Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill devoted his April 30 WorldNetDaily column to rebutting the idea that Donald Sterling was the victim of being "James O’Keefe’d":
As Esquire writer Charles Pierce and others have commented in the wake of Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s sudden notoriety, Sterling’s lady friend V. Stiviano “appears to have James O’Keefe’d him.”
Pierce is referring to the work of imaginative young journalist James O’Keefe. Not yet 30, O’Keefe has pioneered the art of quietly recording the damning words of a range of duplicitous individuals – from ACORN workers to NPR executives to union honchos to campaign officials – and exposing those words to the light.
Pierce, however, does not quite get the verb “O’Keefe.” O’Keefe goes after corrupt and/or hypocritical organizations that have prospered through taxpayer largesse, and he always tries to work within the law, however ambiguous that law sometimes is.[...]
The media do not share O’Keefe’s hierarchy of values. On CNN, after O’Keefe released the first video of ACORN office workers abetting his apocryphal scheme, the Washington Post’s Keith Richburg expressed his outrage – about O’Keefe.
“It sounds to me like that’s just entrapment,” Richburg said of O’Keefe’s sting. “You know, let’s go around various offices until we can finally trick somebody.”
On that same CNN show, Salon’s Joe Conason added, “It’s not journalism unless they report everything that happened. It’s propaganda.”
In fact, in just about every ACORN office O’Keefe visited the workers obliged his teenage-prostitution schemes. To prove they did, O’Keefe made a practice of posting the videos unedited to show that the damning quotes were not taken out of context.
Cashill is severely overstating O'Keefe's "values." In fact, before O'Keefe released his unedited videos, he released a heavily edited video designed to play up his most salacious accusations. And when O'Keefe got around to releasing his unedited videos, they usually showed that he was taking people out of context. Indeed, O'Keefe agreed to pay $100,000 to a former ACORN employee for falsely portraying him in a video and for illegally taping him.
Cashill goes on to declare that O'Keefe "has not once been sued for libel or defamation." Actually, the above cited case aside, he has been sued for defamation -- by one of his own former employees.
And Cashill was too busy rhapsodizing over O'Keefe's "hierarchy of values" that he mention a botched sting in which O'Keefe "hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session."
Those are apparently the kind of "values" Cashill can get behind.
