Ready for round two?
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas organization released “Part II” of their “American Pravda” series on Wednesday exposing left-leaning bias in the media, this time focusing on not only the “Holy Grail” of journalism -- the New York Times -- but also video platform giant YouTube.
“Part I” of the series was released Tuesday, which revealed NYT Audience Strategy Editor Nicholas Dudich making some pretty bizarre and untrue claims about James Comey and Donald Trump.
“Part II” catches Dudich admitting the Times manipulates what gets pushed on social media platforms like Facebook.
"As an editor, I’m a gatekeeper so I can choose what goes out and what doesn’t go out," Dudich claims in the undercover footage. "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."
According to O’Keefe, Dudich’s attempt to squash a negative Facebook story is a violation of the Times “Ethics in Journalism” handbook, which states: “The goal of The New York Times is to cover the news as impartially as possible and to treat readers, news sources, advertisers and others fairly and openly, and to be seen to be doing so.”
But that doesn’t seem to actually be the case — at least, not according to Dudich.
Dudich also claims he has connections inside YouTube that enable him to get NYT videos to the platform's front page, regardless of whether they're a top trending story.
The Veritas undercover reporter asks Dudich about whether that “connection” is a conflict of interest.
“No, keeping it hush-hush because, let’s say something ends up on the YouTube front page,” Dudich said, “New York Times freaks out about it but they don’t know it’s just because my friends curate the front page.”
Shockingly, Project Veritas caught YouTube’s Brand and Diversity Curation Lead Earnest Pettie backing up that very claim.
“Nick is one of the people I think who has more knowledge about YouTube as a platform than probably anyone else that I know,” Pettie said.
Petty then basically admitted that YouTube artificially pushes stories that aren't trending organically to the forefront -- like, for instance, the James Comey hearings.
“In very rare cases, we will try to make up for the fact that something isn’t in the trending tab,” Pettie told the undercover Veritas reporter. “But in those cases then we will, like, use some type of intervention to make sure that, like…to encourage the thing to be there, basically.”
“So Comey?” the Veritas reporter asked.
“Yeah,” Pettie responded.
The whole interaction drives O'Keefe to question why multimedia platforms like YouTube should constitute what's “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” news.
Illegitimate news — what does that even mean? Who decides what is legitimate and illegitimate? Why do they have the power to make someone legitimate or illegitimate just because they don’t like them? Is that really the news environment that we want to live in?
It shouldn’t be.
No word on whether there are more parts to Veritas’ “American Pravda” series, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see another bombshell tomorrow.