James O’Keefe Burns His Own Straw Man in a New Video
James O’Keefe’s lastest undercover investigation has blown the lid off the rampant liberalism at New York University: journalism professors Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen have been outed as opinionated men. In what appears to be an NYU classroom, one of O’Keefe’s collaborators films Shirky (that’s O’Keefe’s misspelling of his name above), billed as a consultant to The New York Times, giving a talk (probably to NYU students) about everything from The Times’s coverage of Obama’s election and Occupy Wall Street to the idea that journalists are members of the Manhattan elite. The video attempts to draw attention to a pair of quotes: Shirky referring to those in the room as “chardonnay-swilling news junkies” and Rosen saying, “We are the one percent,” in reference to access to newspapers. With shots of Columbia Journalism School and The Times building, O’Keefe introduces the video as “part two of our series: To Catch a Journalist.”
Only problem is: neither Shirky nor Rosen are really journalists, even if they have many opinions about journalism. They’re both faculty members at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, but neither of them work for a newspaper. Shirky and Rosen both maintain blogs and speak at conferences, but they don’t get paid to report stories. Sometimes Rosen’s posts, which tend to focus on news analysis and opinion, appear at The Huffington Post, but in the unpaid blogger section. O’Keefe accuses both of airing their biases in the undercover video, but many would argue that being upfront about biases is something to be admired in academia. Rosen, for one, has long argued that the media should be more transparent about bias, not to adopt disingenuously what he calls “the view from nowhere.”