PBS sting video next?

It looks like a few executives at PBS might be getting ready for they YouTube moment.

Media Decoder: NPR was not the only media organization duped by the Republican provocateur James O’Keefe.

PBS confirmed Wednesday that like NPR, one of its executives attended a lunch with people who posed as members of the Muslim Education Action Center Trust, a fictional group. When those people had lunch with NPR executives, they falsely claimed that they wanted to donate up to $5 million to public media. The NPR executives were secretly videotaped at the lunch.

Anne Bentley, a PBS spokeswoman, said PBS’ senior vice president for development, Brian Reddington, attended a lunch with the fake donors in February. She said she had “no sense at all” of whether Mr. Reddington was taped during that lunch; when asked if PBS was concerned about a possible tape surfacing, she declined to comment.

Ms. Bentley said that Mr. Reddington came back from the lunch with “profound concerns about the organization” and began what she called a routine vetting process “when there is an appearance of a conflict of interest and to ensure they meet requirements of transparency and openness.”

“Attempts to confirm the credentials of the organization proved unsatisfactory and communication was halted by PBS,” she said.

I will not be the least bit surprised if James O'Keefe drops a PBS Sting video tomorrow. It would certainly fit his method of operation. One of the reasons why the ACORN sting was so successful was because there were several videos O'Keefe was able to establish a pervasive problem within the organization rather than a singular problem at one office. So, if O'Keefe's goal is to prove that public broadcasting is biased and not worth funding, then you have to show more than NPR's problem.

Also, I noticed that PBS also speaks of finding vetting issues with the fake organization O'Keefe sets up, but they found these vetting issues after they met with the guys. That certainly doesn't sound like an intellectually superior thing to do.

Via: Memeorandum
Via: Media Decoder