I asked [Hannah Giles, the woman who appeared in O'Keefe's video dressed as prostitute,] about a criticism that’s often been leveled against them — that they hyped up the video by wearing outrageous clothes in promotional materials and the videos’ introductions that they didn’t wear in the actual stings.
“We never claimed that he went in with a pimp costume,” said Giles. “That was b-roll. It was purely b-roll. He was a pimp, I was a prostitute, and we were walking in front of government buildings to show how the government was whoring out the American people.”
So now the question remains: Will the New York Times and other “liberal media” outlets retract or, at the very least, correct their reporting? Our guess is no.
Despite the video you may have seen of O’Keefe posing in pimp attire outside ACORN offices, when he went into the meetings he left the costume in the car and was dressed in his normal aging frat boy style, slacks and a button-down shirt.
With clever video editing, along with an invaluable assist from Fox News, O’Keefe — who is now facing federal charges on an unrelated caper in which he tried to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phones in her office in New Orleans — and his boss, Drudge-”Bitch” Andrew Breitbart, have pulled off one of the biggest media scams in recent memory. And despite evidence to the contrary, the purportedly biggest “liberal media” outlet of them all, the New York Times, is refusing to retract stories it published asserting that O’Keefe wore the costume during his meetings with ACORN.
The BRAD BLOG had the story earlier this month:
“There is nothing for us to correct … We stand by our reporting.” That was the innocuous enough position from Greg Brock, New York Times “Senior Editor/Standards,” in reply to a [request for a correction] to recent reportage from the “paper of record” concerning rightwing activist James O’Keefe, on the heels of his federal felony arrest late last month. O’Keefe was arrested in New Orleans as an alleged ringleader in a conspiracy with three others, attempting to gain access, for reasons still unknown, to the phone system of Louisiana’s Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu.
Incredibly, Brock originally cited claims by Fox News and O’Keefe himself as sources for why the New York Times stood by their apparently unverified and apparently incorrect report. “We believe him,” Brock wrote, because he said as much on Fox News, apparently.
But the matter went from the absurd to the ridiculous in fairly short order, as Brock then seemed to contradict himself by claiming their source wasn’t actually Fox or O’Keefe, but that the Times stood by their reporting because of a mysterious, unpublished video said to back up the claim, along with testimony from ACORN employees.
Though both the video and statements from ACORN employees were cited as evidence their story was right, Brock would refuse to share evidence for either of the claims. That, even after an independent report from the former Attorney General of Massachusetts — released in early December, but never mentioned in the Times’ recent report (or any report at the paper to my knowledge) — directly contradicts their reportage….
In short, the Times suggested in an article a week ago Sunday — and at least seven others prior to it, all published after the release of the former MA Attorney General’s report — that O’Keefe was wearing his infamous pimp outfit inside the offices of ACORN while speaking to employees in his now-infamous hit videos. In actuality, according to the December 7th report by AG Scott Harshbarger, in direct contradiction to the Times reporting, he was not.
Read More:
- BRAD BLOG: Breitbart Lied About ACORN ‘Pimp’ Videos When Selling Story in His Own Washington Times Column (Feb. 17, 2010)
- Media Matters: James O’Keefe and the myth of the ACORN pimp (Feb. 17, 2010)
- Empty Wheel: NYT Thinks TeaBugger James O’Keefe Entitled to Own Set of Facts (Feb. 9, 2010)
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