the first video was leaked onto Reddit by one of our partners in the alternative media the night before the official launch.
Reddit user Mikeroolz commented on the thread, “Monday, June 26th, 2017. MARK IT DOWN! This is the winningest day since November 8th, 2016.”8 Tons of comments and tweets echoed this exact sentiment in the span of an hour. I was gratified that the raw footage was rapidly making the rounds on the internet, but at the same time I wanted our fully produced video to be seen by as many people as possible. In the official video, I primed viewers to watch for subsequent releases. Without my commentary, we lose some control over the release pattern. At Project Veritas we adhere to the Breitbart “drip . . . drip . . . drip” rule. When the media deny the content of our videos or denigrate their impact, as they often do, we come back harder the next day. I wish we could just put good footage out there when we have it, but the media force me to play their game.
I reached out to a few contacts that were linking to the raw footage on Twitter and promised a live link to the fully produced video as soon as it was ready. They took down the bootleg video, and my production team rushed to make the final touches on the official one. Laura, now freelancing, was in the office getting behind-the-scenes access of the release for an article. The media ace that she is, Laura decided to livestream the moment I clicked “Publish” on our YouTube link. Optimistically, she ended the stream by saying, “Bye-bye, CNN.”
In the first video, CNN supervising producer John Bonifield confirmed what we suspected, namely that CNN’s relentless narrative linking Trump and his people to Russian meddling in the 2016 election was “mostly bullshit right now.”9 Admitted Bonifield, “I think the president is probably right to say, like, ‘Look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.’ ” Although Bonifield’s beat was health reporting, he was well aware of the larger zeitgeist at CNN. “Just to give you some context,” he told our reporter. “President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN [Zucker] said in our internal meeting, he said, ‘Good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we’re done with that. Let’s get back to Russia.’ ”
There is a mix of motives as to why Zucker would push the Russian narrative. The most obvious was ratings. Bonifield acknowledged as much. He told us, “All the nice cutesy little ethics that used to get talked about in journalism school you’re just like, ‘That’s adorable. That’s adorable. This is a business.’ ” He did not exaggerate CNN’s ratings success. The stretch during which the network pushed the Russian story most forcefully—February, March, and April 2017—represented the first time in fifteen years that CNN had been a top ten network for three consecutive months.10
As Bonifield was well aware, however, the Russian narrative would drive the ratings only if CNN viewers were eager to hear the president being criticized or worse. “I think there are a lot of liberal viewers who want to see Trump really get scrutinized,” said Bonifield, “but I think if we had behaved that way with President Obama . . . I think our viewers would have been turned off.” Not all of CNN viewers were “super liberal,” Bonifield added, “just a lot of them.” Feeding that audience a relentless Russian narrative meant, said Bonifield, that “Trump is good for business right now.”
This video went wildly viral. It was the number-one trending video in the world that day and trended on Twitter as well. As of this writing nearly 3 million people have watched it on YouTube alone. That is roughly three times the average nightly audience for CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Some people of influence took notice. One was President Trump. “Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!” he tweeted on June 27.11
Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders chimed in as well. “I would encourage everybody in this room, and frankly, everybody across the country to take a look at it,” said Sanders of the “American Pravda” video. “I think if it is accurate, I think it’s a disgrace to all of media, to all of journalism. We’ve been going on this Russia-Trump hoax for the better part of a year now with no evidence of anything.”12
CNN’s Brian Stelter, the network’s senior media correspondent, was also paying attention. “CNN PR just issued a statement about @JamesOKeefeIII’s undercover video, noting that this staffer isn’t involved in Russia or Trump coverage,”13 he tweeted in an attempt at damage control. But that’s exactly what we suspected he would say.
I replied to Stelter, “That’s just the reaction we were expecting and it just punctuates the video we release about CNN tomorrow.”14 Stelter followed with another tweet quoting the same statement, “CNN stands by our medical producer John Bonifield. Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it & embrace it.”15 What CNN did not do was deny what Bonifield had said in the video. As to the “diversity of personal opinion” nonsense, that convinced no one.
Personally, I am glad Bonifield was retained. He was not the villain of the piece. His naked honesty was a refreshing contrast to the subsequent CNN spin. Besides, the most important thing to take away from this first video was not his insight into Russia but his insight into the culture of CNN.
As inevitably happens in Big Media, when one outlet is attacked, the others rush to its defense. On Stelter’s CNN Show Reliable Sources, the Baltimore Sun’s media critic, David Zurawik, dismissed me as a “propagandist.” This was a frequent charge and a perverse one. We do nothing but allow our targets to reveal themselves in their own words.
The Washington Post’s response a day after the Bonifield video aired was purely Pavlovian. The article by Paul Farhi, “What the Latest James O’Keefe Video Leaves Out,” said almost nothing about Bonifield’s comments or the culture of CNN.16 Instead, it challenged the right of the Samizdat to question the major media cartel, our collective Pravda.
Allow me to add a disclaimer here. Although my name has become something of a brand, there is no longer any such thing as a “James O’Keefe” video. We have assembled an excellent team of journalists, technicians, and producers at Project Veritas. They do the work. I get the credit and, by extension, the abuse. Farhi was sparing with the former and overly generous with the latter. Did you know, for instance, that I have a “criminal record” and that our work has been “criticized for intentionally deceptive editing”? In fact, Farhi managed to squeeze into the article every misstep, real or imagined, that I have made in my humble nine-year career without even mentioning the missteps CNN had made within the previous month, missteps that led to the termination of Kathy Griffin, Reza Aslan, and three high-profile journalists
. Twitter user Janene @justsickoflies cut right through the obfuscation, tweeting at Farhi: “Haha Right, but publishing articles with no sources, or unnamed sources, are more credible then a mans words on video. Shut up & sit down.”17
Farhi made a broadside attack on undercover journalism in general and our brand of it in particular. Although I introduced and explained the Bonifield video in much the same fashion as any news anchor would, Farhi trivialized my role, calling me a “kind of master of ceremonies.” As Farhi saw things, we failed to identify our undercover reporter or to name Bonifield’s specific assignment at CNN. Then, too, said Farhi, I did not “disclose that Bonifield is based in Atlanta.”
Of course, we did not reveal the identity of our undercover. Who would? We did not explain Bonifield’s role in detail. It was not relevant. Working as he did at CNN company headquarters in Atlanta, he was fully exposed to the larger company culture. But how was the viewer to know Bonifield worked in Atlanta? That was easy. I said so right up front.
In response to an email from a reader who accused Fahri of lying, Farhi said something with which I agree, namely that there is a difference between making an error and lying. Farhi likely just erred. That said, the reader apparently touched a nerve. Farhi ended his response with the decidedly uncivil, “Apologize or drop dead.”18 I kind of tipped this whole episode to the absurd when I used the occasion of a Steven Crowder podcast interview to urge listeners to ask Farhi why he wasn’t issuing a retraction.
I then put out another direct appeal to Farhi asking for a retraction. He tweeted back, “Sorry to disappoint you, folks. There is NO retraction coming.”19 I suspected there would be, and I was right. Late on Sunday night, July 2, the Washington Post added a retraction above the online Farhi article. Yes, the editors admitted, I did say Bonifield worked in Atlanta. We promptly framed the article and put it prominently on our office’s “Wall of Shame” alongside previous retractions from the Washington Post and other members of the cartel.
A day after the Bonifield video dropped, we answered the critics like Stelter who claimed that since Bonifield was not “involved in Russia or Trump coverage,” his opinion did not much matter. The same could not be said for Van Jones. One of CNN’s most prominent political commentators, Jones had appeared on CNN in the past attacking President Trump for his “Putin relationship.” In a more honest moment, Jones told one of our undercover reporters, “The Russia thing is just a big nothing burger.”20 It was one of the rare times this former leftist radical found common cause with President Trump. He said this unprompted but, when exposed, he claimed his comments were taken out of context. They were not. He also slammed our piece as “edited right-wing propaganda video.”21 He was right about “video,” wrong about everything else. We did not edit his remark at all. A Twitter user, @argmachinetv, aptly summed up Jones’s criticism—“Liberal hocus pocus. Just say ‘edited’ and you can disregard very obvious remarks that amount to a full on confession.”22
Despite Jones’s response, reality was starting to set in. Our friends and even our enemies were beginning to see the contradictions discussed throughout this book. Why indeed was CNN calling ours an “edited” video? As @NotPaxDickinson put it, “Have you ever seen media religiously describe a video as ‘edited video’ when reporting on ANYONE other than @JamesOKeefeIII?”23
The Van Jones video set the world of internet memes on fire. By the end of that day, the term “nothing burger” entered the public lexicon. One of our favorite memes read, “Welcome to CNN, home of the nothing burger, can I take your order?” The meme replaced the face of the clerk from All That’s famed “Good Burger” sketch with that of Jones. @PatrioticCovfefe tweeted, “How does @VanJones68 like his #Nothingburgers served? On hidden camera and spread with fake news! #CNN you’re toast.” Christopsy666 tweeted, “Is it acceptable to call Grilled Cheese a “#nothingburger” now? Y’know because grilled cheese has no protein.” @RhondaRoseFlora tweeted, “I’ll have one #RussianNothingBurger with extra RATINGS, please.! @VanJones68 @CNN #FakeNews.”24
The Jones nothing burger video made the top of the Drudge Report and, like the Bonifield video, was the number-one trending video on YouTube that day. President Trump even embedded clips of our videos on his Instagram account, which at the time had more than 7 million followers. Even I got in on the nothing burger fun, tweeting, “My staff at @Project_Veritas is getting hungry. I think I’ll get them a big order of nothing burgers. #FakeNews @CNN @VanJones68.”25 The whole world was paying attention to our videos, and CNN was starting to bleed.
We, on the other hand, were just warming up. Jimmy Carr, associate producer for CNN’s New Day, shared with one of our undercovers what the CNN people in New York thought about President Trump and the people who elected him. “On the inside,” said Carr, “we all recognize he is a clown, that he is hilariously unqualified for this. He’s really bad at this and that he does not have America’s best interests. We recognize he’s just fucking crazy.”26
When asked whether CNN was impartial, he smirked, “in theory.” The reality varied dramatically from the theory. According to Carr, “90 percent of us are on board with just the fact that he’s crazy.” As to how Trump got elected, that was not too hard to figure. Said Carr about the voters, “They’re stupid as shit.” To kick off the day, I tweeted, “ACTION ITEM FOR YOU ALL: Tweet this video to @ChrisCuomo, @clarissaward at @NewDay.”27
At this point CNN went silent on Twitter: Brian Stelter wasn’t tweeting; Chris Cuomo wasn’t tweeting anything. This was unusual for Cuomo, who is usually extremely engaged with his audience. He made not a single mention of our video, even though tens of thousands of Twitter users were slamming him and the producer of his we caught on tape. Some samples:
@Calideplorable1: “One sided outrage has no place here. The #MSM dishes it out buy cannot be on the receiving side. @ChrisCuomo needs to get it real!!!!”28
@Jayne720: “Comment? Are you reporters or opinion propaganda pushers? @clarissaward @ChrisCuomo @NewDay @CNN #FridayFeeling.”29
Ohio Deplorable @JennStitts: “@ChrisCuomo still waiting on you to publicly denounce your producer’s hateful comment about @KellyannePolls you only comment on Trumps.”30
Ohio Deplorable was referring to one additional comment made by Cuomo’s producer. Carr volunteered that Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway “looks like she got hit with a shovel.” As it happens, on the very day we released this video, the media, with CNN in the lead, were savaging Trump for the sexist remarks he made about MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski.
For good measure, in the Jimmy Carr video, we compared a finished piece by Alisyn Camerota speaking to a panel of Trump supporters with the raw audio provided by one of the panelists in the room during the segment’s production. The audio showed that CNN had selectively edited the segment to make the Trump voters look, as Carr might say, “stupid as shit.”31 It was just another day on the job at CNN. For her selective-editing stunt, Camerota received a ton of criticism on Twitter:
@S_L_J730: “Editing tape is never helpful either Alyson. Wow you’ve sunk to the bottom #AmericanPravda #FakeNews.”32
Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet): “CNN caught editing out poll watcher’s eyewitness testimony of voter fraud to characterize him as a conspiracy theorist. @JamesOKeefeIII.”33
@DeplorableShay: “Care to comment @brianstelter? @jaketapper? @ChrisCuomo? @AlisynCamerota? We the #StupidAsShit people want answers. #AmericanPravda.”34
@Spone63: “@AlisynCamerota @ChrisCuomo oooppsie ship be sinkin’ #JeffZucker @TimeWarnerFdn.”35
@Wtrogers4: “How you work for an unethical company?! @AlisynCamerota @ChrisCuomo you’re all jokes!”36
@lilium479: “It’s on tape, You Lied to America, Alisyn. BREAKING: new #AmericanPravda @CNN video is out NOW. https://youtu.be/4dRGMME4VnM @AlisynCamerota.”37
@mrstsw01: “You are so outed—it’s all ’bout that check, ’bout that check
, isn’t it, Alisyn? You have sold your soul for a paycheck. #AmericanPravda.”38
Soon thereafter, Camerota deleted her Twitter account altogether. Although she did not mention Project Veritas, the timing was too perfect. In her Dear John letter, “Why I’m breaking up with Twitter,” she wrote, “You’ve become mean and verbally abusive. In fact, you gross me out. You’re a cesspool of spleen-venting from people who think it’s acceptable to insult other people in public and anonymously.”39
I guess Twitter stopped being a “safe space” for her. As to why neither Cuomo nor Camerota were willing to mention Veritas by name, our sources informed us of a corporate edict that instructed them not to. Our effectiveness had become something of an inverse Gandhi: first they fight you, then they ignore you—then you win.
The beauty of this particular part of our exposé was that we were able to level the same accusation of “selective editing” at CNN that Jones threw at us. The difference, of course, was that our accusation was substantive. The proof can be found in the video of the Camerota panel discussion when compared to the audio captured by a participant. Jones’s “nothing burger” comment, on the other hand, was uncut and fully in context. We played our American Pravda videos like chess pieces, and we were always one move ahead of the media.
As a case in point, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times said to me of Bonifield, “He’s just a health producer.” I retorted by bringing up Van Jones. Peters minimized the importance of Jones, implying that Jones was not a serious political journalist. When I brought up Jimmy Carr, Cuomo’s producer, Peters said, “Well CNN is just . . . ,” basically changing the subject and insinuating that CNN is ridiculous.
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