What you could sayDB008 is that James O'Keefe who produced that video is master manipulator. In essence he has a mission to destroy any person or institution to the left of Genghis Khan (or these days Donald Trump) . To that end he sets up video stings and then carefully edits the resulting material to ensure the person/organisation is show in the worst possible light.
How much form has he got ? Acres of it. His whole website is a tribute to selective editing and misleading headlines.
It works because by and large people don't go past headlines and the first couple of minutes. In this day and age it also works because of the polarisation that has been created by people like James O'Keefe.
Want to see how he reconstructs a story to put people in the worst possible light ? A Time magazine reporter did an analysis of one of James O'Keefe most infamous stings. You can't read it in 30 seconds. In fact that is the point the journalist makes at the end of his article. This guy gets away with his deception because he's not checked out properly and in the end the people who want to believe his BS aren't interested in facts just confirmation.
If anyone else is interested in understanding why James O'Keefe and anything he has produced should be treated with great care check out this analysis.
News Media
The Twisty, Bent Truth of the NPR-Sting Video
By
James Poniewozik @poniewozik March 13,
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@TIMECulture
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James O’Keefe, the controversial conservative activist and undercover-video maker, brought down NPR’s CEO this week after releasing a “sting” video of an NPR fundraiser meeting with fake Muslim “donors.” Now a video editor, having reviewed
the full, two-hour film that O’Keefe also posted online, has done a close analysis showing that several key scenes were edited misleadingly, and quotes taken out of context, in the more-publicized short form of the video. Interestingly,
the critique came from The Blaze—an online outlet from none other than conservative host
Glenn Beck.
The close-up look doesn’t let the executive, Ron Schiller, off the hook. But it shows O’Keefe edited the short version of his video to fit his anti-NPR agenda. Explaining why both things can be true at once requires, well, a lot of context.
Blaze video editor Pam Key (the writeup is credited to The Blaze’s Scott Baker) said that several of the most embarrassing moments were cobbled together or left out context, apparently in order to make Schiller look as bad as possible. You can read the full post, with video clips, at The Blaze, but the highlights include:
* A quote in which Schiller seems to respond amusedly to a reference on the fake group’s website to promoting Sharia law–“Really? That’s what they said?”–is lifted from an entirely unrelated part of the lunch
* The edited video includes Schiller saying that liberals “might be more educated, fair and balanced” than conservatives; but it omits his saying that he used to be a Republican–and is proud of it–and a fellow NPR fundraiser defending conservatives, saying that she knows and went to school with highly educated conservatives
* A one-minute stretch where the audio goes into a loop while the video keeps playing unaltered may be intentional, perhaps to omit dialogue; says Blaze, it “could be an actual glitch, though not one I’ve seen like this in 25 years of working with video editing”
* The edited video quotes Schiller saying that the Republican party has been “hijacked” by Tea Party conservatives, who he seems to describe as “racist”; the full video shows that–at least at the beginning of his quote–he is explicitly describing the views of wealthy Republican friends who voted for Obama
I want to look at that last scene, because it was the most incendiary, so I went back to the full video. Does it let Schiller off the hook? Not in my viewing, but it does change his comments, introduces room for interpretation–and suggests that O’Keefe left the context out so as to make the quote sound as bad as possible.
........ As of this paragraph, I’m at about 1650 words—thank you if you’ve stuck it out this far!—and I’ve left plenty out, partly because, frankly, I have other stuff to do. I’m thinking about writing my TIME column about this subject this week. I get about
700 words for that, I can’t embed explanatory video, and I’ll need to include much more background about NPR, O’Keefe and the week’s controversy than I did here. Good luck!
That’s the dilemma of any journalist, as well as, well, whatever O’Keefe is: reality takes forever. You condense, you edit, you quote; you try to get a full sense of the actual story and relate it as best you can in the space you have available–whether limited by actual word count, minutes on air, or your audience’s attention span. You cut a lot of nuances and hope for the best.
You can do that with a mind toward presenting the fullest, fairest picture you can and earning your readers’ trust on the rest. (And you don’t have to be a nonideological, MSM outlet to do it—kudos to Beck’s The Blaze for calling O’Keefe out.)
Or you can, like O’Keefe, do it with a mind toward making sure your side wins and you present the worst possible picture of your adversaries. You can trust that unpacking all of your slanting will take too long to matter, that the casual news audience will remember your version and that your fans won’t believe your critics anyway.
That trust may well be rewarded. The biggest advantage that a video propagandist has is that reality, as they say in the blog comments, is tl; dr. Too long; didn’t read.
http://entertainment.time.com/2011/03/13/the-twisty-bent-truth-of-the-npr-sting-video/