A big NYT Magazine article about James O'Keefe — written by Zev Chafets.

Zev Chafets is that NYT contributor who wrote that book about Rush Limbaugh that Limbaugh was so pleased with. So let's read the new article.

He seems to be styling himself as the organizer and commander in chief of a vast guerrilla army of young conservatives trained in his methods and inspired by his example. “There are already dozens of teams out there working,” he told me. “And there are thousands more who want to learn and get involved. The more they restrict me, the more they inspire me.”....

O'Keefe — on probation for 3 years after he pleaded guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses —  can't leave New Jersey without court approval. (Hey, don't plead guilty if you can't do the time.)

His takedown of Acorn was... devastating, although Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s former chief executive, contends that the videos were dishonest. “He is demon, a liar and a cheat,” she says. “What he did was despicable. He created a fiction.” Bertha Lewis still insists that Acorn did not offer advice on how to break the law. Clark Hoyt, a former public editor for The New York Times, reviewed O’Keefe’s raw footage and edited tapes and concluded that “the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context.”

There is no doubt that O’Keefe disseminated only the material that supported his thesis about Acorn, but this kind of selectivity is the norm in advocacy journalism. “I put James O’Keefe in the same category as Michael Moore,” says Dean Mills, dean of the University of Missouri’s school of journalism. “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.”

“People can’t control me,” O’Keefe says. “No one tells me what to investigate.” But that freedom from oversight means he has no one to offer a second opinion. Andrew Breitbart, summing it up after the fact, called the Landrieu sting a “high risk, low reward” mistake. O’Keefe himself acknowledges that he used bad judgment in that operation. “If I had it to do over again, I’d do it outside a federal building.”

Hundreds of people contact James O’Keefe with suggestions for investigations and stings. He looks for situations that illustrate what he sees as larger injustices. He also recruits activists. “It takes a lot of what you could call courage to go into the opposition’s presence and tell a story under a false name,” he says. “People ready to improvise and maybe get caught.”