The first question to ask with any James O'Keefe video is "where is the raw video." He has a long and sordid history of fabricating these kinds of storylines.
> As long as you hold Michael Moore to the same standard.
I know you're trying to be dismissive with your glib comment but let me tell you: I do hold him to the same standard and I find him to be a jackass.
That doesn't change the fact that James O'Keefe is a convicted criminal (attempted to wiretap Sen. Mary Landrieu's office).
It also doesn't change the fact that he heavily edited the ACORN video to skew the story, nor that they were humoring him and reported his nonsense to the police. Conservatives wanted to believe his lies so they did.
I worked for years as a film professional, including screenwriting and editing. It is very easy to lie with footage. The craft of editing is to make the edits disappear so that changes in camera angles and content appear natural and seamless. We employ misdirection to exploit a phenomenon in the brain known as suture, which creates the illusion of continuity.
As a simple example, in a narrative film I'll cut from angle to another when actor A takes a drink from a glass of water. The reason I want to cut is that I have begun to feel bored by shot #1 already for whatever reason - actor A may not be that good looking, or not a great actor, or the scripted dialog may be dull, whatever. It's boring, and that means you the viewer will be bored with it soon too. But I can't just cut away or you'll know what I'm up to. I'll wait until actor A engages in a physical movement and your visual cortex will quietly paper over the transition for me. Hmm, Actor A drank from the glass at different times during different takes, and the action of drinking doesn't line up with the dialog? No problem, I'll just cut briefly to a shot of actor B reacting to actor A (and by exploiting the Kuliekov effect, I can significantly change the meaning of the scene depending on what facial expression I choose to show on actor B) and then I'll cut back to actor A talking again from the new angle.
You would be surprised how many movie scenes depicting two people in a room were shot across 2 different days with the actors never actually meeting in person. Likewise you would be astonished at the number of ways the same footage could be combined to tell radically different stories. I have made edits where I have run pieces of footage backwards and not even the director noticed until I pointed it out. Don't think you can't be fooled by even a semi-skillful editor, your brain has been trained in how to watch TV and movies probably from infancy, and while it is not too hard to break free of that training, nor is it hard for others to manipulate your pre-existing mental reflexes.
I could imagine some sort of manipulation, but for the specific video of the the specific words came out of the mouth those people, can you please explain to me how the video fabricated the whole thing?
You are expressing a possibility that has a low probability of being true.
The hidden video he released today looks incontrovertible. One can only imagine all the other things these dark political operatives do if they were willing to discuss what they did so explictly with people they presumably don't know well.
I agree with everything you said. But I am too curious as to what you think of the posted video. I hardly see how there could be manipulation considering the chunks of raw footage posted are always following a Q/A format.
