The New York Times has reportedly fired an editor featured in a Project Veritas undercover video. A new video in the series shows another editor admitting to media bias and laying out her views on President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
Project Veritas president O’Keefe announced on Tuesday that Audience Editor Nick Dudich was fired. Dudich was the subject of two Veritas videos published last week.
A new undercover video, published earlier in the day, shows Homepage Editor Desiree Shoe trash-talking Trump and Pence to two undercover reporters in what appears to be a bar.
One of them tells Shoe that on the NYT website during the election, “the whole page is Trump.”
“Yeah, part of it was because it was sensational,” Shoe said. "I think one of the things that maybe journalists were thinking about is like, if we write about him, and how insanely crazy he is and how ludicrous his politics are, then maybe people will read it and be like, oh wow, we shouldn't vote for him."
Project Veritas, a conservative group specializing in what it says are undercover sting videos, has released a number of videos on US media outlets in a series dubbed “American Pravda.” The group has so far targeted CNN and the New York Times.
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Veritas says Shoe’s previous statement is “a scary revelation,” and quotes from the newspaper’s ethics handbook about how staff members “must do nothing that might raise questions about their professional neutrality.”
“Our main stories are supposed to be objective,” Shoe says at a later point. “It’s very difficult in this day and age to do that.”
Asked why, Shoe brings up the August events in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“Because when you have something like the Charlottesville story, it’s hard to portray, for instance, the president, in an unbiased light when the words that are coming out of his mouth are apologetic towards white supremacists, which is what they were.”
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“I feel like Trump is just sort of an idiot in so many ways, or just an oblivious idiot,” Shoe says. “If you impeach him, then Pence becomes president. Mike Pence, who is f**king horrible, I think may be possibly worse than Trump.”
“I’m speaking off the record,” she adds.
Asked to elaborate on her thoughts about Pence, Shoe says: “He’s extremely, extremely religious. Extremely religious. He at one point backed a bill that hinted at conversion therapy for gay people, which is like electrocution and stuff like that.”
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Shoe also spoke of the “Trump bump” where media outlets have seen an increase in subscriptions or viewers following the election. For the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, “who have paywalls up, the main objective is to grab subscribers, any way you can.”
“The last couple of years it’s changed for the bad,” Shoe admitted, referring to the profitability of media outlets depending on clicks and subscribers.
“A business model in this time is built on what the readers want,” Shoe said. “You have to be respectful of the reader’s desires, what interests readers.”
“People are interested in politics right now, and a lot of the readers are liberal, so I think what they want to know about it Trump so when the next go-around happens, they feel they’re sufficiently informed to either vote on way or the other.”
As with other Project Veritas videos, its targets are secretly filmed with the hope of getting scandalous responses. The group don’t show unedited versions of the videos, or provide context as to how they tricked their targets into talking.