early this morning. thank you for pulling this off and i will see you on axios.com. >> a live picture of the conservative political action conference. at around 4:00, devin nunes is expected to speak. we will give you his remarks here live on c-span. c-span, live coverage of the gun owners association winter meeting in washington, d.c. we will share their last session weather expected to talk about the up your crisis. while we wait for congressman nuñez to take the stage, here is a portion of today's washington journal. joining us now is james o'keefe, the founder and president of project veritas,

and the author of "american ."avda: my fight for truth thanks for joining us today. guest: thinks for having me back. host: what is pravda? guest: "pravda" was the russian word for truth. believect veritas, we the american people do not necessarily know that everything like to. in the soviet union, they know they are being lied to. what we are trying to do is expose waste, fraud, and abuse all of the country with one of the greatest sources of this that is the and media itself, and that takes us to the mainstream media, big tech companies like facebook, pressr,, and the american

has more power than all three branches of government, so they need to behold to account just like any other organization should be held to account. host: what is your definition of a journalist? guest: i think that journalism to be so muchrued an identity and less so on activity. even in oklahoma city, the percentage of that amazing photograph of a firefighter baby in his arms, he wanted. right is. the bullet-- he won surprise. the was not -- the pulitzer prize. he was not a photojournalist. for lack of a better word, the this sort ofated cartel where they are only allowed to tell stories. a lot of it is not just political. it is economic. major media corporations are unable or unwilling to go places that an intrepid citizen can go,

as we document in the 2016 election, as we are reporting, in many ways, we were the only ones who could have gone and done it, and many of these major organizations were afraid, for various reasons, to do things we were doing. asit is as much an activity it is a protected identity. host: you consider yourself a journalist. guest: yes. institute haster described you as a conservative activist organization. do you agree with that characterization? guest: no. i do not. host: why not? fruitsif you look at our of our work, we call it veritas, or cinéma verité, which is the latin word for truth. we capture people in their own words. like in the twitter investigation, twitter engine ear engineers on tape talking at

shadowing online. words, it is to paint a portrait. we do not write words -- we capture other people in their own words. that is the closest thing to journalism. i think journalism is the first draft of history, as has been said. videos,ook at our they are capturing a series of events -- not our words, their words. they may say we deceptively edited or selectively edit the footage, and i say name the edit. name the actual place where we engage in any form of selective editing. if you look at the actual work itself and what we do, taking on powerful people and the result of our work, congressional defining some of resignations, reactions, by any measure, we are journalists. i want to remind our viewers that we are joined by james o'keefe, the founder and president of project veritas, and also author of "america "american pravda: my fight

for truth in the era of fake news." (202)icans can call guest 748-8001, democrats (202) 748-8000, and independents (202) 748-8002. i want to talk about the videos you shoot. acorn caretdeo on here is the decision between a project veritas reporter and an -- whilement reporter we use deception to gain access, we never to see the audience. setitional journalists who the record weather subject tells them may not deceive the deceive but they often their audience. when they tilt questions to their subject to produce a desired result, the government deceive their audience." i am glad you highlighted

that portion of the book. the problem with modern journalism is that in many ways, the most important ar paramount measure of journalism is to tell the truth of the american people. yes, we do go undercover, we do utilize deception to get to the source or the target. you just report what your source tells you, if you blindly pass along unsourced information, like when busey asks twitter? "do you shadow twitter buzz feed asks -- do you shadow feed? they say they don't. in the 20th century, wallace, upton sinclair, or william went undercover as a generator janitor in a chicago hospital, all these people use

deception. the reason they do that is because they only the most important thing is to tell the most important thing is to tell the truth to the masses. you have to question what you are told. you have to report off the record conversations. it has been done before, just never in medicinal agent of an age where media is so consolidated. ok, brian is on the line from michigan. you are on the line with james o'keefe. caller: thanks, james. quite an interesting conversation. i am going to talk to the white house press corps in particular. i have done my own story on cnn, and i can to you whether it is jim acosta, tapper, dana bash, you can go on and on and on, none of them have a degree in

print journalism. ar down onto be that, they all have -- anderson cooper especially -- they all have alliances with the democratic party, but they do not announce that to us. is in the white house press corps specifically, not what you are doing, sir, is that they should have a degree in french journalism and let the conflict go from that, the white house press corps, with a degree in print journalism, with their own broadcast news is that they get it right, so another words, they police themselves. host: i want to get james a chance to respond to that idea. guest: should they have a degree in journalism? maybe they should not. i do not have a degree in journalism. i just sort of went out and did

it and taught myself so i can tell stories. schoolsthat journalism have lost their way, and i think it goes back to water become a my history of reading, it goes back journalists started to pursue power instead of the truth. they view this as a means to gain power and gain interest. if you look at the old mucky muck muckrakers, that is not what journalism was about. it was about telling stories to administer reforms of institutions, like mental a silence, like schools, and suddenly it became every day, you were trying to get a new watergate. the perversion happened. i think it is happening in journalism school, so i would actually encourage people instead of going to journalism school, go out and do the work. host: how is project veritas funded? cest: we are a charity, a 503 organization.

we expose waste, fraud, and abuse in different organizations. we are not for sale. we are crowd source funded, so nobody has any editorial influence over what we do or what we choose to do. host: jaclyn is on our democratic line from philadelphia. good morning. caller: good morning. i was reading some articles about mr. o'keefe and how he, you know, attempts to get people to, you know, tell what he thinks is the truth, but they said they bribe him with --ohol, you know, engage asks if they are antiabortion activists, i mean, it is not true, what he does. it is just a bunch of crap. host: i want to let you respond to that. guest: what we do is true, and every time we report something, not only is it true, but it is

often these subjects have admitted that they said what they said. they have admitted that they make the mistakes, and they keep resigning. why would they keep resigning is what we report is not sure? i would happily go to court and testify that what we report is factually correct, as would many of the subjects that we covertly film. nowcorker is suing us right not because he did not say what he said. because we are affecting the organization because of what you said. i think -- i did not make the statement. he made a statement. he was the head of the nazi partners, hired by hillary clinton and the dnc to do various things, and one of the major investigations was on the election and how they were they did violence on the ground here he is suing us for more than $1 million. but in none of these cases do they actually confessed that they did not say these things.

none of them actually pointed out to me where the stuff was edited. host: if you can recall another story that involves project veritas during the alabama u.s. senatorial race when project veritas told the "washington post" a story that a person who claimed had been impregnated by a candidate for more was coming forward, explain what happened there and your reaction to the response to the. guest: yes, we pretended to be a source to meet with the "washington post" in order to draw them out to an honest conversation. we had done stories on cnn where the russia story was all bs, is what the guy said, his words, not mine. we get a story on the "new york times" where nick dudek said they were not deceptive. rich comey, the executive

editor, respondent. we were doing stories on the media, and we decided to do the "washington post. we could capture a few national security advisers who said" he was amazed to work at a place with an op-ed page, which is what he characterized as extreme and out of touch of that spirit in the course of this investigation, we pretended to be a lot of different things. most of the time, you do not hear about the aliases we use. it is not a controversy if put in thisroper context or case, we posed a vindictive in order to have a meeting. it was only to get a meeting. we never intended to plant a fake story. that was never our intention. but it was misconstrued, and people assigned false motives to us about what we were trying to do. again, the context is, we pose as telephone workers, terrorists, temps, drug dealer, often times to obtain the meeting. in the terms of the newspaper, to expose their corruption, the

only meeting was to pose as a fitting the -- as a rape victim. host: our next call is from des moines, iowa. caller: hello, mr. o'keefe. i love your work. i'm used to seeing you on" wars and other outlets. question is -- i know google is coming after conservatives, libertarians. i want to hear your take on that. i know they're going after mr. jones lately as well as fox news other mainstream media outlets. i will respond. keep up the good work, man. guest: thank you. i do not think they will ever break up google. i think reforms happen when you build a sort and moral consensus around issues. best way to institute reform is through exposure and

education. i think if people had any idea what is actually happening in places like the irs, or maybe even the doj, or silicon valley titans, when people start to see these things -- and it is not just words. i think images transfix in the way that words do not. the only way to get the video is to go undercover. i cannot figure out any other way. twitter, hundreds of engineers read your private text messages or direct messages. on ther righteous people right and the left, probably more so on the left. panel with james damore at cpac yesterday, and when he is fired for writing a memo about intellectual diversity, i think it raises people's eyebrows. the solution to the problem is not to lobby for solution security solutions to the problem is to expose what is happening. and the solution is sort of manifest.