Beck's website criticizes the undercover tape for its 'deceptive nature.' Beck baffles with NPR video critique

Is Glenn Beck going centrist, reinventing himself as a journalism watchdog, trying to undercut conservative competitors or just sticking it to critics?

All those possibilities and many more have been floated to explain why the fiery talker’s website last week posted an in-depth analysis partially debunking an undercover sting video produced by guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe showing NPR executives disparaging conservatives.


The analysis, posted on Beck’s TheBlaze.com website, dissected O’Keefe’s video, welcomed on the right for providing what was regarded as proof of NPR’s liberal bias, and criticized its “deceptive nature.” It has provoked puzzlement from across the political spectrum, and drawn unaccustomed praise from many of the very media outlets and liberal critics who have loudly decried Beck’s polarizing effect on the public discourse.

“Like everyone else, I was scratching my head,” said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at liberal watchdog Media Matters, which has made a cottage industry of critiquing Beck. “We’ve been really critical of the site, and just because they turned on O’Keefe doesn’t suddenly make them the arbiter of truth. But I haven’t seen anyone who has looked at it and suggested that they don’t have the goods.”

The goods, as Boehlert described them, was a side-by-side comparison of O’Keefe’s sting video, which totals about 11 ½ minutes, with two hours of raw footage that showed the entirety of a lunch meeting between two NPR fundraising executives and a pair of O’Keefe collaborators, who had secured the meeting by posing as representatives of a fictional Muslim charity that wanted to give NPR $5 million.

O’Keefe released both the unedited footage and the 11-minute highlight package at the same time last week, but it was the highlights that got the most attention, resulting in the resignation of NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller and NPR’s lead fundraiser, Ron Schiller. But a day later, The Blaze posted its analysis. Among other things it shows that in one of those most damning apparent examples of liberal bias, Ron Schiller was mostly recounting views he says were expressed to him by two top Republicans.

The post came at a potentially important point in Beck’s highly successful career. He has increasingly drawn fire from conservatives concerned about his influence in their movement, while facing mounting speculation about the future of his Fox News television show. At the same time, he has been trying to position himself as a player in the conservative blogosphere.

On his syndicated radio show Monday morning, Beck basked in the praise for his web site’s story, but denied that any of those factors played a role in his decision to green light the O’Keefe post. And he took oblique shots at O’Keefe and his mentor Andrew Breitbart, an online competitor of Beck’s who – ironically – helped promote the careers of the two Blaze employees responsible for the critique.

“The problem with this whole thing is does James O’Keefe have enough credibility to continue to do” undercover video journalism? Beck asked his listeners. That kind of journalism, he said, is “just really not something that you necessarily want to get into. But if you do it, you damn well better not lie on the tape. You don’t now take what you have and edit something to make them say something that they didn’t say. I mean, you have no credibility then.”

Beck said he had been cautious about airing video from O’Keefe’s biggest previous sting, which targeted the liberal community organizing group ACORN, explaining “we wanted the raw video because we wanted to make sure that nothing has been taken out of context. I’m not going to Shirley Sherrod someone” – a reference to Breitbart’s posting of video excerpts that seemed to show an African American Department of Agriculture official in a speech expressing racist sentiments that – more complete video footage showed – she was actually renouncing.

“And not that I question James or anything else, I just want to make sure that it’s right and that’s what we did with The Blaze – just make sure that it’s right,” Beck said on the radio Monday.

Beck launched The Blaze last fall, just days after his August 28th “Restoring Honor” rally made him the focus of a blizzard of mainstream media coverage.

“Too many times we see mainstream media outlets distorting facts to fit rigid agendas,” he wrote in his inaugural post. “Not that you’ve ever heard me complain about the media before. Okay, maybe once or twice. But there comes a time when you have to stop complaining and do something. And so we decided to hire some actual journalists to launch a new website.”

The most prominent of those journalists was Scott Baker, a founder and editor of Breitbart TV, who brought over one of his favorite video journalists, Pam Key, founder of Naked Emperor News.

Key has specialized in digging up old audio and video of favorite right-wing targets, such as Van Jones, that casts them in often unflattering light. The tapes frequently appeared on Breitbart TV, and Beck picked them up on his radio show from time to time. When Beck hired Key for his new website, Media Matters marked the occasion by rounding up all its least favorite samples of her work, calling her an “activist” and her videos “misleading.”

On his radio show Monday, Beck called Key “remarkable,” while Baker, in an interview with POLITICO, drew a fundamental distinction between Key’s work and that of O’Keefe.

“I think there are different styles,” Baker said. “It’s one thing to say, I’m going to try and find video and audio of people describing their views, and I’m going to try to present those in context. That’s a different thing from, ‘I’m going to create a stunt environment to create a Project Veritas-style video.’ I’m not saying that undercover journalism is out of bounds. I think there are very clear roles for undercover journalism. What I’m saying is, in the rise of citizen journalism, it’s important to look at the ethical parameters, and for conservatives to think about their values when they go to present the truth."

The Blaze’s critique of O’Keefe’s editing of his NPR sting video emerged out of conversations about media ethics between Baker and Key. As Baker wrote in his presentation of the critique, Key was uniquely qualified to review raw video footage and compare it to O’Keefe’s 11-minute edited version because she is “experienced in reviewing hours and hours of raw audio/video to find key sections that can then be used in proper context.”

The resulting video essay was posted Thursday and picked up steam Friday and over the weekend. By Sunday, NPR’s ombudsman Alicia Shepard was giving Beck a shout-out on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” for the piece, and by Monday, the story of the misleadingly edited video had hit the AP wire, crediting The Blaze in the second paragraph.

It was a coup for the young website with a mostly conservative audience, but not the first time that The Blaze had confused media watchers. Beck generated similar head scratching when he hired former Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan to lead his new site.

Boehlert criticized both NPR and other media outlets for rushing to judgment on the O’Keefe sting video without applying the same level of scrutiny that The Blaze did.

“Why,” Boehlert asked, “did other mainstream media outlets automatically accept the James O’Keefe version without checking the full version knowing that James O’Keefe’s record is pretty spotty to say the least?”

Like other outlets, The Blaze did post the 11-minute version of the video before analyzing it later in the week.

O’Keefe said he provided the raw footage “so that every taxpayer and every news media outlet could see for themselves what was said” by Ron Schiller.

“The shorter version indicates the relevant pieces we believed best represented the conversation,” O’Keefe said, adding “All journalists edit, but very few allow the public to see the entire video of an interview. We believe the story speaks for itself and NPR has not denied any part of the comments made by Mr. Schiller.”

Breitbart said mainstream media outlets have created a double standard for O’Keefe wherein they are free to cut and edit videos with impunity, but they question his edits.

“I’m looking at this mostly as a diversion, because at no point do any of those edits make somebody sound like they’re saying something different than what they’re saying,” he said. “I kind of consider it to be a series of straw men,” he asserted. He said “found it very interesting” that Beck’s site chose to critique O’Keefe’s video, but refused to elaborate.

Other conservatives have increasingly voiced skepticism of Beck’s’ motives and impact on the right, with some suggesting that he’s more motivated by money and market share and others worrying he’s tainting the conservative movement.

The Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin suggested last month that the right should “call him out and explain that he doesn’t represent the views of mainstream conservatives.”

Rubin said The Blaze’s critique of the NPR sting left her pondering “whether (Beck) is trying to do something on the up and up and advance good journalism or whether he is doing it to create a controversy and stick his finger in the eye of the right in some ways in retaliation for all of the negativity that’s been expressed of late.”

She added “It’s hard to divine his motivations and in some sense I don’t try to. I try to evaluate what he’s said which, of late, has been fairly and increasingly outrageous. But I don’t have any psychological insight into why he does what he does.”