Few are coming forward to defend James O'Keefe's latest stunt. Conservatives turn on James O'Keefe

Heralded last year as epitomizing a new form of “activist” journalism, James O’Keefe now finds himself abandoned by some of the powerful conservatives who championed him. And a multi-million dollar effort designed to offset what many conservatives regard as the leftward tilt of the mainstream media has been undermined by a series of increasingly bizarre incidents.

“Just because conservatives have what I believe is a well-grounded beef with the establishment press, doesn’t mean that they don’t have to abide by rules themselves,” Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, told POLITICO. “I have been telling my fellow conservatives that if we are going to accuse liberals of not following rules of journalistic ethics, then by God, we better follow them or we open ourselves up to all sorts of accusations, and one of them is hypocrisy.”


Even Andrew Breitbart, the conservative internet entrepreneur who has promoted O’Keefe and defended his tactics, backed away a bit from his protégé Monday, telling POLITICO that “in this instance, it’s not going to be others who are going to defend him. He is an adult and he now has to defend himself.”

O’Keefe, 26, became a superstar on the right last year when he and an associate named Hannah Giles released secretly recorded videos on Breitbart’s website showing employees of the liberal community organizing group ACORN supposedly offering advice on setting up an underage brothel. The videos prompted House Republicans to introduce a resolution praising O’Keefe and Giles’ “exemplary actions as government watchdogs and young journalists uncovering wasteful government spending.”

Praise was in short supply last week, though, after CNN reported that O’Keefe planned to secretly record himself acting out an over-the-top seduction – complete with sex toy props, strawberries and champagne – of a female CNN reporter seeking to interview him for a documentary about the increasing prominence of young conservative video activists who use ambush and undercover recordings to expose the left.

O’Keefe’s goal was to reveal CNN’s “bias against conservatives,” its “racism” and its “low journalistic standards” through both the seduction and by getting the network to report a false story on either “tea party racism” or Sarah Palin, according to a memo written for O’Keefe and his collaborators. “The joke is that the tables have turned on CNN,” read the memo to O’Keefe. “Using hot blondes to seduce interviewees to get screwed on television, you are faux seducing her in order to screw her on television.”

The plan, detailed in the memo and emails from O’Keefe’s associates, apparently collapsed when the director of O’Keefe’s investigative non-profit group, Project Veritas, tipped off the CNN reporter.

In a statement posted on Project Veritas’s website Monday afternoon, O’Keefe said he “liked the basic absurdity” of the plan laid out in the memo, but was “repulsed by the over-the-top language and symbolism” and “never considered” carrying the plan out.

Still, the episode was only the latest effort by O’Keefe and his allies to expose alleged liberal malfeasance that either backfired, fell apart under scrutiny or otherwise had minimal impact.

O’Keefe and three other young activists were arrested in January during another puzzling botched plot in which they entered Democratic Sen. Landrieu’s New Orleans district office dressed as telephone repairmen in a purported effort to prove she was ignoring constituent calls.

An explosive video Breitbart posted in July was proven to have been excerpted to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer, whom she in fact helped. And a much-hyped O’Keefe expose on the U.S. Census Bureau was widely dismissed as proving little.

Even the ACORN videos, which appeared to show the group’s employees offering advice on facilitating underage prostitution, were later revealed to have been misleadingly edited, though Breitbart has declared them deserving of a Pulitzer Prize.

Breitbart – who promoted O’Keefe and his cohorts as a powerful new breed of “ weaponized freedom fighters” whose work would take down the liberal media – at one point paid O’Keefe for his work.

On Monday, though, Breitbart made clear he had nothing to do with the CNN prank and said O’Keefe “owes an explanation that helps to put into a greater framework what he does and why he would target a news network and a reporter.”

But he also cautioned “there are people out there – many in the press certainly his political enemies – who want to take (O’Keefe) out” and who have misrepresented his past efforts. And he contended that no matter the ultimate resolution of the CNN episode, conservative citizen journalism remains a powerful tool. In the last six months, he said, “citizen journalists” have given him video showing “that the organized left – including OFA, Obama’s vaunted organizing unit, and the SEIU and the DCCC and the Democratic Party have been organizing stop the hate rallies that descend into hate rallies.”

Other influential – and deep-pocketed – conservative interests have similarly invested in O’Keefe and other citizen journalists as a potentially potent new force for the conservative movement.

When O’Keefe was enrolled at Rutgers University, he received some hands-on training, as well as a $500 grant, from the well-funded Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va. to help start a conservative student paper. Two of his fellow activists arrested in New Orleans – Joe Basel and Stan Dai – got similar help to start conservative newspapers at the University of Minnesota-Morris and George Washington University.

All three then received funding for the papers from the Collegiate Network, another conservative non-profit. And, after graduating, O’Keefe went to work for the Leadership Institute in 2006 and early 2007 training right-leaning students on how to start and run their own publications.

O’Keefe’s post-ACORN struggles haven’t diminished the enthusiasm of budding young conservative activist journalists, said Bryan Bernys, who now oversees college programs for the institute, but did not work with O’Keefe. “I’m sure he’s inspired some people,” Bernys said, though he declined to comment when asked if he saw O’Keefe as an example for young activists to emulate.

The Network, which sponsored a November conference in Texas at which O’Keefe advised young journalists about how to follow in his footsteps, and the Institute since 2000 have received a combined $89 million in grants, including checks from some of the biggest institutional funders of the conservative movement.

One such funder, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, over the years has given more than $1.6 million to the groups. But, in an interview after O’Keefe’s arrest in New Orleans, foundation president Mike Grebe sounded cautious when asked about whether the foundation viewed O’Keefe’s style of journalism as helpful for the conservative cause.

“It’s worthwhile, depending on the tactics involved, obviously,” he said. “There should be some limits on that kind of activity. We think that the coverage of the problems at ACORN was very effective and turned some opinions regarding that organization, so there a place for it, but again, within limits.”

On Monday, Grebe seemed to distance the foundation further, explaining it had “never funded O'Keefe or Veritas,” and adding that its grants to the Collegiate Network and Leadership Institute “have always been for general operating purposes and their grant requests have never made any mention of undercover video journalism. And I have no knowledge of what they may or may not do in that field.”

Steven Sutton, vice president of campus programs at the Institute, which also trains non-collegiate activists, previously told POLITICO that the ACORN videos ran afoul of the organization’s teachings about how to embarrass adversaries without crossing ethical lines.

Bernys, though, said “we don’t really do ethics training, but then again we don’t really do any kind of investigative journalism training like O’Keefe either.”

Meanwhile, the CNN caper has led to a conversation about whether conservatives need to take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Bozell of the Media Research Center called the prank “sleazy” and said it highlighted the need for conservative citizen journalists to adopt a code of ethics of some sort.

“We’re getting to that point where there’s going to have to be a serious assessment of the rules of the road,” he said, explaining the ethical guidelines should be based on simple overarching concepts: “You’ve got to seek truth. The ends can’t justify the means. And, for God sakes, grow up.”

In an August speech at Maryland’s Mount Saint Mary’s University, posted online by his Alexandria, Va.-based corporations Veritas Visuals and Project Veritas, O‘Keefe blasted what he asserted were liberal media efforts to marginalize him by deeming his “undercover tactics immoral, falling outside the journalism bible, the code of ethics. What is this journalism code of ethics? ... And what is journalism? Is journalism asking questions at press conferences and getting official responses? Is that journalism? Do you expect someone to be honest with you when you put a microphone in their face in front of a million people? That’s not journalism — that’s stenography.”

He brushed off efforts to label his work, saying “I don’t really like the label ‘journalist’ anyway, because unlike journalists, people on my team actually do investigative reporting.”

One blogger on the influential conservative blog Red State agreed - O’Keefe’s aborted CNN prank shouldn’t be called journalism.

“It’s not clever or funny, it’s sick,” wrote the blogger, Caleb Howe, who questioned the popularity in conservative circles of the term “citizen journalism,” which he wrote is “most often used when referring to people who produce video. Most of these folks could more properly be referred to as activists. James O’Keefe has been referred to as both.”

The maverick Republican David Frum asserted that “For O’Keefe, politics is a form of war, waged without rule or limit,” which he added “would not matter much if he were one lone attention-seeker. But O’Keefe is not alone. ... if the ‘politics is war’ attitude persists, these episodes will recur.”

And conservative blogger Matt Lewis lamented O’Keefe’s unfilled promise, while positing that the right’s desire for youthful enthusiasm “caused some conservatives to be too lenient when it comes to tolerating some of the amateurish actions of O'Keefe and his ilk. Sadly, O'Keefe's insistence on continuing his weird brand of performance art has probably cost him his chance to be considered the 21st-century version of Paul Weyrich or Phyllis Schlafly.

“Instead, he seems more and more likely to be cast as the conservative version of The Merry Pranksters.”