Sputnik Radio's Fault Lines with Garland Nixon and Lee Stranahan invited Matthew Tyrmand, a journalist who is a regular contributor to Breitbart and Project Veritas and is an anti-corruption crusader in Poland. Tyrmand discussed the recent investigative journalism performed by Project Veritas and their most recent campaign to expose corruption in mainstream media outlets.
"The next lens we're going to turn on fraudulent complexes in our society will be the media," Tyrmand said, paraphrasing O'Keefe. "Part of that was a little bit of a call to arms to get people who are in the inside, or have good intel, to come out of the woodwork and aid us in our quest to want to shine a light on some of the coercive nature of the modern day mainstream media complex. It has an agenda and it's highly coercive."
"So we started a few months ago with the CNN investigation, and it was pretty rich. There was a lot of good stuff, there including [CNN political commentator] Van Jones saying [the investigation into alleged Russian election interference is] a big nothingburger."
Jones replied to the secretly recorded video, calling it a "hoax" and an "edited, right-wing propaganda video" in an article published on CNN. "Did I mean that there is 'nothing' to the allegations that members of team Trump colluded with the Russians and then tried to cover it up by firing FBI Director James Comey? No — and far from it."
"And then the next series of episodes was in this what we call the 'American Pravda' as a sort of denote to the historical Communist Russian [newspaper] Pravda, which meant 'truth' but… everybody on the street knew what they wrote was not the truth. They would write things like 'Crop Yields Are at Record Highs' yet everybody was hungry."
But the next episode of American Pravda was especially controversial. "We put the lens on the New York Times, and we got a few really juicy pieces of footage — including the video editor, a guy named Scott Dudich, who has a lot of ability to formulate what goes onto the website and help people get their video news, was on tape bragging about how he would place them to serve the leftist political agenda. He was also saying things like he was [former FBI Director James] Comey's godson, and that he was an FBI asset, and working with antifa to punch Nazis. He was just trying to impress our undercover journalist."
New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha claimed in a statement earlier in October that Dudich was a junior video editor who "was responsible for posting already published video on other platforms and was never involved in the creation or editing of Times videos." They added that Dudich "violated our ethical standards and misrepresented his role."
"The issue with the New York Times and most of the mainstream media organs is that they look to coerce the fact patterns, to push an agenda. [Dudich] was living proof of it, that he even admitted it that this was his his goal. He was talking about the newsroom and how everybody is against [US President Donald] Trump. It ends up that Dean Baquet, the managing editor, was asked about this, and he just attacks the messenger. He said, '[Dudich] is a nobody, but James O'Keefe is despicable. What he does is despicable.'"
The comment that Tyrmand is referring to was Baquet saying that Project Veritas "went after a kid who just started his career in journalism. To ding the NYT, they went after a kid, and they probably affected his career forever. That's despicable."
"A journalist has to have in his heart or her heart a desire to make society better," said Baquet to the press. "All James O'Keefe is trying to do is hurt institutions and get some clicks. He just did a video about it that I think — and I used the word before, I'll use it again — is despicable."
"Undercover journalism has a long history of exposing truth," Tyrmand fired back. "The great irony is that the New York Times did it themselves when they infiltrated the alt-right and had a leftist activist taping some of these really reprehensible neo-Nazi figures. Now, the New York Times would have you believe that everybody right of center has neo-Nazi predilections. They actually sent an undercover journalist to infiltrate, and they had all this undercover tape techniques. Here they are impugning James with what he did with Scott Dudich."
"We had a few more videos including the London front page editor — she's an American but based in London — talking about how bad Trump is, how everybody hates Trump. The funniest part was the Upper West Side of Manhattan smear she did when she said, '[Vice President Mike] Pence is even worse than Trump. You know he's… religious?' So it just tells you the culture of that newsroom. Here they purport to serve the American public; they serve a very narrow subsection of the American public and we've provided some transparency to just that."
