Friday, September 18, 2009

Undercover ACORN Investigators Are Conservative Activists; Aim To "Be Their Own Media"

I had noticed that the Fox News approach to their recent ACORN story is that opponents are going to try to shoot the messenger.  The two kids pretending to be journalists, Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe, had violated laws regarding videotaping a person without their knowledge, but pundits on channels such as Fox News attacked such claims that these young journalists should face criminal charges for their actions, and that they had provided a valuable service, which was uncovering an organization that was receiving public funds and aiding in the trafficking of child prostitutes, but did the organization actually do anything illegal, compared to these two reporters?

I am not defending ACORN, but looking at the facts presented by the reporters, which are few, it appears that their investigation was conducted poorly and at times incomplete, and more resembles a Charles Dickens serial novel then an actual hard hitting investigative piece.  The reporting by these two people is like a YouTube video playing a prank on some office.  They were dressed like they were going to a Halloween party, and I would hardly believe O'Keefe to be a pimp.  He looks more like David Spade from PCU then a pimp.  The conduct of the ACORN employees in the first couple videos was reprehensible, and I agree with the Senate vote stripping Federal funds from ACORN''s programs, but I believe that the actions taken by these journalists were highly amateurish, and seemed as if they were trying to hard to make a name for themselves, engaging in illegal videotaping and essentially equates to entrapment.  Ontop of that, the release of their latest video, in which an ACORN employee claims to have killed her husband, was not fact checked prior to publication, with Fox News following suit giving the video tremendous air play.  It turns out that the woman had never murdered her husband, and any investigative journalist would have done the research before showing this video.  These two reporters were duped, and in my opinion, discredits their entire operation.  Who is to say previous employees did not dupe these two?  There is also question as to whether the ACORN employees in previous videos filed any paperwork.  If they did, while that would be illegal for the organization, wouldn't it also be illegal for the two reporters, who would essentially be trying to defraud the government with their investigation, just to prove a point?  These two should have done more research to create a more comprehensive examination into the possible illegal activities of ACORN.

This raises my question as to who are these two people.  Nobody has ever heard of them, yet they broke this story and got it put at the top of Fox's story rotation.  As I had written a couple days ago regarding this story:
First, on September 9th, Glenn Beck mentioned that Fox had an exclusive segment and that no other journalists were covering this story, and no other station was investigating or telling the truth, so Beck and the people at Fox were going to tell you the "truth as we know it".  I thought that was interesting: "the truth as we know it".  Although a seemingly innocuous comment, I thought it was intriguing.  It is like a license to say whatever you want because you believe it to be true.  On September 10th's program Glenn Beck discussed more about the prostitution scandal, and stated again that no other news program was showing the story he was about to air, and that the only ones who were giving the story the light of day was The National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and Fox News, the latter two being owned by News Corporation, headed by Rupert Murdoch.          

In addition to which news agencies were reporting this story, I thought it was interesting because of who the reporter, Hannah Giles, was.  She had mentioned that she was not familiar with ACORN, but she heard poor things about them (presumably from Fox), and decided to bait them to prove they are thugs.  At the end of the program, Beck said you can find this all on Big Government.  I decided to visit that site and saw that the website was presented by Andrew Breitbart.  That name rang a bell.  After thinking long and hard, I remember that Andrew Breitbart has another website, titled Big Hollywood, which also rang a bell.  The reason why was because this website was mentioned during Beck's program where he accused the National Endowment for the Arts of being a propaganda wing of the administration, citing exclusive information provided by filmmaker, marketer, and art community consultant Patrick Courrielche, who also happens to be an author for Big Hollywood..

What is interesting about Big Government is that it is brand new, debuting on September 10th, although video clips premiered on Glenn Beck's program on September 9th.  Glenn Beck is constantly lambasting liberal bloggers and the liberal media, but it seems that Beck is establishing his own right wing media circle to pull stories from, to try and legitimize his own program, in addition to the rotation of commentators on each others shows (O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Van Susteren, etc.)    
We know the story surrounding the source of the articles, but what about the actual authors?  It turns out Hannah Giles is "contributor" to Townhall.com and an "aspiring journalist", as well as Townhall.com journalist Doug Giles' eldest daughter.  Townhall.com is an online conservative publication that was previously operated by The Heritage Foundation, but was purchased by Salem Communications, a "media company specializing in evangelical Christian and conservative political talk radio".

She had written only a couple articles for the website.  In her article The Truth Is Too Scandalous for YouTube, Giles discussed the abundance of socially unacceptable material that can be found on YouTube, but what you wont find are videos made by "UCLA Law Student James O’Keefe", whose videos are "habitually banned".  If you have been familiar with the ACORN story, and do not have short term memory problems, you may remember that O'Keefe played the pimp in the infamous ACORN videos.  What else does Giles have to say about her friend?
A young lawyer in training, full of prospects and dreams, O’Keefe takes no prisoners and calls things as they are.  Currently, he has his sights set on unveiling the deep-rooted  prejudices of Planned Parenthood.  O’Keefe, and other dedicated students, are tackling the American abortion industry, by revealing the basis of its existence.
She goes on to discuss Planned Parent spreading "race-hygiene", and she describes them as "Hitleresque".  In O'Keefe's sting operation with Planned Parenthood, he called up sites, "in states where it is legal to audio record without the other party's consent" (how come they did not do the same with their ACORN videos), and he posed as a donor who wanted his money to be used for the abortion of black babies, expressing his "belief" that there were too many black people around.  Planned Parenthood agreed to fulfill his wishes.  These videos were posted online, and were the most popular videos under Planned Parenthood, but were taken down without notice during Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.  Coincidence?  Maybe, but it seems that Giles believes that the removal of this activist's videos were politically motivated.  She goes on to call O'Keefe's efforts "legitimate investigative work".  She goes on to write the following:
After all, who would know that the founder of Planned Parenthood was an avid racist and sex fiend.  Or that even though Margaret Sanger never physically reproduced, her ideas spread far and wide, and developed into a billion-dollar American industry responsible for the death of approximately 4,000 babies a day.
I guess it is easy to attack a woman who had died over 40 years ago, and claim she was a sex fiend.  While she may have been a supporter of negative eugenics, I had never read that she was a sex fiend, but I guess that goes hand in hand with people who support abortions;  they all must be promiscuous.  I would like to make a side note that I only support abortion in the most severe instances, including rape and incest, and the threat of the mother's life.

In Giles other article Don't Be A Zombie: Question Your Leaders!, written right after Obama had won the nomination, she continues to refer to him as "Barack Hussein Obama".  Although that is his legal name, I understand that his middle name is favored by the right because of associations with another famous Hussein: Saddam.  She references Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  She puts it so affectionately, "Sen. John Sidney McCain III and Sen. Barack Hussein Obama are vying for the presidency this election year."  I guess it was necessary to include McCain's middle name, maybe to show that it was not as exotic as Obama's, or to accentuate that he is an Anglo-American (I am not accusing Giles of racism, or of playing the race card, but simply proposing that she may have had ulterior motives).  Her belief, as stated in the article, was that at the time, Senator Hillary Clinton was calling for Republicans to forfeit the race to Obama, which would lead to the loss of American liberty and freedom.

I would like to note that as I am reading her article, there are advertisements all over her web page with advertisements for Glenn Beck and conservative t-shirts with slogans such as "I'd rather be waterboarding" printed on the front.

Her latest article was written June 29th of this year, and focused on a possible tax on the methane emissions of cattle.  The article was called I've Heard of a Flat Tax, but a Flatulence Tax? and discussed how farmers were being unfairly targeted by Obama's administration.  After reading all three of her articles, it does not appear that this is the voice of someone who wants to offer a fair and balanced story to the American public.  It appears to me that Giles is a conservative activist, and not an objective journalist.  This would be like getting your news from the various commercials that appear to be a newscast, but is just an advertisement.

Now who exactly is James O'Keefe?

It seems that James O'Keefe was the founder and editor-in-chief of the conservative collegiate magazine The Centurion at Rutgers, as well as Veritas Visuals, which according to the site consists of"Documentary Journalism pushing the boundaries of Contemporary Discourse Via Public Expose" and lists as activists on the website Saul Alinsky and Jesus Christ.  Also, as mentioned before, he was responsible for phoning Planned Parenthood locations pretending to be a rascist donor.  He had even written an article regarding his sting operation in the New Guard Magazine, where he states Planned Parenthood advocated black genocide.  In this article, he describes his actions as "mockery" in which the target loses if they agree with the journalist, and they also lose if they disagree, which he attributes to "legendary leftist activist" Saul Alinsky.  Regarding his sting, he stated that either "Planned Parenthood accepts donations from racists, or they must reject the view of their founder, Sanger, as racist", and either way, they come out behind.  O'Keefe also references Alinsky's strategies, in that one must do "whatever necessary to disrupt and annoy power structures, applying constant pressure and opposition".  Of his Planned Parenthood investigation, in which Lila Rose assisted in the sting, O'Keefe had said the following:
Leaders taking on power structures need to be raw, confident, fearless and impermeable. Lila received a letter threatening to prosecute the group for violating wiretapping laws, but it did not stop her from continuing the investigation. After the investigation aired nationally on Fox News, Planned Parenthood could no longer press charges, as Lila would appear the victim.
Although he had mentioned earlier in his article that they performed these investigations in states that allowed "one party consent", it seems as if he is encouraging the violation of laws to achieve a greater goal, which would be to disrupt certain "power structures", or in this case and the following instance with Giles, Planned Parenthood and ACORN, and we can see this situation playing out with the ACORN investigation, with Fox News pundits trying to paint O'Keefe and Giles as victims regardless that they violated recording statutes.  The most interesting, and scary, statement by O'Keefe in the article is this:
Most importantly, conservative activists need to be their own media, and use their independent media to obtain their goals.
We see this currently with conservative news programs, such as Glenn Beck, who uses limited sources for their reports, and then the story is repeated in what some refer to as the "echo chambers" of Fox News.  Consider Glenn Beck, who has consistently utilized Andrew Breitbart to help take down so-called liberal or subversive targets, such as Van Jones, Yosi Sergent (with reports from his site BigHollywood.com), and now ACORN (with reports from his BigGovernment.com website, which includes contributors Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe).


The news created by the conservative media made James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles appear to be a couple of neophyte journalists who theorized corruption in the ranks of a large non-profit corporation, and then conducted hidden camera investigations to uncover the truth, when in reality, they are conservative activists, who in their own words aim to be "their own media" in achieving their goals through any method available, even going as far as violating state laws to accomplish such.  Although the conduct by the ACORN employees may be questionable and worthy of a legitamite investigation, O'Keefe and Giles are far from credulous and have used the media to not only deceive the media, but to deceive Americans as well to achieve their own goals, regardless of who it may affects.  What makes this dangerous is what stops these two people, or people like them, from turning there sights on other organizations, corporations, or even governments, only to fulfill their desires?  What stops them from turning on the people they claim to be protecting?  Glenn Beck loves to encourage his viewers to "question with boldness" and "hold to the truth" and that is exactly what I am doing.  

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