There are so many things about which to write this morning and yet I find myself reverting to a few common themes expressed in this space over the last few years. It just amazes me that Santayana‘s maxim about the past is given so much lip service and yet ignored in practice.
I’ll apologize upfront if I sound kind of angry but I kind of am. You see, things such as earthquakes, which we can’t control, are very different from things such as knee-jerk reactions to malicious underhandedness, which we can. In this and other cases it costs people their jobs and embarrasses their organizations for absolutely no reason. I’ll also tell you upfront that this is NOT a political rant because in this case although the incident was politically motivated the business implications could not be more clear.
Once again, a dirtbag named O’Keefe has cut raw video in such as way as to demean someone and distort reality. In this case, it was an NPR executive and NPR mildly labels it “inappropriate editing.” Which is a polite term for lying bullcrap.
Why does this have me so riled up? For a couple of reasons. First, this is NOT the first time this guy has put out a supposedly damning video that turned out to be a heavily edited lie. He’s also the same guy who plead guilty in May, 2010 to a misdemeanor charge of “entering federal property under false pretenses” for breaking into a Senator’s office to bug the place.
Let’s stop here and think about this in business terms. You do a deal with someone who claims to have a product you want. It turns out that the product he sells you is a fake. He comes back a few months later to sell you another product. Is there any chance you’re buying? Let’s say he was arrested in the interim for trying to steal information. What kind of deal would you be rushing to make?
My guess is that if you’re smart enough to read this, you’re also smart enough to send a potential business partner such as that packing. But people don’t, either in the media, politics, or in business. So let’s get back to the same things of which we’ve spoken earlier.
- Find the facts. It’s not always easy, but operating on hearsay from a single source often comes back to bite you, especially if you haven’t vetted the sources themselves.
- Do NOT do business with bad people. In most cases, we have choices about companies and individuals with whom we transact. A lesser deal with a better person is a more desirable outcome in my book than a better deal with someone who might be dishonest, treacherous, or selfish.
The question I have is NOT why this creep isn’t in jail: it’s why does anyone take anything he has to say on the least bit seriously. I think it says more about those who do than about his actions. Just like most trolls in business and in politics, if you ignore them they go away. Unfortunately, apparently some folks – and media entities – aren’t smart enough to look to the past before they report. Let’s not make the same mistake as we do business.
Consult Keith 
Hi Keith,
There are thousands of Old Media stories like the Chicago Sun-Times/60 Minutes Mirror Bar investigation or the Food Lion set-up:
“In the 1990s, Food Lion gained a degree of notoriety when it was the subject of an ABC News investigation. ABC had received a tip about unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Two ABC reporters had posed as Food Lion employees, and witnessed the unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Much of what they had seen was videotaped with cameras hidden in wigs that they were wearing. The footage was then featured in a segment on the news magazine Primetime Live, in which Food Lion employees described unsanitary practices, which included bleaching discolored, expired pork with Clorox and repackaging expired meats with new expiration dates, and the use of nail polish remover to remove the expiration dates from dairy item packages.
The company responded by suing ABC for fraud, claiming that the ABC employees misrepresented themselves; for trespassing, because the ABC employees came on to Food Lion property without permission; and for breach of loyalty, the ABC employees videotaped non-public areas of the store and revealed internal company information. During the court battles between Food Lion and ABC, over 40 hours of unused footage were released that helped Food Lion’s case. In the unused footage, two undercover producers are seen trying to encourage violations of company policy; however, employees resisted and correctly followed sanitary practices.
Food Lion was awarded USD$5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia. According to the court, even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, Food Lion was unable to show that they had been directly injured by ABC’s actions – essentially that it was the actions of Food Lion that caused the damages, not the publication of those actions.
An indirect result was that Food Lion ended up exiting the Houston, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex markets, which it had recently entered. The Dallas/Fort Worth market is highly competitive, and the stores were already being criticized for being too small and lacking the amenities desired by the local shoppers—for example, Food Lion did not include pharmacies in its stores.” -Wikipedia
O’Keefe exposed ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and a Congresswoman who wouldn’t answer her constituents’ phone calls about ObamaCare (he wasn’t bugging anyone). So far, he and Lila Rose set up Planned Parenthood to accept a $25,000 donation if the money was only used to abort black babies (which Darwin, Sanger, and all the other Eugenicists have been doing for 120 years while sharing research with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute).
Watch O’Keefe’s absurd Irish ethnic-slur complaint against Rutger’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3WUnFiEJ4
Here’s a Poynter Institute analysis of O’Keefe’s work:
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/making-sense-of-news/123188/what-james-okeefe-knows-about-media-and-you-should-know-too/
I was working at ABC at the time, John, and totally agree that it’s not just right wing nuts that have agendas. I think the big difference here is that for ABC it was very much NOT standard operating procedure to behave this way; it seems to be for O’Keefe. My point is that we all need to do more digging and stop believing those who lie as their norm. You sure wouldn’t do business that way.
True, your mother raised you right, and if his mother made him serve 500 Masses as an altar boy, delivered newspapers every day and caddied every weekend and during summers, O’Keefe would have character and honor too, unlike the ABC Food Lion editors, 60 Minutes, Dan Rather and thousands of screened and filtered journolists.
O’Keefe has learned the devious lessons of the Left and has shown the truth about Eugenics, Marxism and corruption.