The New York Times is once again ripping into James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas for undercover videos of Times employees belittling President Trump and boasting of skewing the news.
The reaction to O'Keefe's "American Pravda" series comes from Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet in a CSPAN segment.
"James O'Keefe is a guy who happens to be conservative who goes out and tries to trick journalists into saying inappropriate things," Baquet said.
TRENDING: America's most dangerous demographic
The Pravda series already has caught several CNN and Times workers on video making statements that appear to conflict with the news organizations' ethics and neutrality in reporting on President Trump.
O'Keefe has declared he isn't finished exposing the bias of establishment media, which could explain why some outlets are on record trying to undermine his work.
The Washington Post said after O'Keefe's videos about CNN were released that he engaged in "intentionally deceptive editing" and "journalistic evasions and shortcuts that would likely elicit outrage from critics in a mainstream news organization had employed the same techniques."
The newspaper charged that a CNN staffer interviewed by O'Keefe's group may not have made "relevant" comments because he was a producer of health and medical stories.
Esquire went after O'Keefe full volume: "Ahooogah! Ahooogah! Dive! Dive! Dive!" it said. "There's no reason to trust anything O'Keefe says or any BOMBSHELL RECORDING (1) he produces."
Newsweek lashed out with: "James O'Keefe wants you to think that he's a journalist. That the undercover videos shot for his Project Veritas are all that keep rampant liberalism from running roughshod over the republic. Freedom has manifold enemies, from National Public Radio to Planned Parenthood, and the only way to hold them in check is to secretly record members of these flagrantly liberal organizations, then edit the videos in such a way as to make it seem that those organizations sell baby organs, celebrate prostitution and send conservatives unwanted subscriptions to The Nation."
Regarding Baquet's latest criticism of Project Veritas, O'Keefe said the Times that is lining up news for the "clicks," as verified by the newspaper's own employee.
Baquet claimed: "A journalist has to have at his heart, or her heart, a desire to make society better. All James O'Keefe is trying to do is hurt institutions and get some clicks."
O'Keefe pointed to the Times' own Desiree Shoe, who stated on video: "You know, for the New York Times, our subscriptions have sky-rocketed since. … I mean, they call it the Trump bump."
O'Keefe's previous video featured a longtime New York Times employee confessing his co-workers hate Trump "like the plague, dude."
It was the fourth video on the Times in Project Veritas' in the American Pravda series. The third showed London-based editor Desiree Shoe blasting Trump as an "oblivious idiot" and attacking Vice President Pence as "horrible" because of his religion. Shoe confessed that her colleagues hoped their reporting would influence people not to vote for Trump.
Earlier videos revealed a video editor for the paper admitting he had friends at YouTube who helped position his videos. And the first featured staff member Nick Dudich explaining his job is to slant the news.
The IT consultant is Todd Gordon, who explained the anti-Trump sentiment is a cultural belief shared by all workers at the paper.
Asked whether anyone at the Times liked Trump, he said, "No, no, no. … Not one person. … Everyone hates him. They hate him like the plague, dude."
And he said it's impossible for the Times to be impartial.
Asked whether the newspaper reports on Trump unfairly, he said, "Unfairly, yes. I agree 100 percent. They unfairly report on him."
The video: (Be forewarned about abusive language)
Shoe, a senior home-page editor based in London, said Times reporters hoped their work would lead to Trump's defeat in the 2016 election.
"I think one of the things that maybe journalists were thinking about is like ... 'Oh, if we write about him, about how insanely crazy he is and how ludicrous his policies are, then maybe people will read it and be like, 'Oh wow, we shouldn't vote for him,''" she explains.
And she confesses to a "clearly defined liberal-leaning bias" at her newspaper.
"I feel like Trump is ... is just a ... is sort of an idiot in a lot of ways. Just an oblivious idiot," she says.
However, she said: "If you impeach him, then Pence becomes president, Mike Pence, who's f----ng horrible ... I think maybe, possibly worse than Trump. He's extremely, extremely religious. [Pence] at one point backed a bill that hinted at conversion therapy for gay people ... which is like electrocution, stuff like that," she says.
The video:
Baquet previously bashed O'Keefe as "despicable."
Baquet said: "Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. For those of you who saw it, it was an undercover operation in which James O'Keefe, who I think is a despicable person who runs a despicable operation. He essentially tries to catch people from what he sees as the left-wing media saying inappropriate things. He caught a kid, a guy in his 20s, who I, to give you an idea, they portray him as a very powerful figure in the New York Times. … I never met him."
He argued that Nick Dudick has an entry-level job but acknowledged: "He said things he shouldn't have said. Um, and he said things that you know, were damaging. And I'll deal with that. But the greater sin wasn't his, it was theirs. They sent a young woman in, as part of their undercover operation, who essentially made him think he was developing a friendship. He said really stupid stuff, he said he was Jim Comey's godson, he said he had once worked undercover, essentially … he said stuff he shouldn't have said. But his sin was a sin of foolishness and it violated our policies. Their sin was greater. Their sin was a sin of lying and subterfuge. They're, they're just awful."
The first video about the New York Times revealed Dudich, the audience strategy editor for NYT Video, explaining how the Times slants Trump news on the front page.
"Oh, we always do," he said.
Then Project Veritas released a second video about the Times.
It again featured Dudich, this time describing "how he can influence the news by manipulating social media and employing the help of his friends in Silicon Valley," Project Veritas said.
"As an editor, I'm a gatekeeper, so I can choose what goes out and what doesn't go out. And let's say we wrote something about Facebook negatively. … We actually just did a video about Facebook negatively, and I chose to put it in a spot that I knew wouldn't do well," he said.
Project Veritas said Dudich admitted he has friends in Silicon Valley who help his videos move to YouTube's front page.
The report noted Earnest Pettie, the brand and diversity curation lead at YouTube, helped "push Dudich's videos to the top."
In the video, he described Dudich as "one of the people I think who has more knowledge about YouTube as a platform than probably anyone else that I know."
He said the New York Times benefits from the relationship.
"There are things that exist in the product that, like, are definitely optimized for news. Now, like last night if you searched for Hugh Hefner, there's the search results but then there's also. … A carousel comes up with a page that’s just news videos. There's this need, people are searching for a topic that is, that our systems know is a 'newsy' topic, so let’s give them videos that we know to be newsy because we know we have these news partnerships."
He added: "In very rare cases, we will try to make up for the fact that something isn't in the trending tab. We will, like, use some type of intervention … to encourage the thing to be there."
He explained "algorithms do control everything, but sometimes you need humans to provide a check."
The first New York Times video showed Dudich explaining his job is to slant the news.
"That's why I'm here," he said on the video.
Hear his comments (Editor's Note: Be forewarned of highly offensive language in the video):
In an earlier segment of the American Pravda series, about CNN, Jimmy Carr, an associate producer for the "New Day" morning program, lambasted the president.
Carr said American voters are "stupid as s---."
The video: (Be warned of offensive language):
Carr continued, regarding Trump: "This is a man who's not actually a Republican. He's not actually a Republican. He just adopted that because that was the party he thought he could win in. He doesn't believe anything that these people believe. The man's on this third wife. I guarantee you he's paid for abortions. He doesn't give a s--- about abortion. He doesn't care about gay marriage. He doesn't even really care about the budget."
And he claimed he's not alone in his opinions: "Ninety percent of us are on board with just the fact that he's crazy."
In No. 2, Van Jones, former President Obama's onetime "czar" on green jobs and a longtime left-wing commentator, activist and organizer, agreed with President Trump that the Russia scandal is "a big nothing burger."
The video clip shows Jones being approached on a street and stating in response to a question, "The Russian thing is just a big nothing burger."
He adds, "There's nothing there you can do."
The video (Be warned of offensive language):
In the video that opened the series, another CNN producer admitted the network's focus on allegations that Trump's election campaign colluded with Russia is mostly for ratings. The producer said the network's mostly liberal audience would not have put up with that kind of treatment of Obama.
The first video was of CNN producer John Bonifield, and his comments drew the attention of the White House. O'Keefe's video of Bonifield shows him saying, "I think there are a lot of liberal CNN viewers who want to see Trump really get scrutinized."
See the video (beware off offensive language in the video):
Â
Â