Our political Quote of the Day is actually the beginning of a column by Gene Lyons who notes how hidden camera political activist James O’Keefe is finding some former friends distancing themselves from him:
It gets curiouser and curiouser, this buzzing electronic cacophony that’s supposed to represent the national conversation. Consider the rapid rise and meteoric fall of one James O’Keefe, the right-wing prankster whose “Candid Camera” stunts made him a “journalist” hero to the FOX News crowd.
The difference between O’Keefe and the late Allen Funt, understand, being that Funt played it strictly for laughs. Letting the victim in on the joke was a big part of the show. “Smile,” he’d say to some guy tricked into arguing with a talking mailbox, “You’re on Candid Camera.”
O’Keefe’s stunts, however, have been aimed at humiliating his targets and exposing them to ridicule and even legal peril, which is what makes his takedown by CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau so satisfying. Poor baby, O’Keefe got caught in his own trap, no doubt why readers who get their information from FOX News probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
He used to be their hero. Sean Hannity once hailed O’Keefe as a “pioneer in journalism,” and Bill O’Reilly wanted to nominate him for a congressional medal. There were mentions of the Pulitzer Prize. Even Glenn Beck took time out from his busy schedule of likening Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler to call O’Keefe “courageous.”
All this for dressing up in a ludicrous pimp costume O’Keefe pretended to wear into ACORN offices to make the anti-poverty organization’s employees look like fools and criminals. It was all an elaborate hoax. Real people, however, lost their jobs; the organization lost its funding and disbanded.
Alas, it appears that O’Keefe’s admirers have now forgotten his name. According to MediaMatters.org, FOX News has scarcely mentioned how CNN’s Boudreau, cautioned by an O’Keefe aide with a guilty conscience, frustrated his bizarre scheme to lure her aboard a boat tricked out like Hugh Hefner’s boudoir for the purpose of sexual humiliation.
Read the rest of it in full.
In fact, this also reflects a larger shift in our political culture. Years ago I was on a hidden camera show on NBC, Spy TV. The highly creative producers and directors went to enormous lengths and expense to basically take over the floor of an office building, make a room packed with hidden cameras to look like an office — all to trick a 4 year old and set the scene. But the idea was fun. And some said it was the sweetest of all segments on SPY TV which could be edgy.
But today there is a real mean-spiritedness in the land. You can see and hear it in satire on political talk shows and websites (always aimed only at one side with virtually no exceptions), the continued coarsening of our political discussion and the way partisans talk to and about each other and the tone of much Internet opinionizing both in posts, the way the talk show political culture has turned polemics into virtue and — oh, yes, most assuredly — at times in blog comments.
So in the case of O’Keefe he crossed a line — a line that has been blurred so you almost have to work at it to cross the line. Last week we saw a similar but not identical case of a line being crossed, by CNN’s Rick Sanchez. Sanchez has offered an apology; O’Keefe has offered more of an explanation.
But in the end the explanations and apologies are less important than this fact: our politics is increasingly mean…increasingly less centered on even aggressive discussions of issues and more about trying to define or totally discredit anyone who DARES to disagree. It’s all search and destroy. It’s not about getting and better presenting an idea; it’s increasingly about getting someone.
And if this is the trend and people who cross the line aren’t called out for it exactly where do we think this trend is headed as America moves — angrily, personally — further into the 21st century?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.