According to tax filings for Project Veritas, O’Keefe is raising more money than ever; he drew a salary of over $300,000 last year. But Project Veritas feels like a relic from an earlier era in conservative media, like a Glenn Beck chalkboard or a Fox News segment on “Obamaphones.”

Caleb Howe, a longtime conservative blogger and the editor-in-chief of the website RedState, has written optimistically in the past about the potential of "citizen journalism" practiced by conservative activists. But in recent years, he said, Project Veritas has largely failed to live up to its promise.



"I do think after ACORN, the magic went out of this pretty quickly," Howe said. “As I saw the story of this attempted sting,” he added, “I thought to myself that it seems like the only thing being exposed lately is the lack of sophistication on the part of the stingers.”



Howe said that O'Keefe and his compatriots seem to be motivated by a genuine belief that malfeasance and incompetence are so rampant in the American press that any enterprising prankster with a hidden camera can easily expose it. The half-baked nature of Project Veritas's schemes may be rooted in that misconception.



"I have seen people say in all seriousness that the [mainstream media] will repeat any lie about a Republican, no matter how fake or how easily disproved," Howe said. "I just don't think anything is that simple."

Like others who came of age in the conservative blogosphere, Howe said Andrew Breitbart played a key role in popularizing O'Keefe's videos and pushing them into the mainstream conversation. It was Breitbart who published O’Keefe’s initial ACORN stings. Without his "judgment and experience" to guide the projects, Howe said, O'Keefe's sting operations have often had a hasty, incomplete quality to them—"like the rest of the science project after the nerd kid gets a cold and can't finish, and the partner has to turn it in."

“James has committed important acts of journalism,” the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor, said. “This wasn’t one. It was misbegotten from the outset. Attempting to indirectly discredit alleged sexual-abuse victims by planting a fake story with a news outlet is bad stuff.”

“His track record over the past several years has been increasingly embarrassing,” Dan McLaughlin wrote in National Review on Tuesday. “Even if you set aside the factual integrity of his reports – and there are those on the Right who believe that ‘war by the other side’s rules’ means not worrying about such things – and judge O’Keefe strictly on activist terms by the scalps he collects, he’s been startlingly ineffective for several years now at actually damaging any of his targets.”

O’Keefe’s choice of targets over the years has displayed a less-than-keen understanding of what has news value and what doesn’t.