So When does O'Keefe Get His Pulitzer?

© Jack Cashill
June 26, 2019 - WND.com

On Wednesday, the major media were compelled, however reluctantly, to acknowledge James O’Keefe once again.

This time, President Trump forced their hand. “We should be suing Google and Facebook and all that,” said Trump during a phone interview with Fox Business Network.

The Washington Post’s Tony Romm grudgingly conceded that Trump’s remark “came in response to a video posted online by Project Veritas, an organization founded by James O’Keefe. .  . ”

If Romm, a technology policy writer for the Post, had stopped there, he would not have embarrassed himself, but he continued “. . . that targets reporters and people it deems to be left-leaning.”

Project Veritas does no such thing. From the beginning O’Keefe has targeted institutions that flout the law or their own stated mission, and he has had extraordinary success in so doing. Google is the latest monster, if not slain, at least seriously wounded by the truth.

In 2009, as a 25-year-old, working with 20-year-old Hannah Giles on a project financed by their credit cards, O’Keefe’s undercover reporting resulted in the congressional defunding and eventual collapse of the astonishingly corrupt $2 billion community organizing entity known as ACORN.

O’Keefe should have gotten his Pulitzer right there. Instead, he earned the bottomless scorn of the media elites for doing the job they should have done many years earlier.

In subsequent years, Project Veritas’s reporting forced the reporting of two top NPR executives, inspired the House of Representatives to cut NPR funding, forced New Hampshire to change voting laws twice, forced resignations of Medicaid staff in multiple states, forced the termination of three Common Core executives, and exposed teacher union hijinks across the nation.

In 2016, the now 32-year-old O’Keefe orchestrated the infiltration of the carelessly corrupt Clinton political operation. In mid-October 2016, Veritas’s undercover videos led to the termination of two high level Democratic operatives and helped turn the tide in the election. More than 22 million people saw the videos.

This week, a devastating new Project Veritas video paired the in-studio comments of a Google whistleblower with the spontaneous comments of a Google executive captured on video without her knowledge. https://bit.ly/2Ft84F6

Combined, the two commenters strip away Google’s carefully nurtured illusion of neutrality. When the insider says Google “is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again,” and the unwary exec confirms Google is determined to “prevent next Trump situation,” one tends to believe them.

Here’s how the Post’s patronizing Tony Romm summarizes the content: “The video purported to show Google employees discussing politics in a way that suggested they specifically targeted conservatives.”

There is nothing “purported” about video. It strips away the editorial layer a print reporter inevitably inserts between reality and his or her rendition of reality.

Romm continues, “But the clip had been recorded in secret, without the Google executive’s permission or knowledge, and she later said that Project Veritas had edited the video in a duplicitous way.”

As Romm should know, those captured on tape almost always say the editing is duplicitous, usually just before they get fired. This exec, however, said something entirely different.

“I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.” If anything is “purported,” it is Romm’s claim that the editing was duplicitous.

Then too, if memory serves, the Post had no qualms about airing Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded “47 percent” video or Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape. In those cases, no one fretted about editing.

For all his huffing about Google’s “targeting conservatives,” Romm is fully aware the social media giants do exactly that, and he seems to approve.

On his home page, Romm boasts of “chronicling Silicon Valley’s political renaissance.” He then explains his idea of a renaissance.

“In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential election victory,” he writes, “the tech engineers, executives and investors who dominate the country’s tech capital are leading the charge to fight the White House — and rethink the Democratic Party.”

Romm lists this “chronicling” among the “major stories” he has broken. Compared to O’Keefe’s major stories, Romm’s list is pathetic. It is also dishonest.

Romm could have broken the “targeting” story himself. Instead he has been finessing it on obscure tech sites. The secret to success in his world, he knows, is to suppress stories unfriendly to the progressive agenda and attack those like O’Keefe who surface them.

In time, Romm hopes to win a “major award” for his “major stories.” Today, unfortunately, a leg lamp would have more intrinsic value than a Pulitzer.