Right-Wing Media Spin the Conservative Activist James O'Keefe's Crime

Back in September, right-wing activist James O'Keefe told Fox News host Glenn Beck that he was "willing to serve prison time" for his work.

That just may happen.

According to an affidavit from the FBI, O'Keefe and three others were arrested on Monday in connection with an alleged plot to "interfer[e]" with the phone system in Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office. O'Keefe is perhaps best known for the heavily edited and misleading undercover videos he and Hannah Giles shot of low-level ACORN employees while the right-wing duo were dressed as a pimp and prostitute, an escapade that itself may have violated state criminal statutes.

The New York Times reports that "the four men, two of whom were dressed as telephone repairmen, were charged with entering a federal property on false pretenses with the purpose of committing a felony. The crime charged is itself a felony that carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison."

As Media Matters' Eric Hananoki noted, O'Keefe's three alleged accomplices -- Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan, and Stan Dai -- are right-wing activists as well. Basel was the founder of a conservative campus publication at the University of Minnesota-Morris, which, like the campus publication started by O'Keefe at Rutgers University, received funding from the conservative Leadership Institute's "Balance in Media" grant. Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana William Flanagan, reportedly works at the conservative Pelican Institute in New Orleans, just half a block from Landrieu's office. Dai received $5,000 from the right-wing Phillips Foundation's Ronald Reagan Future Leaders Scholarship Program. Additionally, during his time as a campus conservative, Dai reportedly co-wrote "a satirical work entitled The Penis Monologues, apparently a takeoff on the Vagina Monologues."

News of the four's arrest spread quickly Tuesday.

Because Fox News had showered O'Keefe's undercover video work targeting ACORN with near wall-to-wall coverage, one would have hoped the conservative network would provide comparable coverage of the arrest -- it did not. In fact, a Media Matters study comparing coverage of the day following the release of O'Keefe and Giles' first ACORN tape and the day news of O'Keefe's arrest broke found that Fox News provided 13 times more coverage to the video.

Fox News' first segment on O'Keefe's arrest was as funny as it was disappointing (view it here). During the report, assignment manager Tim Gaughan called the news a "very weird story that probably needs a lot of context and a lot of looking into." Sage advice -- too bad the network often didn't offer ACORN the same deference.

It really shouldn't be much of a surprise that Fox News handled the O'Keefe arrest with such kid gloves. After the release of his ACORN videos, Fox and other media conservatives lavished praise on O'Keefe. Beck called him "courageous." Andrew Breitbart -- more on him in a bit -- said that O'Keefe "is already well on his way to being one of the great journalists" and that he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Sean Hannity applauded him as a "pioneer in journalism." Bill O'Reilly said he deserved a "congressional medal." Right-wing author Ann Coulter said O'Keefe was "so magnificent." National Review editor Rich Lowry said he deserved an "award for impactful guerilla journalism." On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace featured O'Keefe as "Power Player of the Week." And when news came that O'Keefe might be sued by ACORN or its staffers over the videos, Hannity and Breitbart led the conservative media fundraising campaign for his defense.