Speaker in Bigfork advocates muckracking journalism

Sometimes it takes outrageous tactics to rile people up and spur changes, conservative activist James O’Keefe told a crowd at Crossroads Church in Bigfork last Thursday.

O’Keefe is known for his undercover videos and recordings of organizations like Planned Parenthood, NPR and liberal politicians. Paul Vallely’s Stand Up America and Glacial Forum, conservative groups based in the Flathead Valley, sponsored O’Keefe’s talk in Bigfork.

O’Keefe gained national notoriety in 2009 when he released undercover recordings of him and an associate posing as a pimp and a prostitute seeking tax advice from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform, known as ACORN.

The video shows ACORN employees advising the pair on how to conceal the illegal source of income, and how to manage their import of underage prostitutes.

While O’Keefe revisited his ACORN sting in the talk, he started by taking the audience back to his beginnings at Rutgers University where he first began his self-described “muckracking journalism.”

Harry Power, professor emeritus at Rutgers University introduced O’Keefe. Powers was the faculty advisor of a student magazine O’Keefe founded at the University. O’Keefe’s first forays into unorthodox media with the magazine got him in trouble, and Powers said nearly got him expelled.

O’Keefe said at one time he published the salaries of all of the university employees in the magazine, and had a professor kick him out of a classroom.

It was at Rutgers where O’Keefe made his first undercover video, asking university officials to stop serving Lucky Charms because the leprechaun character portrayed on the boxes was offensive to Irish-Americans. In the video O’Keefe claimed the image promoted a stereotype.

O’Keefe began going after more serious topics with his undercover recordings, releasing recordings where he posed as a 23-year old boyfriend trying to help his 15-year old girlfriend get an abortion. One of the videos shows an employee of Planned Parenthood telling the allegedly underage girl to “figure out a birth date that works.”

“It’s one thing to go after your college professors, its another to go after a multi-million dollar corporation,” O’Keefe said.

O’Keefe eventually founded the nonprofit Project Veritas. The organization’s mission is to “Investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions in order to achieve a more ethical and transparent society.”

Through the nonprofit O’Keefe has assembled a team that helps him with the undercover videos and recordings.

Before speaking in Bigfork on Thursday O’Keefe and Project Veritas released a video from Hillary Clinton’s campaign offices in Nevada showing a campaign staffer encouraging canvassers to solicit votes for Clinton during voter registration, which is illegal in Nevada.

O’Keefe criticized mainstream media outlets for a lack of investigative reporting, claiming they wouldn’t investigate organizations because the are in “cahoots.”

“I went places other journalists didn’t want to go,” O’Keefe said.

O’Keefe said his videos are about eliciting a reaction that gets results.

“What matters is we must outrage the people,” he said. “They’re not going to do anything unless we light a fire under their butts. We break the news and have them react to us. I believe people can make the best decisions when they’re educated.”

During the question and answer session O’Keefe’s was asked if it was possible get information from closer to Hillary Clinton since she is so insulated.

“These videos have enormous power, even if you’re going after boots on the ground,” O’Keefe said. “This is a war that we’re fighting and we need to fight the war in the trenches.”

 “I don’t measure my success by number of page views,” O’Keefe said. “I measure my results in how many people resign, how many government agencies lose their funding.”

WHILE O’KEEFE has his fans, he also has many critics. He said that the biggest criticism he receives is that he selectively edits his videos. He argues that all journalists edit.

“The way I look at it their articles are the scissors and my videos are the rock,” he said.

Another widespread critique of O’Keefe centers on the ethics of his methods for obtaining the undercover videos, by using false pretenses.

In May of 2010 O’Keefe was arrested and convicted of a misdemeanor after he posed as a telephone repairman to get inside the office of a Louisiana senator. He pleaded guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses. He was ordered to pay a $1,500 fine, serve 100 hours of community service and was placed on three years of probation.

“I’ve been to jail because I ask tough questions,” he told the crowd when he talked about the incident.

After O’Keefe’s famed ACRON videos went viral, the nonprofit was subsequently unfunded by Congress and eventually went bankrupt. In 2013 O’Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit with a former ACORN employee who claimed O’Keefe misrepresented him in one of the videos.

Other notable videos from O’Keefe include him crossing the border between Texas and Mexico dressed as Osama Bin Laden, and going to polling places and asking for other people’s ballots to illustrate problems with voter fraud.