The mainstream media really doesn’t like James O’Keefe. When Salon runs a story alleging that he manned a literature table at a conference of white supremacists, that’s just too good to check. That last thing you want to do is look carefully into whether he really was manning a literature table there, or whether the event in question really was a conference of white supremacists. You might lose a perfectly good attack story if you checked the facts.
The answer, incidentally, seems to be no on both counts. I wasn’t going to bother to report this incident when it was just a Salon story picked up by the Village Voice. (In the Village Voice, O’Keefe had actually morphed into an organizer of the event.) But now the story is appearing in the supposedly respectable press, like the Newark Star-Ledger. Retracto is on the case.
Internet Scofflaw 