On Wednesday, conservative activist and controversial video sting artist James O’Keefe made an appearance in Cannes during the Film Festival with a new, secretly recorded 20-minute video that he said exposes the hypocrisy of two environmentalist documentarians and two Hollywood actors. At the end of the clip, after Josh and Rebecca Tickell, Mariel Hemingway, and Ed Begley Jr. appear to have unwittingly agreed to accept financing for an anti-fracking film from Middle East oil interests, O’Keefe claims he’s caught other allegedly altruistic actors and filmmakers in his trap, teasing a clip of a phone conversation with filmmaker Josh Fox.
But this time, O’Keefe wasn’t the only one making secret recordings. Left more than a little suspicious by years of vicious—and often surreptitious—attacks from the natural gas industry and its supporters following the premiere of his 2010 Oscar-nominated anti-fracking documentary, Gasland, and its 2012 sequel, Gasland II, Fox taped his interaction with one of O’Keefe’s minions and documented the elaborate lengths they went to entrap him.
Well considering his entire shtick, the whole of his journalistic repertoire consists in recording people without their knowledge (or consent) before some creative editing, I would venture the guess that it’s probably legal to do so wherever he does it.
Yes, he’s an idiot but no bigger an idiot than the preening, pontificating followers of Thespis he’s going after. That bunch have added more hot air to the atmosphere than a dozen medium-sized industrial nations. O’Keefe and his actor targets richly deserve each other.
I’m sorry, serious about what? That O’Keefe is an idiot? That many actors, specifically those who preach to us, are idiots? That said actors generate a lot of hot air? (You do realize that’s a trope, right?)
My confusion lies in the comparison of activists making a documentary who have not done anything explicitly wrong to a fraudulent charlatan who lied very clearly and explicitly about them by pestering them until they gave in to meeting with him (through a fake contact), then found a snippet that they said and took it out of context to the point where a 10-minute call where the primary message was “We cannot take the money unless we know who is offering it” was turned into “Yeah, we want that money”.
O’Keefe is scum. Saying they “deserve each other” is like saying that a petty thief deserves prison rape that gives him AIDS and a ruptured colon.
The proportion of actors who are idiots is likely not much different than the proportion of people generally who are idiots. And being an idiot isn’t by itself a moral failing.
Other than that, I don’t see how a person who has a degree of attention from the public who chooses to draw attention to some real problem is comparable to a fraudster like O’Keefe.
Since when are documentary film-makers thespians? As for O’Keefe, is he a murderer, a rapist, a pedophile? These people are scum. O’Keefe is a dumb journalist who uses dirty tricks to get his ‘stories’ and whose politics you appear to dislike. He’s a tosser, as is the one-note ecofanatic Ed Begley Jr. Neither are scum. And, yes, they do deserve each other’s company, if only to give the rest of us a fucking break.
I’m sure that’s true but as we don’t tend to see non-actors constantly droning on from the red carpet about their pet cause of the week it’s sometimes difficult to remember.
And I said it was … where?
On it’s own it isn’t. But when it’s accompanied by a degree of hypocrisy that would disturb even Molière’s Tartuffe the comparison is spot on. Do I need an actor with an opulent lifestyle and an energy consumption worthy of Galactus telling me that the Earth is in danger from human excesses? I don’t think so.
Do they think their status as actors qualifies them to comment on public and political affairs? Probably no more so than anyone else in non-political fields thinks they are so qualified. What actors and celebs in general think is that people will listen to them. And they’re right. If millions of people who will never meet you are going to take an interest in your sex life, they will also take an interest in your politics. And, it’s all mostly harmless, isn’t it?
This is more than just dirty tricks journalism. O’Keefe outright lied about what happened and would still be lying about what happened if Fox hadn’t also taped the conversation.
Actually, for all I know, he is still lying about it, I haven’t seen a statement from him since this broke. I really can’t see how this is defensible.
I’m on the record of criticising them, and also on the record of criticising O’Keeffe, by simple experience I have to report that your equivalence compass is broken here.
It is really ridiculous to use such a wide brush with all the ones that are telling us that we are in danger, and specially when there is very little to support that that is the case here. And that angle of attack is really a logical fallacy. What is clear to me is that O’Keefe does not care where the truth lies, and the right wing media encourages those efforts. The evidence that O’Keeffe is lying to the right wing is legion.
The evidence is already here that the Right wing media does not care and continues to still use him, I will always think that for all the talk of the right of accusing others of being sheep the evidence is that they never seem to complain when their sources continue to mislead them, as long as they report their continuously to be fed wrong bias.
I’m actually coming to the conclusion that mislead is the wrong term here. Mislead indicates that right wing media consumers believe what they do because the they have been lied to and just don’t know if or haven’t done due diligence to learn the truth. In fact, right wing media consumers want to be lied to, they thrive on it. Given the choice between a factual report and one that supports their delusions they will take the delusions every time. At this point its the consumers that are doing the leading not the media.
Your assessment of Mr. O’Keefe and what he does are at odds with reality. He’s not a journalist at all, for one.
Why are you defending a man who’s modus operandi is to slander and denigrate innocent people in an attempt to ruin their professional and personal reputations because he doesn’t like their politics?
If I tried to ruin your reputation and standing in the community with lies, including edited versions of things you said, would you honor me or try to stop me?
They can do that?!