I am kind of ashamed of myself in retrospect that I took the James O'Keefe NPR video at face value last week and wrote a post without thinking to myself, hey, let's hold off here for a minute until we have a chance to see what the full context is, how this thing was edited. We know O'Keefe and his confederates have a track record in that regard.

Sure enough, it emerged last week that the editing on that video of former NPR exec Ron Schiller talking with fake representatives of a fake Muslim nonprofit was not only misleading but in journalistic terms outright corrupt. A web site called the Blaze did the chapter and verse on this, and you can read it here.

It's interesting that The Blaze was founded by Glenn Beck in 2010. I don't know what to make of that. That they're honest conservatives, maybe?

Anyway, I wouldn't say the fuller, unedited video completely and totally exonerates Schiller. He still says several things a representative of a straight news outfit should not say to people he doesn't know. And after all, he didn't bother to fight for his job, or even his new job at the Aspen Institute, which evidently fell apart last week.

However, it can be true that Schiller spoke somewhat out of school and that O'Keefe's doctoring of the tape was completely corrupt and unethical. The most startling thing to me: when Schiller called the tea party "seriously, seriously racist," he was very clearly describing the views of two high-level Republicans he'd spoken to who voted for Obama. Very clearly. You can say well, he was endorsing those views, and maybe he was, but that doesn't change the fact that the person who edited this tape was completely without scruple.

Yes, yes, this doesn't change the fact that NPR acted stupidly here, in case you think it makes you a genius to point that out. But let's hold our horses every time these right-wing sting videos come out. I vow not to stroll into those propellers again, folks, and if somehow I do, please call me out. And NPR is still 20 times the news-gathering outfit that any conservative outlet I can think of is.

