Unwilling Confessions

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Growing up, my mother had a small quote framed over her desk:

I was warned, but I did not listen. Earlier this year I spent a week of my one and only life watching ten years’ worth of Project Veritas videos on double speed to prepare for an assignment, and now it’s too late. I am addicted. Obsessed. The videos drop, I watch. Pavlov’s dog needs therapy.

About a week ago, Project Veritas released two videos that feature undercover footage of Matthew Rosenberg, a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist for the New York Times, in casual conversation with someone in at least two restaurants. This someone turned out to be working undercover for Project Veritas, and now everyone has the opportunity to hear what Rosenberg thought nobody wanted to hear.

I am making my addiction your problem because this time, it’s important. The Matthew Rosenberg videos are twelve minutes and thirty five seconds of pure, uncut dystopia. They are a kaleidoscope of horrors, a view into the modern world no one wants and everyone needs. The real problem with Project Veritas is that it shows things entirely too clearly, though not always the things they intend to show. Stare into the abyss long enough and you’ll start to see them too.

When writing about Project Veritas, a lot of people get lost enroute to the real point, so let’s take care of those diversions here and now.

I’m not going to get into some big discussion of whether what Project Veritas is journalism because I don’t care. At all. As far as I can tell, the only people on this planet who do care are other journalists, who have a vested interest in imbuing that title with purity and mysticism. Project Veritas tells stories they think are important with curated facts they think are relevant. I don’t see any real point in acting like what they do is fundamentally different from what I do, even though we make radically different choices about both stories and relevant facts. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I don’t care. Let the academics sort it out.

Speaking of curated relevant facts, I’m not going to get deep into whether these videos are deceptively edited either. If it is, somebody did a very good job. The quotes are fairly straightforward. They seem to be continuous blocks of interaction and not a mashup of disparate sentences. I am hard-pressed to imagine how context would significantly change the meaning of any of it. Ultimately, however, I am unlikely to ever find out definitively if this video was deceptively edited or not. So rather than use the unknowable as a copout, I’m going to focus on what I can know: the finished product, and what it says about the world we live in.

I will  get into the tactics used to obtain these recordings in a very big way, but not today. That’s right, this is a two-part affair. If you have a sweet tooth, don’t worry: we’ll talk about honeypots next week.

Journalism

The Matthew Rosenberg videos consist of twelve and a half minutes of footage compiled from what O’Keefe describes as "multiple meetings with one of our undercover journalists." The editors at Project Veritas created these videos from hours of footage, which means everything in these videos is there because someone felt it was important.

Project Veritas and I agree that the section I quoted at the beginning is important. Let’s look at it again:

Nor is this segment a one-off. The video also shows Rosenberg declaring that January 6th was not scary and making fun of other reporters inside the Capitol building who claimed trauma afterwards (though he admits it was scarier on the inside). 

What makes these takes disturbing and not merely thought-provoking is the part where Rosenberg explains he’s been tasked with a retrospective on January 6th. The finished product, titled “The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot,” remains true to Rosenberg’s recorded assessment of the “lunatics on the Right,” but also directly contradicts his own assertions that the day was not as awful as the left often make it out to be. 

And why would it be any other way? Rosenberg wasn’t lying when he said no one wants to hear his barstool take. He tells his dinner companion he brought these points up at a meeting, then that nobody wanted to hear them. The man has one of the few decent journalism jobs left in America and wanted to keep it, so he did what his editor wanted. Of course he did. Do you have any idea how goddamn hard it is to make it in this field right now? It’s the gig economy, baby, and most of us are freelancers: mercenaries of the writing world. No benefits, no unemployment, no safety net. The New York Times gives Rosenberg prestige, a steady paycheck, and a budget for investigative journalism. You don’t even want to know what I’d do to get that. What he does is toe the line and keep the bitching in the bar. 

This isn’t a matter of a rotten individual but of a rotten system. The discrepancy between Rosenberg’s private words and public writing illustrates the crisis of information ravaging our society. What does it mean for journalism when most journalists have to bleed themselves dry just to make enough money to live? When people respond to ambitions of becoming a writer the way they would to hopes of becoming an NBA star? When the only way to achieve real success is by selling your services to someone with an agenda of their own, whether advertisers or high-powered donors?

No one is talking about this aspect of the video, maybe becasue it would involve uncomfortable introspection for the journalists writing about it. Right-wing outlets loved the description of January 6th as not a big deal, and of course the  hypocrisy of Rosenberg’s article in light of these comments had pundits calling the Viagra hotline for days. But deeper implications? Come on. We’re on deadline. Give the public what they want and move onto the next thing.

The Police State

Late in the first video, Rosenberg tells his unseen dinner companion that the New York Times has contacts within the FBI and other government agencies, which they use as anonymous sources. The journalist also reveals that it is basically impossible to report on these agencies without connections. 

Did anyone think the world worked some other way?

If Project Veritas wanted to be consistent, they should approve of the New York Times publishing stories made possible by FBI insiders, such as the ones about a strong FBI presence at the January 6th insurrection. After all, Project Veritas is all about whistleblowers these days. “Be Brave. Do Something.” The New York Times is doing something. Right?

Instead, the group chose to publish footage that explains how the New York Times helps whistleblowers get around polygraph tests. This decision would seem in direct contradiction to the group’s stated desire for transparency and freedom of information, but what do I know? I'm just some mercenary.

Speaking for us mercenaries, though: what does it mean when only large, well-established outlets can report on organizations like the FBI? As discussed mere moments ago, the state of journalism as a career means outlets hold tremendous power over reporters and what they report. One imagines they exert influence over coverage of three-letter agencies as well.

(Edit: FOIAs do exist, but institutions that can classify documents can also classify documents to get around FOIAs)

The FBI and the CIA and DHS and ICE and state and local police forces enjoy almost unlimited power with minimal government oversight. For most journalists–and by extention, most people–their inner workings remain opaque as well. No one wants to dwell too long on the fact that America has several agencies that fit the definition of secret police. But we do.

James O’Keefe is personally aware of what happens when three-letter agency overreach. As I sit here, editing this article one last time, Project Veritas has dropped footage of the FBI’s November raid on O’Keefe’s house over a potentially stolen copy of Ashley Biden’s diary. Armed men with guns barged into the Project Veritas founder’s house in the middle of the night, apparently restrained him, and tossed the place searching for something that was not there on the flimsiest of pretexts.

This assessment is not Stockholm Syndrome, I swear. The ACLU, The Reporters Committee, and the Committee to Protect Journalists all decried this massive overreach. According to the latter, raids without a direct link to criminal activity “set a dangerous precedent that could allow law enforcement to search and confiscate reporters’ unpublished source material in vague attempts to identify whistleblowers.”

Bad enough that you have to be the New York Times to have even a prayer of finding out what’s going on inside the most powerful institutions in America. How the hell can any journalist report about the FBI when they can come to your house and toss your shit on the flimsiest of pretexts? 

Best not to think about it. The outlets that covered this video sure didn’t.

The Panopticon

But it gets so much worse.

The epidemic of labeling anything with even the smallest element of control or consequence as straight out of 1984 has gotten so bad that I suspect future archaeologists are going to have a lot of trouble dating things from this era. Contrary to popular belief, the core horror of that book does not lie in the making of new words, or the inability to choose your career, or even the general authoritarian structure of the society Orwell describes.

The true monster of 1984 is the unblinking eye of the eternal camera. The constant performance. The destruction of private life.

We’ll talk about that next week.