But why does the article include commentary from right-wing scam artist Andrew Breitbart? The paper reports:

Conservative online publisher and commentator Andrew Breitbart said the movement's new focus demonstrates that Occupy Wall Street is not "an authentic grassroots movement" but a political maneuver backed by organized labor and remnants of the ACORN community-organizing group aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election campaign.

"This is AstroTurf" rather than grassroots, he said. "This isn't about helping little old ladies.… This is about fomenting civil unrest, fomenting class warfare."

Breitbart's work is totally unreliable. He's been sounding the ACORN/SEIU alarms about Occupy Wall Street almost from the beginning--just like (at least) one Fox News host. The point is to try and link the movement to an array of progressive institutions and, apparently, the Obama campaign. It's nonsensical paranoia. Is he included for the sake of "balance"?

Some of his reader-generated scoops have reverberated all the way to the halls of the United States Capitol, like the Weiner photos and undercover video he released of ACORN workers offering advice on how to evade taxes and conceal child prostitution. After the videos went viral Congress ended grants to ACORN, and federal agencies severed ties with the group.

That wasn't the lesson of the ACORN videos at all. After  a long battle, the Times admitted that much of its coverage of the Breitbart/James O'Keefe videos was misleading. The paper told readers that O'Keefe actually went into ACORN offices dressed in a ridiculous "pimp" get-up. He did not.

What the Times would not concede, though, was that the actual videos show very little in the way of tax evasion and prostitution advice. But that's the story Breitbart and O'Keefe were pushing; watching the actual videos doesn't provide much, if any, support for those claims. But they're still being made in the New York Times--which might be Breitbart's greatest triumph.

Peters goes on:

The stories and videos Mr. Breitbart plays up on his websites--which include Big Government, Big Journalism and Big Hollywood--tend to act as political Rorschach tests. If you agree with him, you think what he does is citizen journalism. If you don't, his work is little more than crowd-sourced political sabotage that freely distorts the facts.

This is absurd.

If you think that Breitbart distorts the facts, that's because HE DOES. To suggest otherwise is to assert that there's no way to ever know the truth about anything.  Is that the standard in "objective" journalism?

We last saw O'Keefe wearing a fur coat and playing a pimp when he managed to take down the liberal group ACORN.

No we didn't.

As should be well-known by now, O'Keefe used footage of himself wearing a "pimp" costume in his ACORN videos--but didn't wear the ridiculous costume during his "undercover stings." Media accounts acted as though he did, though--it took a lot of effort to get the New York Times to finally admit its errors on this count.

If reporters don't know these facts, they're bound to get fooled by O'Keefe again.

But it appears that, once again, O'Keefe's videos are not be what they seem. The first serious questions about them were raised on (I swear!) The Blaze, a Glenn Beck-affiliated website. Over there, Scott Baker pointed to a few problems (3/10/11). In one part of the video, NPR's Schiller seems to laugh about the phony Muslim group's position on Sharia law. Baker says it's out of context:

So after saying that the MEAC website advocates the "acceptance of Sharia," the video cuts to the NPR exec saying, "Really? That’s what they said?" The cadence is jovial and upbeat and the narration moves on.  The implication is that the NPR exec is aware and perhaps amused or approving of the MEAC mission statement. But when you look at the raw video, you realize he was actually recounting an unrelated and innocuous issue about confusion over names in the restaurant reservation.

But more important than that is the part of the video regarding Schiller's comments about the Tea Party--the words that generated much of the current controversy. According to Baker, elsewhere in the video Schiller talks fondly of his own Republican roots. As for the racist, xenophobic Tea Party stuff:

the clip in the edited video implies Schiller is giving simply his own analysis of the Tea Party. He does do that in part, but the raw video reveals that he is largely recounting the views expressed to him by two top Republicans, one a former ambassador, who admitted to him that they voted for Obama.

NPR has done at least two reports on the video (one here, the other here). It's not quite a Shirley Sherrod moment--where the right-wing video was edited to totally turn her message around--but it's clear that things aren't exactly what they first seemed. O'Keefe's history should give media outlets serious reservations about taking him at face value on anything.

On CNN's Reliable Sources (3/13/11) O'Keefe was asked what he thought of the media's coverage of the story:

HOWARD KURTZ: Do you think the media coverage has been fair to you and your organization in this NPR story?

O'KEEFE: I think it's been more fair. I think the mainstream media is certainly starting to have a little more respect for us.

He's right--which goes to show you that the argument that the media is tilted to the left remains totally unconvincing.

*NOTE: A small correction: The Blaze writer's name is Scott Baker-- not Scott Walker, who is someone else entirely.