American Pravda

by James O'Keefe

  The Peters conversation exemplifies two irrational, if predictable, reactions to our interaction with CNN. For one, journalists are inclined to change the subject when cornered in an argument. For another, they will highlight the job position of the unwitting whistle-blower as if position somehow negated content. The “health producer” worked in Atlanta. That is headquarters. He interacted with the CEO. If the cleaning lady had stumbled on a CEO memo, it would still count.

  We could not take our eyes off the computer screens that week or ears off our phones. Tweets, Facebook messages, and YouTube comments were all flooding in with their own creative input. Stefan Molyneux, a friend of mine, tweeted, “Why is every fake news media coffee fetcher and each feminist with a poetry blog @verified while @JamesOKeefeIII and @JulianAssange are not?”40 Law and Order USA tweeted, “#ProjectVeritas undercover reporters are doing what journalists used to do. Finding the truth & sharing it: essential pillar of democracy.”41 Comments like these keep us going.

  If June was a bad month for CNN, July 4, 2017, was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. CNN producers had no one to blame for the mess but themselves. Weary of Trump’s teasing and our revelations, they decided to take their frustrations out on one hapless individual citizen. The fellow, a redditor, claimed to have contributed to an amusing little internet video that superimposed the CNN logo on the head of a wrestling promoter that Trump had body-slammed ringside a decade earlier. Trump’s attack, of course, was clearly a prank, as was the internet video.

  CNN did not find it amusing. Its producers hunted down the redditor and threatened to ruin him unless he made the kind of public confession Soviet citizens were routinely forced to make during the Great Terror. Stranger still, CNN bragged about what it had done. “How CNN Found the Reddit User behind the Trump Wrestling GIF,” read the headline of a story by Andrew Kaczynski, head of CNN’s investigative unit, the KFile.42 CNN had a certain leverage on the redditor. He had apparently posted some racist comments as well under his perfectly Reddit name, “HanAssholeSolo.” If the redditor worked for anyone other than himself, exposure by CNN would cost him his job. He had little choice but to cooperate.

  In addition to apologizing for his racist comments, HanAssholeSolo groveled before the media cartel that held his future in its collective grip. “The meme was created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation,” he wrote, adding, “I have the highest respect for the journalist community and they put their lives on the line every day with the jobs that they do in reporting the news.” CNN accepted the terms of the redditor’s surrender but only conditionally. Kaczynski’s response was chilling: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”43

  The internet, including many left-leaning libertarian blogs, exploded in outrage. “#CNNBlackmail” was the top trending Twitter topic the day the story went public. “A multi-billion dollar TV network blackmailing a private citizen into not making funny videos about it is not journalism, CNN,” tweeted Julian Assange.44 The generally anti-Trump conservative publication National Review called CNN’s action “a disturbing new precedent for a major media outlet.”45 And scores of citizens joined in making videos of their own mimicking the wrestling video and mocking CNN.

  Once again, the major media colluded to protect one of their own. On the very day #CNNBlackmail was trending, the New York Times posted two articles defending the embattled network, one focusing on the controversy, the second on CNN CEO Jeff Zucker. Like many of its media allies, the Times saw CNN’s actions as defensible but worthy of discussion. Reporter Daniel Victor framed the debate around whether CNN was right to withhold the name of the redditor.46 He did not question why the network used its ample resources to hunt the man down and coerce a Lubyanka-worthy confession. That issue scarcely surfaced.

  Victor gave the final word to Kaczynski supporter Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, citing a Smith tweet, “[Kaczynski] is among the most careful, transparent reporters on the internet. He’s never operated with the bad faith of ppl attacking him today.”47 Smith could not have conceived a neater way of ingratiating himself to CNN and getting his name into the New York Times. As to the intimidated redditor and the “ppl” defending him, who cared?

  In his article on Zucker, Michael Grynbaum brushed off the blackmail scandal with a petty caveat, namely that some media critics thought intimidating HanAssholeSolo into silence was “an unusual choice.”48 The article focused instead on the “digital war” being waged against CNN by Trump and his supporters. “My job is to remind everyone that they need to stay focused doing their job,” Zucker told Grynbaum. Said Zucker of Trump, “He’s trying to bully us, and we’re not going to let him intimidate us. You can’t lose your confidence and let that change the way you conduct yourselves.”49

  Our CNN videos are rather the first installment in a series through which we will continue to expose the moral corruption of the mainstream media. On this note, @realDonaldTrump tweeted: “I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It’s about time!”50 I wrote out a response to him, “Guess what, Mr. President. We still have a whole lot more coming, both about @CNN and exposing the entire rotten #FakeNews Media Complex.”51

  That same day, the president also tweeted, “So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS, & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”52 We are way ahead of him. I promise you that Project Veritas will continue to expose the media complex for what it is, unabashed American Pravda. To the patriots who support us, I thank you. The assault against the complex will forever be an uphill one, but with veritas as our guide and an army of supporters as our inspiration, may the Overton Window be thrown wide open.

  This takes us back to where we began. The people reading the New York Times on July 5 actually believed that CNN treated the cowed redditor appropriately, that CNN reporters focused on doing solid objective journalism, and that the price for doing that job was to be bullied “by the leader of the free world.” Back in the day, the readers of Pravda would not have believed this nonsense for a minute.

  The New York Times was in for a shock or two of its own. On October 10, 2017, we dropped part one of our American Pravda series on the Times. The unwitting star of this video was the “audience strategy editor,” Nick Dudich. As Dudich told our undercover, he was responsible for choosing which videos go on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, among other social media. He claimed to be the Times’s “gatekeeper” for its video content. Boasted Dudich, “My imprint is on every video we do.”53

  Journalists, according to the Times’s handbook on journalistic ethics, “may not do anything that damages The Times’s reputation for strict neutrality in reporting on politics and government.”54 Having worked on both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, Dudich had no intention of honoring that commitment. “I will be objective,” he told our u/c with undisguised sarcasm before revealing his true intentions. “No, I’m not. That’s why I’m here.” In fact, Dudich returned to journalism following Clinton’s defeat for the purpose of remaining politically active: “After the Clinton campaign, I’m like, ‘No I need to get back into news and keep doing shit because, like, this isn’t going to change.’ ”55

  “Journalists have no place on the playing fields of politics,” so claim the Times editors in their handbook. “Staff members are entitled to vote, but they must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality or that of The Times.”56 That chapter seems to have been overlooked in Dudich’s orientation.

  Like many of his colleagues, perhaps all, Dudich was no fan of President Trump. To the degree that his job allowed him, he hoped to make Trump’s life difficult. “I’d target his businesses, his dumb fuck of a son, Donald Jr., and Eric,” he explained. He argued that the way to force Trump out of office
was to “ruin the Trump brand.” The way to ruin the brand was to launch investigations into his various businesses. “He cares about his business more than he cares about being president,” said Dudich. “He would resign.” That simple.

  In a bizarre digression, Dudich tried to convince the Project Veritas reporter that former FBI head James Comey was his godfather: “Well, the Comey hearing, I should have recused myself, but I’m not ever telling anybody there [at the Times] that I have a tie with that or else I don’t know if they can keep me on.” Before running with this angle, we did a careful background check. It turns out Dudich was fibbing. “He’s not James Comey’s godson,” Dudich’s father told us. “I don’t even know James Comey.” For all his dissembling, Dudich was indeed a gatekeeper at the Times. That fact should be worrisome to the bosses at “the paper of record.” We had to wonder who else they let spread misinformation in their name.

  The Times responded in its “Reader Center” the same day we posted the first video. The spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not say much. In her retelling, Dudich was a “recent hire in a junior position.” That said, he appeared to have “violated our ethical standards.”57 A review was under way.

  While the New York Times was assessing Dudich’s future, we posted the second in this American Pravda series.58 In this video, Dudich revealed how he worked with his friends at Facebook to limit damage on stories unfavorable to Facebook. “We actually just did a video about Facebook negatively, and I chose to put it in a spot that I knew wouldn’t do well,” he told us.

  To get more information on insider trading, social media style, one of our undercovers spoke with Earnest Pettie, the brand and diversity curation lead at YouTube. A friend and former coworker of Dudich’s at Fusion ABC, Pettie honored the friendship by maximizing exposure for videos produced by the Times. Yes, blind algorithms drive the process, at least in theory, but there are features within a story, said Pettie, that can be “definitely optimized for news.” Pettie’s technique was pretty simple. He deemed stories from the Times “legitimate” to position them front and center on a news carousel.

  As part of its mission statement, YouTube insists that “people—not gatekeepers—decide what’s popular.”59 Gatekeeper Pettie does appear, however, to be putting his thumb on the popularity scale. Dudich did not share his optimization secrets with his bosses. A pragmatist, he just wanted “to make it look like what [I] do is harder than what it is.” Here’s hoping his new bosses appreciate his initiative.

  After the second “American Pravda” video was released, the Times executive editor Dean Baquet decided he had seen enough. Weighing in during a live-streamed Times forum, he seemed far less upset about what Dudich said than by how we recorded him saying it. “For those of you who saw it,” Baquet said of the video, “it was an undercover operation in which James O’Keefe, who I think is a despicable person who runs a despicable operation. He essentially tries to catch people from what he sees as the left-wing media saying inappropriate things.”60

  It pays to remember that when the undercover video of Mitt Romney saying 47 percent of Americans are dependent on the government fell into the hands of the Times, the editors did not call the recording of that video “despicable.” No, they praised the video as “offering a rare glimpse of [Romney’s] personal views.”61 When the Times published the content of the eleven-year-old Access Hollywood video, neither Baquet nor anyone else at the Times expressed any concern about how the tape was secured or whether it was even legal. From all appearances, the Times’s overriding concern in October 2016 was to derail the Trump candidacy.62

  As it happens, California, where the video was recorded, is a two-party consent state. On the Access Hollywood tapes, neither Trump nor his conversation partner, Billy Bush, knew they were being recorded.63 Florida, where Romney was recorded, is also a two-party consent state. Romney was clearly unaware he was being secretly recorded. A Politico headline, a day after the story broke, addressed the issue head on: “Mitt Recording May Have Been Illegal.”64 The editors at the Times apparently did not care whether either video was legally secured or not.

  The media can be selective about which videos they share with the public. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times famously refused to release a video of Barack Obama speaking extemporaneously at a farewell dinner for Palestinian radical Rashid Khalidi. Citing a confidentiality agreement between source and reporter, the Times has argued that journalistic ethics prevented the video’s release.65 I wonder, however, whether those ethics would have withstood the pressure to share something like the Access Hollywood tape. I think not.

  Three days after our first New York Times video dropped, the paper of record announced a new set of guidelines for its journalists’ use of social media. We like to think we had something to do with this, especially since it dealt specifically with Dudich’s bailiwick. NPR thought so as well. The headline on its coverage of this change read, “New York Times Changes Social Media Policy after Claims of Bias.”66

  The new guidelines are a study in damage control. “If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media,” reads the introduction, “that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.”67 You think? The posted guidelines seem sincere and make sense. If honored, they have the potential to at least change the perception of the Times, but they will not change any hearts in the newsroom.

  Writing in the New York Post, Karol Markowicz cited Project Veritas’s Dudich videos as a possible inspiration for the new guidelines. Just as usefully, she sniffed out the contradiction at the heart of such a halfhearted reform. “The problem for the Gray Lady is that it can’t have it both ways,” Markowicz wrote. “If its reporters and editors are going to be overwhelmingly liberal and anti-Trump, as they clearly are, it’s a bit dishonest for the paper to insist they pretend otherwise.”68

  On Monday, October 17, Baquet appeared at another one of these stuffy journalistic forums, this one the Kalb Report at the National Press Club. The subject at hand was “the administration’s threats to press freedom.” As expected, Baquet served up some ominous guff about President Trump. It was in the Q&A session that one of the journalists in attendance surprised us and, I expect, Baquet as well by inquiring into the American Pravda videos. Specifically, he asked Baquet whether he considered what we do “investigative journalism.” Good question.

  Not surprisingly, Baquet denied us the status of “journalist.” He repeated his previous slander that I was “despicable” and insisted that all I wanted to do was “hurt some institutions and get some clicks.” He came down particularly hard on me for “jeopardizing that kid’s career.” Baquet used the word “kid” to describe Dudich several times, both in this appearance and in the earlier live stream conversation. For the record, Dudich was twenty-eight years old at the time our videos were recorded. When they initiated their Watergate investigation, Woodward was twenty-nine and Bernstein was twenty-eight. For that matter, I was twenty-five when we “hurt” that institution formerly known as ACORN, the astonishingly corrupt institution the Times ignored for decades.

  A real journalist, Baquet insisted, “has to have in his or her heart a desire to make society better.”69 No, I wanted to shout, a real journalist wants to pursue the truth and let the citizens use that truth to build a better society. Without intending, Baquet fingered his institution’s fatal flaw. If his journalists think as he does, they sort and shape the news to realize their collective vision of a better society.

  Des Shoe, the London-based senior staff editor for the Times, boasts of doing just that. As she told one of our British undercovers in London, she and her colleagues set out to subvert the Trump candidacy: “I think one of the things that maybe journalists were thinking about is like, ‘Oh, if we write about him, about how insanely crazy he is and how ludicrous his policies are,’ then maybe people will read it and be like, ‘Oh wow, we shouldn’t vote for him.’ �
��70

  Yes, she actually said that. Unlike Dudich, whom Baquet dismissed as a “recent hire,” Shoe is a senior-level employee who has been with the Times since January 2009. More troubling than her views on Trump, whom she called “an oblivious idiot,” were her views on Vice President Mike Pence. Her contempt for Pence was not personal but ideological. “If you impeach [Trump], then Pence becomes president, Mike Pence, who’s fucking horrible,” she told our u/c. “I think maybe, possibly worse than Trump.”

  The reason why the generally benign and well-respected Pence was “horrible,” Shoe explained, was because “he’s extremely, extremely religious.” As an example of the deforming effect of Christianity, Pence, according to Shoe, “at one point backed a bill that hinted at conversion therapy for gay people, which is like electrocution, stuff like that.” Even the left-leaning Snopes could not swallow that one. In its “What’s False” category, Snopes writes, “Pence never stated that he supported the use of electric shocks or ‘gay conversion’ therapy.”71

  Over the years, the Times has quietly conceived a marketing strategy around its very biases. The paper, admitted Shoe, “is widely understood to be liberal leaning.” The catch, she noted, was that “our main stories are supposed to be objective.” To write objectively was “very difficult in this day and age” because readers expected to have their biases confirmed, and the business model was “built on what the readers want.”

  Post-election, like all liberal audiences, Times readers have hungered for news stories that portray Trump in a negative light. “Speaking on, you know, for the New York Times,” said Shoe, “our subscriptions have skyrocketed since [the election]. I mean, they call it the Trump bump.” This sentiment was echoed by Nick Dudich. He explained, “I mean honestly, Trump has driven us more business than anybody else. Anytime he says ‘failing,’ we add a boost of subscribers.”