studentcam.org for competition rules, tips, resources and a step-by-step guide. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest and nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including buckeye broadband. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> buckeye broadband, along with these television companies,, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> host: james o'keefe in your new book "american muckraker:

rethinking journalism for the 21st century" you write that there is an indecently close personal and professional relationship between reporters and the people they are supposed to cover. >> guest: right. >> host: is that a bad thing? >> guest: yes, because there's always been tension in journalism between what i call in his book access and autonomy. there's always a tension there because some people need to get real close to the sources come sometimes need to aggressively and adversarial he investigate your sources projected strike that balance just perfectly but these days in journalism it's become too out of bounds. people become, they delivered on a platter what the sources and the government want come with the government wants people to see. they are sort of acting as delivery people for though sources rather than being adversarial, being skeptical. you don't want to be too adversarial because i can

engender biases of their own budget to strike that balance. there's no more balance. the national security act of service for the administration. >> host: somewhat ask you about the subtitle of the book, rethinking journalism for the 21st century. how does that fit with being a muckraker? you do refer to yourself as a muckraker. >> guest: rethinking journalism, the early 20th century i think in the mid-20th century investigative reporting was, you're the "chicago sun-times" doing these investigations where they are posing as bartenders. most famously upton sinclair wrote the jungle, which he had an ideology, he was a valid socialist he had an agenda but there was a willingness to kind of go there and really speak aggressively towards the powers that be. upton sinclair was -- you don't really see that anymore. on cable is people just sort of

set up their and talk to that what they think. none of these journalists on cable really break big aggressive stories. most of the stories are broken in the people like me. washington, for example, "washington post" won a pulitzer prize-winning investigating me, not corruption in the government. so you need to have the spirit of investigative reporting and citizens need to do at an kind of have a renaissance and go back to what was done decades ago, which now doesn't happen anymore. mostly due to what i talk about in the book which is economics, consolidation of media, commercial imperative which a lot of news organizations have slash their budgets. abc news recently slashed investigative bureau and it's become a commercial enterprise not a journalism one. that's why we are philosophical profit organization. we don't have advertised the story tells us what to do.

>> host: so mr. o'keefe, what is a goal of project veritas? how do you pick your subjects? >> guest: are subjects pick us. our sources find us in the same way that in the journalist would find resources conflict with it edward snowden found ringwald. i don't think green one is going to find a contractor in an essay at the contractor down him, pained him. much as a case of project veritas. whistleblowers find a. >> for example, this year an fbi agent found me after the fbi raided my home and that fbi agent came to us with internal restricted documents from within the fbi's computer systems where they were calling us news media, which is a very big deal because the case hinges on whether we are news media picks of the people tend to find journalist that they can trust that these days most sources don't really trust any journalist at all. most people don't trust media. but we don't really pick our subjects. our subjects find us.

>> host: how many times have you been sued? >> guest: or jailed or indicted. >> host: my attorneys t enough i could with me and another probably laughing. i don't know exactly how many. a few come a couple dozen pieces a litigation over the last ten years. we really never lost a case. we don't lose because we're in the right and we don't give up. so if you're in the right and you don't ever saddle, you eventually went in a court of law. in some cases we have to appeal. most recently we end up going on offense against the "new york times" for defamation. past motion to defense and the case will enter discovery. in the beginning of my career people would sue me, and there was the opportunity to settle the cases at adventure said i'm not settling any of these cases. what we found a out in the discovery process of a lawsuit, defamation lawsuit, i've been sued for breach of fiduciary duty, trespass, the sorts of

things, is a people who sued me never want to be deposed themselves. they never wanted discovery of an operations because we are fairly ethical at veritas. we don't really break any laws, don't do anything improper but the people over there usually are not as ethical. so they found out if i see james o'keefe i will have to be deposed and then they stop suing me and now we sue them. >> host: is it okay to deceive a subject when you're investigating? >> guest: this chapter in a book called deception and your question is an interesting one because it is a question of relative deception. because either, either you deceive her subject that you're investigating to tell the truth to your audience can or you don't deceive her subject and you tell untruths to the audience. in other words, if you just take what your subject missing at face value you will be disseminating perhaps falsehoods to millions of people. so there's an ethicist names

louis who argues in a thesis paper you have a moral imperative to deceive your subject if your mission is to tell the truth to the audit. this event about a book called the journalist and the murder which is a famous book in the 1990s janet malcolm is a legend or journalist wrote that a journalist always deceives their subject. it's a confidence game that you must play if your intention is to do investigative reporting. if your intention is to read off teleprompters and to deliver and to play a stenographer and to tell the public what the two star general wants you to know, well, i would argue that's the worst deception. and you must choose between these two types of deception. but it's paramount that you tell the truth to your audience. that's what a journalist is supposed to do. >> host: how did you get started in this business? >> guest: lucky charms. i was in rutgers, which are rutgers university, state

university in new jersey, and those a lot of censorship on campus. so they serve lucky charms in the cafeteria. being an irish-american, to prove a point i said that the serial was racist against my irish heritage. i thought i would be laughed at, but the dean of one of these at rutgers took me very seriously and had a meeting and informing they would ban lucky charms cereal because it was racist against me. that was sort of the beginning of this sort of undercover investigative work which really showed these people for who they were, and caught them on video. sort of an artistic mission more than a political one. >> host: whenever in the mainstream media you read about project veritas, there is usually the line in selected edited video project veritas dot, dot, dot. >> guest: well, that's hyperbole. all journalism is edited,

rightfully so. i mean, words are arranged in to sentences. it's an absurd insinuation because they can never actually name the edit. it's just that it is edited. when i release the full rock tape it was that we don't know that you turned the recording device often on the four cups of the kind of engaged in conspiracy theories. and in court will relitigate the stuff that all falls apart. we've had multiple article iii federal judges say that nothing was edited out of context. you might wonder why that isn't covered more. well, our attorneys attended go to like wikipedia and get that put on there, wikipedia says something to the effect of legal documents are not reliable sources. so they say these things that we added and paste but they can never name and edit. feel a case where they may have a point was in 2009 when i went into these acorn offices wearing a a pimp coat.

i didn't wear the pimp coat into all the offices but i certainly president myself as a pimp. i said i wanted to create these brothels when is undercover. i see on my website, have doesn't recall i could require wearing a costume to be a pimp. if that's all they have on me, that i didn't wear a pimp costume 12 years ago, i mean, all journalist make mistakes but i think our track where it is unbelievable compared to the track record of the mistakes made and admitted by the likes of the "washington post," cnn and the "new york times." >> host: james o'keefe, has or ever been a moment in your career where you said i just can't do this again? i mean, this is really hard, this is really uncomfortable? >> guest: yes. the first chapter if you don't mind holding it up, first chapter of this book "american muckraker" which is a journalism textbook, it's about suffering. you might say how would you write the chapter in a

journalism book about such a theme like that? because i think there's a lot of trauma that has occurred in my life and in the lives of the people who work for me. whether you are being a whistleblower and you are violating your nondisclosure agreement, you are fired from your job. i was arrested in 2010 by the fbi, eventually exonerated from what they accuse me of. we were raided by the fbi in november. these are federal agents taking journalists work products, rising to an ominous sources in order to find out if these are committed kind. >> is a calm ties and things that shake the foundation of what it means featureless, what it means to be an american, and you lived through that. you are falsely accused, you get sued, you've got the most powerful people in the world pharmaceutical companies, federal governments, the president, the attorney general come after you and there are moments when you said i don't know if i can do this anymore. i talk about that in that book.

it's very personal story. but then you begin to realize there's a lot of people out there who believe in you and all they have is you, really. it's or anybody else? you begin to realize is more of us in our event in the sense that more people who believe in truth and transparency and believe in darkness and corruption. then you have these whistleblowers by come to you, and i say in the book, the hunter becomes the hunted. they are more afraid of us than we are afraid of them. people like eric cochran, people like the fbi agent, people like the google whistleblower, , cnn whistleblower, all these people, most recently we were interviewing an individual and government whose talk about child trafficking. we're trying to corroborate that. and the passion that you have for hitting the story exceeds whatever pain that is inflicted upon you. >> host: because of some the topics that you are addressing that you are ignored or edited,

ridiculed by the mainstream media? >> guest: i don't know if it's so much politics as it is power. and there is, as noam chomsky wrote about, , which have referd to an american muckraker, he wrote a book called manufacturing consent, 1987. there is a symbiotic relationship between people and power and the media. due to kind of a reciprocity of interest. for example, cnn, one of the main advertisers is pfizer pharmaceutical. the commercial break you actually hear it, it's become a cliché. brought to you by pfizer. rot to you by pfizer. we can take that for granted in the commercials but if you're literally paid by $8 billion corporation, came to investigate that corporation? of course not. we take this for granted growing up in america. we grow up seeing the media operate the way it does, but these are not right-wing arguments. noam chomsky is not a right winger. glenn greenwald is not a right-winger.

these are just honest things about the state of our media. in the 1970s and '80s journalists, newsmen were willing to sacrifice profit on the balance sheet and have a loss leader on the balance sheet to go do that investigative reporting. no more. now it's about the money and it's all about preserving the relationship that you have with the powers that be. that's not journalism under any accepted understanding of what journalism is. >> host: in "american muckraker" you spend a bit of time talking about saul alinsky and his influence but what is at? >> guest: i think saul alinsky had some smart things to say. from chicago. he wrote a book called rules for radicals and one of the things he talked about was make them live up to their own principles. he said that's the most important thing to do is to use their own rules and make them live up to them. i think that's another with saying that is exposing

hypocrisy. he also sucks that had give taking a subject and really focusing on it as opposed to lofty broad narratives are kind of think this can be applied to what i do. for example, i think focusing anecdotally on voter fraud for example, is a very hot button issue in the united states. some people say there is no voter fraud and others believe the whole election was stolen. i don't take a vision. i think there are instances of fraud. for example, in minnesota and texas someone was a arrested after we caught her on tape bragging about all the crimes that she was committing. that's a methodology which is to focus on the actual facts, not on these broad narratives which is what most people in media do. >> host: in the book you use a technique of referring to resolve as the muckraker, in the third person. why tragic because of one of this book to be more, this is my life's work. this book took me five years to

write. as 800 footnotes. in fact, it reads like a thesis paper. and i wanted, i want it to outlast me. i wanted to not be about me. i want it to be about principles. my first book breakthrough was about basically my 20s. i'm 38 years old. my incarceration, going to court, it was a very perverse person narrative and his book is more of a handbook, i would say a boy scout manual for people who want to follow in our footsteps. and of all the people to follow in her footsteps it is a whistleblower. there's a chapter in a book called whistleblowing. i quote daniel ellsberg, it's like you're being on the margins of society. it's like you are a spacewalking astronaut whose umbilical cord has been cut from the mothership. i want people to understand what it's like anything the most important chapter in the book is the first chapter, because at the psychological effects are

unbelievable. the number one question i get asked is, are you worried? are you afraid? i i say no. i try not to worry about the things i can't control. and i think fear is a thing that holds most people back in this country. i think the fbi raids remarkably passive project veritas because sources not trust us. they cope you must be for real. i wasn't sure about you guys but you must certainly be for real because the fed's are made in you. we had a number of sources us as a result of what the fed's did. >> host: where were you raised? >> guest: i'm from bergen county, new jersey. the northeastern part of the state. my parents, my mother is rochester, new york. my dad is from buffalo, new york. they moved to new jersey by the time i was born. project veritas is located in the suburbs of nukes either we're located in westchester county. about 45 minutes north of newark city. with headquarters in and with a

few dozen journalists roaming the country under cover. >> host: what was your lifelike from zero to 18? >> guest: i bite about that in my first book breakthrough. my father and grandfather were in construction and property maintenance, and i helped them up until my teenage years. i write about some of that story from the story of resilience of my life but i didn't really ever think is going be a journalist, but i did enjoy, watch local news in new york, fox five, nbc format, abc seven eyewitness news. i read the new times every day i'm 18, 19, i read the "usa today," star-ledger. i just read newspapers everyday for a year or two. i found, mike wallace once said this, and he said it best. i found things were not as they seem and rarely as a should be. i didn't know what to do with that sentiment. i did know what that meant to

me. was i going to be an actor? was i going to work in finance? was a going to work with my dad? mowing lawns, but i quickly, i want to do something about that. things were not portrayed accurately. so as a student at rutgers i became a columnist for the paper they are called -- the daily newspaper at rutgers university. i was let go from that job. because i voter column about how much money professors give to each political party, the ratio of democrats to republicans was 104 to one. they let me go so i said what i going to do now? i supply don't i create my own newspaper? so i did that. i had no idea what i was doing. most of the work was laid out design. i had to learn how to layout a newspaper, a magazine. i did that. i had a staff and it's called the centurion, and the rest is

history. >> host: in our few minutes remaining would ask you about two people you brought up. here in my notes i have listed a lot of the muckrakers that you talk about. you brought up daniel ellsberg and mike wallace. are the heroes to you? are they effective people in their fields? >> guest: i think some of the things they have done our heroic. i think mike wallace was an unbelievable questioner and he make people feel comfortable in his interviews, and i admire that. i think journalism is an activity, not just an identity, not just a protected class of priesthood. most people want journalism be an identity like a cartel. so i can admire the purchase of each of these different people. i can admire virtues of saul alinsky, why is o'keefe appreciating -- because there are virtues inherent in all these people. daniel ellsberg almost went to

jail, remember, as he went to the supreme court, the "washington post", "new york times" litigated this all the way to the supreme court. and i think whistleblowing can be heroic. it can also be illegal. at snowden can simultaneously be breaking a law but there's a place in the world for people like that. and without people like that, investigative journalists can't do their jobs. it's the bread and butter of what it means to be an american. that right, that right to report what someone tells you is being fundamentally, fundamentally it's in jeopardy right now. in our case with the fbi, they're trying to take that right away from us right here and right now. i had the aclu lawyers in my office last month telling me, and by the way, they are defending s.b. the aclu is writing to the judge trying to unseal the warrants that are against me. they said this is never happened before in american history, james o'keefe.

what's happening to you has never happened before to any journalist. now they're starting to point guns at us and take our notebooks. that's never happened before. so i do admire people like edwards don't. i admire julian assange. i admire mike wallace. i don't know what's happened. i don't know why the billion-dollar corporations are not doing the job. it's left scrappy, broke entrepreneurial enterprising people, but so be it. >> host: james o'keefe, project veritas and the author of this book, "american muckraker: rethinking journalism for the 21st century." we appreciate your time on booktv. >> guest: thank you. >> if you are enjoying booktv then sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to see the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussion, book festival and more. booktv, every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at

booktv.org. television . television for serious readers. weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 come from these television companies and more including midscale. ♪ -- midco. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> midco, along with these television companies, , supports c-span2 as a public service. >> so great to see you again. >> is great that you can. please,. >> we talk about your book american reboot