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Memo to Snyder: Don’t stop the radical reforms now!Threatened: Why the Washington Post treats O’Keefe and Giles like suspects
September 18th, 2009 | 
Author: 
Dan Calabrese
Imagine this headline and lead appearing in any newspaper, save for the Washington Post, in 1972:
Post Reporters Deny Using Questionable Tactics to Entrap Nixon
The proposition seemed outlandish. Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would accept information from a secret source who would only be known as “Deep Throat.” This information would be so damaging to president of the United States, it would unleash a scandal that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government to its core.
If only they'd had YouTube in 1972.
Woodward and Bernstein deny being beholden to left-wing interests, but admit taking advice in their reporting from left-wing editor Ben Bradlee. They insist that no left-wing organization bankrolled their reporting efforts.
Absurd? Of course. Not even the Republican National Committee would have attempted so shamelessly to turn the Watergate scandal into an indictment of Woodward and Bernstein themselves. And if anyone had, the Post would have screamed bloody murder.
Yet look what the very same Washington Post wrote on Friday about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the two independent journalists who exposed what appear to be highly illegal activities by the community organizing group ACORN:
O’Keefe insists that he and Giles’s work was done independently and rejects liberal suggestions that the videos were bankrolled by conservative organizations. He does, however, acknowledge receiving help and advice from a conservative columnist and Web entrepreneur.
Why, exactly, do O’Keefe and Giles now have to defend themselves and their independence, when the result of their work clearly speaks for itself?
Part of the issue is obviously ideological bias. The mainstream media is far less happy to see a left-wing organization exposed as a criminal fraud, especially one so closely connected to the left-wing president in which they have so much invested.
But there is more to it than that.
O’Keefe and Giles represent the kind of new reality that threatens the very existence of media dinosaurs like the Washington Post. These two individuals, ages 25 and 20, respectively, met on Facebook, got to talking about ACORN and decided to travel the country dressed as a pimp and a hooker, shoot some secret videos and – if they found anything good – post them on YouTube.
With the help of Andrew Brietbart and his burgeoning web site BigGovernment.com, the videos became an instant viral sensation. But with all due respect to Brietbart, who does excellent work and is a solid journalist in his own right, I wonder if his involvement was even necessary.
If O’Keefe and Giles had merely posted the videos on YouTube and e-mailed some of the leading conservative bloggers, they would have been just as big a sensation. That’s how information is spread these days, and that may be the even bigger reason their expose upsets the establishment media.
Woodward and Bernstein couldn’t have done in 1972 what O’Keefe and Giles did in 2009, not without the support structure of an establishment newspaper to distribute the information they gathered. For that reason, a scandal didn’t become a scandal unless major newspapers wanted it to be one.
The mainstream media were not interested in investigating ACORN for ideological reasons. Perhaps O’Keefe and Giles had ideological motives for being willing to do so. Regardless, what they found was legitimate – and huge – news. A national organization that receives a lot of federal money, and has historically had close ties to the president of the United States, is apparently aiding and abetting a wide array of criminal activity.
This threatens establishment newspapers because it presents them with any number of very serious problems. They can no longer bury a story by sitting on it, because two kids with a pimp coat, a car and a video camera are now perfectly capable of exposing it to the nation. Even worse, they can no longer hide the fact that they buried certain stories, because once someone does their job for them, they’ll have to explain why they didn’t do it.
And perhaps most ominously, incidents like this begin to raise questions about whether newspapers are really needed at all. Why do we have these institutions if they ignore important stories and leave it to a pair of rank amateurs to expose them?
The Post’s attempt to answer that question is implied in its story about O’Keefe and Giles. These two yokels, you see, are not trained journalists. Giles’s father is the pastor of a “radical church,” and they munched Subway and Quiznos in between sting operations. (Have you ever seen how professional journalists eat? And drink?)
Let newspapers die, it is implied, and we’ll be left with unprofessional hacks like these two. That might resonate if not for two facts: 1. O’Keefe and Giles did a pretty darn professional job exposing ACORN’s true nature. 2. It’s becoming pretty obvious that the Post and its peers cannot be bothered to do stories like this unless it suits their ideological agenda.
That’s why the Post treated O’Keefe and Giles as suspects in a way that no one would have dreamed doing to Woodward and Bernstein. The latter pair threatened to bring down the president of the United States – and ultimately did so. The former pair threaten to bring down the Fourth Estate, and it appears the Post knows all too well just how hard a fall that might prove to be.
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Posted in Dan Calabrese
100 Responses to “Threatened: Why the Washington Post treats O’Keefe and Giles like suspects”
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