A group of journalists at Project Veritas, led by James O’Keefe, has made waves over the years with undercover videos that have covered corrupt officials, voter fraud, and, more recently, media bias at CNN and The New York Times.
“We take the approach we take, a sort of guerrilla approach, because we live in unjust times,” said O’Keefe, in an interview with The Epoch Times. He quoted words often attributed to George Orwell: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
With the current state of news, culture, and politics, many institutions tasked with informing the public have become what O’Keefe referred to as “Potemkin villages,” a reference to communist tactics of disinformation where people are presented with a false image in order to sway their opinions.
In this environment, many institutions that claim to uphold honesty are themselves dishonest, and many who claim to represent society are oppressing the same groups they claim to represent. In order to hide their actions, these same institutions often attack critics, using political labels.
It’s in this environment that O’Keefe has chosen to use a sometimes controversial form of journalism to show the faces behind the facade.
“In order to get the information to the public, we have to use surreptitious means and we have to be guerrilla in how we distribute the information because we’re handicapped; because we’re facing overwhelming forces that are trying to shut us down, suppress the truth, and propagandize the people,” O’Keefe said.
“The only way to distribute the truth in these bizarre times is to use these techniques,” he said.
During the 2016 elections, Project Veritas published a series of undercover videos that showed leaders of Democratic organizations plotting to frame incidents around Trump. This included a video of Democratic political organizers Bob Creamer and Scott Foval boasting about starting fights at Trump rallies in order to paint Trump supporters as violent.
The incident was confirmed by former Democratic National Committee (DNC) interim chairwoman Donna Brazile in her new book, “Hacks.” She writes: “I watched O’Keefe’s video with a sinking heart, knowing this was something we could not fight back against, not really. … The footage of Creamer and Scott Foval boasting about picking fights with crazy people in the line to a campaign rally looked terrible.”
In a video published on June 28, Project Veritas exposed CNN political commentator Van Jones as saying that the stories alleging that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia are a “big nothing burger.” The group showed, through other undercover videos, that CNN was pushing the Trump–Russia narrative for ratings.
In a more recent series of videos, Project Veritas showed various figures at The New York Times admitting that the publication has a strong anti-Trump bias. This included Des Shoe, a New York Times senior staff editor based in London, stating that some journalists believe if they write negatively about Trump, “then maybe people will read it and be like, ‘Oh wow, we shouldn’t vote for him.’”
According to O’Keefe, however, the journalistic methods he and others at Project Veritas use are well within the standards that journalists are expected to uphold.
The code that many journalists go by is the Code of Ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists. It states that undercover methods should be avoided unless “open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” Journalists have a responsibility to “expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations,” the code also says.
O’Keefe said: “We would argue that the stories we uncover are of extreme public interest. The reason why the media investigations we’re doing are so important is because the media arguably has more power than Congress—it has more power than the legislature. It informs the culture.”
