james o'keefe and your new book american james, and your new book america muckraker, rethinking journalism for the 24 century, you write that there is an indecently close and personal and professional relationship between reporters and the people they are supposed to cover. is that a bad thing? >> yes there's always been

attention in journalism between what i call in this book access and autonomy. there's always attention there. some people need to get really close to the sources. sometimes you need to aggressively and adversarially investigate the sources. you have to strike the balance perfectly, these days and journalism, it's become two out of balance. people have become, they've delivered on a platter with the sources and the government want. what the government wants to be able to see. they are acting as delivery people for those sources. rather than being adversarial and skeptical. you don't want to be too adversarial. that can engender biases of their own. you have to strike the balance. there is no more balance. the national security -- act as a serviceman for the people in the administrative state. >> i want to ask you about the subtitle of the book. we sinking journalism for the 21st century. how does that fit with being a

macgregor? you referred to yourself as a muckraker. in the earliest 20th century and the mid 20th century, investigative reporting was, you had the chicago sometimes doing these investigations. they are posing as bartenders. most famously, upton sinclair wrote the jungle. he had an ideology. he was a valid socialist. he had an agenda. there was a willingness to go there and speak aggressively toward the powers that be. upton sinclair was pillared by the journalist what he did. you don't see that anymore. on cable news, i won six of their and talks about what they think. none of these journalists on cables break big stories. most of the stories are broken and people like me. washington, for example, the washington post won a pulitzer

for investigating me. not corruption and the government. you need to have the spirit of investigative reporting. citizens need to do it. you have a renaissance in go back to what was done decades ago. now does not happen anymore. mostly due to what i talk about in the book. economics. consolidation of media. commercial imperative. a lot of news organizations have slashed their budgets. abc news recently slashed their investigative -- it has become a commercial enterprise. not a journalism one. that is why we are a philanthropic nonprofit organization. we don't have advertisers no one tells us what to do. mr. o'keefe, what is the goal of project veritas howdy? pick the subjects. >> the subjects pick us. our sources find. us and many ways that any or journalist would find there is. the way that edward snowden found greenwald. i don't think that glenn greenwald knew that he was

going to find a contract for the nsa. that contractor found him. and then paying tim. much is the case of project veritas. the whistleblower's finest. for example, this year, an fbi agent found me after the fbi raided my home. that fbi agent came to us with internal restricted documents from within the fbi's computer systems. they were calling us news media. it is a very big deal. the case hinges on whether we are news media. the people tend to find journalists that they can trust. these days, most sources don't really trust any journalist at all. most people don't trust media. we don't really pick our subjects. our subjects find us. >> how many times have you been sued? or jailed they are indicted. >> in this exhibit hall, my attorneys are standing about five feet away from me. i know that they're probably laughing. i don't know exactly how many, a couple dozen pieces of

litigation over the last ten years. we have never lost a case. we don't lose because we're in the right and we don't give up. if you're in the right and you don't ever settle, you usually win in a court of law. in some cases you have to appeal, most recently, we end up going an offense against the new york times for defamation. we got past the motion dismiss. the case will enter discovery. in the beginning of my -- there was the opportunity to settle the case. i eventually said, i'm not selling any cases. we found out in the discovery process of lawsuit, defamation lawsuit, i've been sued for breach of fiduciary duty, trespassing, the sorts of things. the people who sued me never wanted to be deposed themselves. they never wanted the discovery of their own operations. we are fairly ethical at very toss. we don't break any laws. we don't do a thing improper. the people over there usually aren't as ethical. they found out, well, if i suit

james o'keefe, i will have to depose. they stop suing me. and now we see them. >> is it okay to deceive a subject when you're investigating? there's >> a chap in the book called deception. your question is an interesting one. it's a question of relative deception. either you deceive your subject that you're investigating to tell the truth to your audience, or you don't deceive your subject. and you tell untruths to your audience. in other words, if you just take what your subject is saying at face value, you will be disseminating falsehoods to millions of people. so, there is an emphasis named lewis hodges who argues that piece is paper, you have a moral imperative to deceive your subject if your mission is to tell the truth to the audience. this is written about a book called a journalist in the murder. it's a famous book in the 90s. janet malcolm, a legendary

journalist, wrote that a journalist always deceives their subject. it is a confidence game that you must play. if your intention is to investigate reporting. if your intention is to read off teleprompters and to deliver and to play stenographer and to tell the public what the two star general lance, well, i would argue that's the worst deception. you must choose between these two types of quote unquote deception. it is paramount that you tell the truth to your audience. that is what a journalist supposed to do. >> how did you get started this business? >> lucky charm. i was in rockers, i want to records university, a state university in georgia. there is a lot of censorship on campus. they served lucky charms in the cafeteria. being an irish american, to prove a point, i said that the serial it was racist against my irish heritage. i thought that i would be laughed at. the dean, one of the deans at

rockers, took me very seriously. they had a meeting. and for me they would ban lucky charm cereal because it was racist against me. that was the beginning of this undercover investigative work which really showed these people for who they were and caught them on video. it's an artistic mission more than a political one. >> whenever the mainstream media you read about project veritas, there is usually the line, in selected edited video, project veritas dot dot dot. >> that is a hyperbole, all journalism is edited and. rightfully so ma wears our range into sentences. it's an absurd situation. they can never name the at it. it is that it's edited. and then i reached the full raw tape, they say, we did not know

that you were turned the recording device often on. they are engaged in conspiracy theories. in court, when we litigate the stuff, it all falls apart. we've had multiple judges say that nothing was edited out of context. you might wonder why that is not covered more. our attorneys attempted to go to wikipedia for example and get that put on their. wikipedia said something to the fact of, legal documents are not reliable sources. we say the thing that they edit tapes. the only case where they might have a point, and 2000 in line, when i went into these acorn offices wearing a pimp coat. i did not wear the pimp coat into all the offices. i certainly presented myself as a pimp. i said i wanted to create these brothels when i was undercover. i say on my website, protocol does not require wearing a costume to be a pimp. if that's all they have on me,

the night warp him cost him 12 years ago, all journalist make mistakes. i think our track record is unbelievable. compared to the track record of the mistakes made and admitted by the likes of the washington post, cnn, new york times. >> james o'keefe, has there ever been a moment in your career where you said, i just can't do this again. i mean, this is really hard. >> yes. >> this is really uncomfortable. >> the first chapter of this, if you don't holding it up, the first chapter of this book, american muckraker, a journalism textbook. it's about suffering. you might say, how would you write a 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 the lives of the people that work for me. whether you're being a whistleblower and you're violating your nondisclosure the agreement.

fire from a job. i was arrested in 2010 by the fbi. eventually exonerated from what they accuse me of. we are rated by the fbi in november. these are federal agents taking journalists work product and rifling through anonymous sources in order to find out if you've committed crimes. these are traumatizing things. they shake the foundation of what it means to be a journalist and what needs to be an american. you lived through that. your falsely accuse, you get sued. you've got the most powerful people in the world, pharmaceutical contrary come, -- the attorney general coming after you. there are moments when you say i don't like it is anymore. i talk about that this book. it's personal story. >> then you begin to realize there's a lot of people out there who believe in you. all they have as you, really. is anyone else? you've been to realize there's more of us than there are them in the sense that there's more people that believe in truth and transparency they believe

in darkness and corruption. then you have the whistleblowers that come to you. i say in the book, the hunter becomes landed. they are more afraid of us than we are of them. people like the fbi agent, eric cochrane, the google whistleblower, the cnn whistleblower, all these people most recently were interviewing an individual in the government who was talking about child trafficking. trying to cooperate that. the passion that you have for getting the story exceeds whatever pain that is inflicted upon you. >> do you think because of some of the topics that you are addressing that you are ignored or edited ridiculed by the mainstream media? >> i don't know if it's so much politics as it is power. there is, as known chunky wrote about, which i refer to, american moderator, he wrote a book called manufacturing consent in 1987.

there is a symbiotic relationship between people in power and the media. due to a reciprocity of interest. one of the main advertisers is fire pfizer. in the commercial break you here. if you chemically jay. brought to you by pfizer. but she by pfizer. we've got we kind of take that for granted. if you are paid by a billion dollar corporation, can you 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. these are not right-wing arguments. no i'm tom ski is not a right-winger. glenn greenwald is not a right-winger. these are honest things about the state of our media. in the 1970s and 80s, journalists, news men were willing to sacrifice profits on their balance sheet. a lost leader on their balance sheet to do the best to get

reporting. no more. now it's all about the money. it's all about preserving the relationship you have with the powers that be. that's not journalism under any accepted understanding of what journalism is. >> in american muckraker, you spend a bit of time talking about solid ski and his influence. >> i think sol lynn ski had interesting things to say. he was from chicago, he wrote a book for it rules for radicals. one of the things he talked about, make them live up to their own principles. he said that's the most important thing to do. to use their own rules and make them live up to them. i think that's another way of saying that is exposing hypocrisy. i think he also talked about the idea of picking a subject and really focusing on it as opposed to lofty and broad narratives. i think this could be applied to what i do. for example, i think focusing anecdotally on voter fraud, four, example it's a very hot button issue in the night

states. some people say there's no voter fraud. so you believe the whole election was stolen. i don't take a position. i think there are instances of fraud. for example, in minnesota, texas, -- after we caught her on tape bragging about all the crimes that she was committing. i think that's an alinsky methodology. to focus on the actual facts. not on these broad narratives. which is what most people in media do. >> in the book, he is a technique of referring to yourself as the mock rake or. why? >> i wanted the book to be more, this is my life's work. this book took me five years to write. it has 800 footnotes. in fact, it reads like a thesis paper. i wanted to outlast me. i want to not be about me. i want to be about principles. my first book breakthrough was about basically my twenties. i'm 38 years old.

my incarceration, going to court, it was a very first person narrative. this book is more of a handbook. i would say it's a boy scout manual for people who want to follow in our footsteps. of all the people to follow in our footsteps, it is the whistleblower. there's a chapter in the book called whistleblower. i quote daniel ellsberg. i say it's like, you're on the margins of society. your spacewalking astronaut. the umbilical cord has been cut from the mothership. i want people to understand what it's like. i think the most important chapter in the book is the first chapter. i think the psychological effects are unbelievable. the number one question i get asked, aren't you worried? aren't you afraid? i say, no. i try not to worry about the things that they can control. fear is the thing that hold people back in this country. and at the fbi raid has helped

project veritas. subject sources trust us. they go, well, you must be for real. i was not sure what you guys. you must certainly be for real now. if the feds a rating. we've had a number of sources come to us as a result of what the feds did. >> james o'keefe, where were you raised? >> i'm from bergen county, new jersey. the northeastern part of the state. my parents, my mother's from rochester. my dad is from buffalo, new york. they moved to new jersey about the time i was born. project veritas is located in the suburbs of new york city. about 45 north of new york city. we have headquarters there. we have a few dozen journalist running the country undercover. >> what was your life like from zero to 18. >> i wrote about that my first book breakthrough. my father and grandfather were in construction and property maintenance. i helped them up until my teenage years. and then i write about some of

that story. and the story of resilience in my life. i did not really everything is gonna be a journalist. i did enjoy -- i watch local news in new york. nbc four, abc seven. i read the new york times every day. 18 years old. 19 years old. i read the usa today. i just read newspapers every day for a year or two. mike was one said this. he said it best. i found things were not as they seemed. rarely as they should be. i did not know what to do with the sentiment. i did not know what it meant to me. was i going to be an actor? was i going to work and finance? was i going to work with my dad mowing lawns? and i quickly wanted to do something about that. things just weren't portrayed accurately. as a student at rogers, i

became a columnist for the paper called the target. it is the daily newspaper at rutger's. i was like oh from that job. because i wrote a column about how much money professors give to each political party. the ratio of democrats to republicans was 141. they let me go. i said, what am i going to do now? i said, while that great my newspaper. i did that. i had no idea what is doing. most of the work was layout and design. i had to learn how to lay out a newspaper, a magazine. i did that. i had a staff. it is called the centurion. the rest is history. look and a few minutes remaining, i want to ask you about two people you have brought up. here in my notes i've listed a lot of the muckraker's that you talked about. you brought up daniel ellsberg and mike wallace. are the heroes to?

you are they affected people in the field? i think some of the things they've done our heroic. i think malik wallace was an unbelievable question or. he made people feel comfortable in his interviews. i admire that. i think journalism is an activity. not just an identity. not just a protective class a priesthood. most people want journalism to be an identity. like a cartel. i can at meyer virtues from each of these different people. i can admire virtues of small alinsky, that -- why is o'keefe appreciating alinsky. there are vouchers inherent and all these people. daniel ellsberg almost to jail. they went to the supreme court. the washington post, the new york times, litigated this all the way up to the supreme court. i think whistleblowing can be heroic. you can also be illegal. at snowden can simultaneously be breaking a law, there is a

place in the world for people like that. without people like that, investigate journalists cannot do their jobs. it is 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 is in jeopardy right now. in our case with the fbi. they are trying to take that right away from us. right here, right now. at the aclu, lawyers in my office last month telling me -- by the way they, are defending us. the aclu is writing to the judge trying to unseal the warrants that are against me. they said this is never happened for an american history, james o'keefe. what's happening to you as never happened before. to any journalist. now they're starting to pointed guns at us. and take our reporters notebooks. that's never happened before. i do admire people like at snowden. i admire julian assange, i admire mike wallace. i don't know what is happening.

i don't know why the billion dollar corporations are doing the job. it's left to scrappy and broke entrepreneurial enterprising people. so be it. >> james o'keefe, project veritas, the author of this book. american macgregor. we thinking journalism for the 21st century. we appreciate your time on book tv. >> thank you.

in 2000, the issue of election integrity, the administration of our elections stopped being so much a local and state issue, and became a national issue with the bush v. gore race. americans realize that our sloppy, that word, and equated election systems in many states could really impact national policy. the presidential race was decided by just 537 votes. there was a coming together by both parties that we had to improve our election systems. that resulted in the help

america vote act of 2002. there was complete bipartisan. passed by a democratic senate and signed into law by republican president. it's lead co-sponsor senator chris todd a senator from connecticut said the purpose of this bill is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat we are americans and we can do both at the same time. the first few years after that election integrity was still into a largest and a bipartisan issue. in 2008, the supreme court by a vote of 6 to 3 upheld the constitutionality of indiana's voter i.d. law. the opinion was written by the court's most liberal member at the time john paul stevens who recounted a long history of voter fraud and voter irregularities and voter sloppiness in america. said the very integrity of our elections was at stake if people he, cited several polls which showed cynicism about the

accuracy and completeness of the vote count. he said to, the extent that public cynicism grows about the reliability of our elections. you're going to see voter turnout go down. we are going to see less public confidence in our elections. ultimately, less legitimacy in our government and the government officials who serve us. good evening. welcome to the midtown scholar bookstore. it is an honor to welcome you to th good evening, everyone. welcome to the midtown scholar bookstore. my name is alex. it is an honor to welcome you to this evening's authored program. with dan pfeiffer and deray mckesson. i've a few housekeeping notes. our speakers will keep their masks off during the talk. we please ask you continue to keep your mask on throughout the evening. to this event is being recorded by c-span. a couple notes, we please ask that you turn off yourself phone ringers. and refrain from using

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