www.michaeladelberg.com
Like most people, I first heard of you a year and a half ago when you and a colleague dressed up as an over-the-top pimp and prostitute and filmed ACORN community activists assisting you in navigating government paperwork. Your sting resulted in the loss of federal funding for that organization. I did a little more research on you, and laughed out loud at your tongue-in-cheek quest to have Lucky Charms removed from the Rutgers University cafeterias because of the derogatory Irish stereotype the cereal portrays. I heard tid bits about your subsequent stings of Planned Parenthood, the New Jersey teacher’s union, and Sen. Mary Landrieux. I compared you to Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat character, and defended you for merely “placing a mirror, and letting others embarrass themselves.” If there was a political motivation to where you placed that mirror, I was fine with that.
A few weeks ago, you seemingly hit the jackpot again. This time, you set up National Public Radio executives with a phony deep-pocketed Islamic group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Your operatives met two NPR execs at a posh restaurant and recorded the execs over lunch. During the lunch, one of the NPR exec made statements that dissed the Tea Party and suggested liberals were better educated than conservatives. You published clips from the lunch to great media fanfare. The NPR exec was fired and NPR’s CEO resigned shortly thereafter. Your sting fueled a new round of calls to defund NPR and public television. (For the record, I like and support NPR, but believe the time has come for a gradual phase-out of federal funding.)
The ethics of sting operations are complicated. Clearly, they have a place when catching criminals. But sting tactics start getting icky when the victim is a middling person just doing his/her job (even in the service of an organization you might not like). It has been noted that journalists have codes of ethics that forbid your sting tactics; you respond by calling your operatives a “citizen journalists” not bound by that profession’s rules. This dodges the fundamental question of the ethics stinging ordinary people about their work, but, okay, let’s call this a gray area and move on.
What cannot be dodged is selective editing. Clearly the NPR execs said what they said. But they also said many other things, including statements that create a much more balanced portrayal of what transpired than your video clips suggest. Glenn Beck and former Bush White House official, Michael Gerson, hardly NPR apologists or liberals, have demonstrated that throughout the now infamous lunch, NPR officials also made pro-conservative statements, repudiated liberal bias, and often resisted when your operatives dangled a suggestive question. None of these moments made it into your edited video. There was not a continuous anti-conservative diatribe, just a handful of ill-considered statements amid many others. (To your credit, you have posted the entire unedited video on your website and invite viewers to reach their own conclusions.)
A few times in my career, I have given speeches or been interviewed by the press. Fortunately, I was never misquoted, but once I believe the reporter selected quotes to advance his agenda, knowingly creating a false impression of my general message. If someone speaks candidly for an hour, a clever observer can cherry-pick a handful of quotes to suggest something different from the speaker’s general message. This is why chastened politicians speak in dull, rehearsed sounds bites, rather than spontaneously. Fear of being selectively quoted deadens meaningful discussion.
This is not a partisan letter from a pissed off liberal. The absolute worst moment of the 2010 midterm elections was the “Taliban Dan” ad run by liberal Democrat Alan Grayson against Tea Party-Republican Dan Webster. In that ad, Grayson ran a statement by Webster about women needing to be subservient to men. Webster did make that statement, but within a larger discussion that specifically disavowed the sexism of the selected quote. Grayson never apologized and was rightly turned out of office.
As for your citizen journalist status, you are welcome to defend the ethics of your sting tactics—that’s a tough issue that can be argued either way. But when you selectively edit a long video down to titillating sound bites without acknowledging that the complete transcript tells a fuller story, you become a dishonest hypocrite behaving worse than anyone you’re exposing.
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