O'Keefe's actions have stirred public debate on what it means to be a journalist and on what constitutes good journalistic practice when false pretenses are used.
[149] O'Keefe has referred to himself as a "guerrilla journalist".
[150]
Tim Kenneally and Daniel Frankel reported in March 2011 that some of O'Keefe's supporters referred to him as the
right wing's answer to a long line of left-leaning "hybrid troublemakers who get put on the cover of
Rolling Stone, like
Paul Krassner and
Abbie Hoffman".
[151] In that same March 2011 article, Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at
University of Southern California's
Annenberg School for Communication, said,
"What [O'Keefe] does isn't journalism. It's agitpop [sic], politi-punking, entrapment-entertainment. There is no responsible definition of journalism that includes what he does or how he does it. His success at luring his prey into harming themselves is a measure of how fallible and foolish anyone, including good people, can sometimes be."
[151]
In reporting on allegations that O'Keefe had attempted in 2010 to tamper with Senator Landrieu's office phone system, Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Robertson of the
New York Times posited that O'Keefe practiced a kind of "gonzo journalism" and his tactic is to "caricature the political and social values of his enemies by carrying them to outlandish extremes."
[1]
Jonathan Seidl of
The Blaze, said of the first NPR video, "the video, in the end, not only raises questions about NPR, but it also raises questions about undercover, gotcha journalism that can sometimes border on entrapment."
[152] Scott Baker of
The Blaze wrote in March 2011 about the NPR videos, saying that O'Keefe was "unethical" because he calls himself an "investigative journalist" but "uses editing tactics that seem designed to intentionally lie or mislead about the material being presented."
[73]
In a March 2011 interview with O'Keefe, NPR journalist
Bob Garfield asked, referring to the ACORN videos, "If your journalistic technique is the lie, why should we believe anything you have to say?"
[153] O'Keefe responded that his that his techniques should be characterized as a form of
guerrilla theater rather than "lying" – "you’re posing as something you’re not, in order to capture candid conversations from your subject. But I wouldn’t characterize it as, as lying.”
[153]
In July 2011, Dean Mills, the dean of the
Missouri School of Journalism, compared O'Keefe to
Michael Moore and said, "Some ethicists say it is never right for a journalist to deceive for any reason, but there are wrongs in the world that will never be exposed without some kind of subterfuge."
[123] The Atlantic journalist
Conor Friedersdorf responded that O'Keefe's "mortal sin" wasn't that he misled his subjects, but that he misled his audience by presenting his videos to the public in "less than honest ways that go far beyond normal 'selectivity.'"
[154]
