O'Keefe. one of Andrew Breitbart's "best and brightest," has settled with ex-ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera, for a whopping $100,000.
This courtesy of Wonkette:
According to the final 5-page agreement, signed by O’Keefe and his legal counsel Mike Madigan this past Tuesday, the boy detective now publicly “regrets any pain suffered by Mr. Vera or his family.” O’Keefe and his counsel have also consented to fork over the $100,000 within 30 business days of the settlement agreement’s being signed.
ACORN was a community organizing group that became the locus of phantasmically baroque conspiracy theorizing in the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, first by the usual sad idiots, but inevitably by the seemingly rational journalists who must cover the sad idiots to pay their mortgages. ACORN attracted this negative attention, in part, because of its large and effective voter registration drives, which enfranchised record numbers of minority and low-income voters, who are demographically likely to vote for Democratic Party candidates.
In 2009, two twenty-something conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, hoped to expose criminal malfeasance at ACORN by filming Vera without his consent, themselves violating section 632 of the California penal code in the process. Vera sued both parties over this and the wild misrepresentation of his activities in the edited version of the undercover video, posted online. (Giles settled with Vera and his attorneys this summer.) The episode is a quintessential example of a wholly original term, which we have just coined: journalistic malpractice.
As many of you probably remember O'Keefe and Giles were paraded around the set of various Fox "news" shows in full pimp and ho regalia, where they completely misrepresented their footage and how they were attired while gathering it.
However it was enough to fool various, more serious, news outlets into covering it and giving them the benefit of the doubt, (Including comedian Jon Stewart, who should have known better.), and this fired up the Republicans who went after ACORN like Rand Paul chasing a conspiracy theory, and eventually the Senate defunded ACORN after which it simply withered away.
The funny part of this, if there is anything funny about it, is that the conservatives believed to their core that the reason Obama won the 2008 election was due to devious practices by ACORN and other Democratic organizations. I think they really believed that with ACORN gone that the President would lose his bid for reelection.
How did that work out for them?
Update: POS can't admit that he did wrong.
O'Keefe's response courtesy of TPM:
Sadly, this is the cost of exposing the truth. That’s why so few people do it. There are liability issues inherent in undercover journalism. But let me be clear, this lawsuit had nothing to do with editing or misrepresentation. It was an action under the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The anti-recording statute under which the suit was brought is unconstitutional, overbroad, and gives the police and other public officials too much power.
As President of Project Veritas and undertaking 5 current investigations, my time and resources are better served in working toward our mission of exposing waste, fraud, and abuse then defending myself against lies. I will not be deterred from investigating and exposing corruption. Now more than ever, America is in need of a more ethical and transparent society.
But do you know what? It does not even matter that this douchebag can't man up and admit that he lied about his footage, and misrepresented himself on television and talk radio programs all over the country. The only thing that matters is that the little bitch was forced to pay up, or risk getting sued for millions. That means the case was good, and he was about to lose.
And he can squeal til his balls finally drop into place but that's the truth and he knows it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Click to see the code!
To insert emoticon you must added at least one space before the code.