An even bigger issue, however, has been the way in which O’Keefe has edited some of his videos.
In 2009, he and an associate posed as a pimp and prostitute to infiltrate ACORN, a community social-services agency. The resulting video showed ACORN members offering the pair advice on how to set up a brothel. It also showed outtakes of O’Keefe and his partner dressed in the flamboyant attire of street hustlers, suggesting they had appeared that way when they spoke to the officials. In fact, the footage of the pair in costume was spliced into the video after the ACORN meetings, a fact the video didn’t mention.
Congress subsequently defunded ACORN, leading to its demise. O’Keefe was later sued by one of his subjects, who claimed his privacy had been invaded by the surreptitious filming; O’Keefe settled the matter for $100,000, admitting no guilt.
O’Keefe’s 2011 sting of NPR executives was fraught with discrepancies between what one of the executives said and how his comments were framed in the video. Then-NPR executive Ron Schiller was quoted in the video as saying that tea party activists were “seriously racist people.” But the raw footage of the encounter showed that Schiller was quoting two Republicans who viewed the activists that way, not that he held such views.