George Stephanopoulos’s “interview” with James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart on this morning’s Good Morning America summed up everything that is wrong with institutional American journalism. No doubt it is even now speeding its way over to the Newseum for permanent enshrinement in the Hall of Shame.

First, the very fact that a partisan hack like Stephanopoulos is actually employed by ABC News is a disgrace in itself. In the old days of “real journalism,” PR men and political operatives found no welcome in a newsroom: they were considered far too tainted by their flackery to ever be credible as independent reporters or newsgatherers.  And yet here is “Steffi,” one of the architects of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and star of The War Room, segueing smoothly from blind loyalty to his impeached boss, to the author of a more-in-“sorrow”-than-in-anger tell-all, semi-mea-culpa memoir (for which he was paid $2.75 million), All Too Human: A Political Education, to prime spots in the ABC pantheon.

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Is that all it takes — a quick, highly remunerative sheep-dip memoir, accompanied by a few bogus crocodile tears — to transform an apparatchik into a newsman?

But this is our culture today: cheap second-hand celebrity, such as Stephanopoulos’s, has come to replace accomplishment, and its kissing-cousin, access, has been substituted for integrity. You just know that if ABC couldn’t get Bill Clinton then Steffi was the next best thing, the same way CNN hired James Carville and Paul Begala, although with not quite the same breathtaking audacity of dope.

Worse, it is also modern journalism’s culture.  As a writer at Time Magazine, I was there in the eighties when the celebrity-news ecosphere shifted from Time’s telling which Hollywood celebrities it was going to put on its cover, to the celebrities’s flacks telling Time.  When my back-of-the-book colleagues Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter left Time to start Spy, they created a brilliant parody of mid/late-eighties American culture, including the slavish cult of celebrity.  What they didn’t realize was that they were also creating the new template for journalism itself – one that Carter has ridden all the way to a long-running and successful editorship of Vanity Fair. The joke has become its own punchline.

So the very notion of Stephanopoulos sitting in the GMA chair and lecturing O’Keefe about being a partisan has got to be somebody’s idea of a gag.


The GMA interview – ostensibly to discuss O’Keefe’s latest round of sting videos, this time involving the current U.S. Census — doesn’t start with the Census, of course.  Instead, it helpfully begins with this question from Steffi to O’Keefe:

First, let’s set the record straight — you did commit a crime, correct?

The reference is to O’Keefe’s recent guilty plea for entering a federal building in New Orleans under false pretenses as he and three friends attempted to investigate why Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu’s staff was claiming their phones were out of order – when in fact, they simply didn’t want to take the heat their constituents were handing out.

Now, if entering a federal building under false pretenses were really a crime, then just about every member of the current Congress would have to plead guilty to the charge.  But, passing that, once free, O’Keefe then spoke from the court house steps, promising to continue his undercover investigative work.

You sounded pretty defiant on the steps of the court — do you think you did anything wrong…?  Would you do it again?  You’d commit a crime?

Did somebody say defiant? Now this is defiant:


The former paid political activist masquerading as a newsman, Stephanopoulos, then starts hammering O’Keefe for being… a political activist.

You crossed the line – critics say you’re more of a political activist.

And he just won’t let go. In his effort to character-assassinate O’Keefe, Stephanopoulos practically waves his opposition research in O’Keefe’s face, tossing around not only these charges but the basest one of all,  “racism” – “your critics says you’re animated by resentment over race” — even though that calumny has been thoroughly debunked.

O’Keefe valiantly keeps his temper and makes his points about the legitimacy of undercover journalism:

Journalists have been doing this forever.  It’s not a left or right thing, it’s about exposing corruption… speaking truth to power.  When you stand up to power – people are going to come after you… this is not about me.  They’re not going to stop us with character assassination.  When you stand up to powerful individuals they’re going to try to destroy you… we’re creating a movement.

Oddly, at this moment Stephanopoulos retreats and notes that he “was one of the few, if not the only journalist who asked president Obama about [the ACORN] case… I did cover it, I did ask.”  Then he asks O’Keefe to once more aver that he’s not going to break the law again.


Finally, with just a few minutes left in the interview, Stephanopoulos gets around to discussing the new Census tapes. Whoops! Time to go!

Welcome to Big Journalism, everybody.