Mike Barnicle apparently thinks that actual investigative journalists bear some sort of resemblance to Republican dirty trickster, Karl Rove wanna’ be and probably soon to be felon James O’Keefe. The cast of Morning Joe talks to author Gabriel Thompson, who “spent a year going undercover working alongside immigrants and citizens in jobs that most of us wouldn’t want to do,” in the words of Willie Geist in his intro. His book is Working in the Shadows. In what should have been just an interesting interview about what Thompson experienced while researching his book, Mike Barnicle throws this stink bomb out there.
Barnicle: You know it’s great for people to get more information about what kinds of jobs are being done by largely an immigrant population but you mentioned, you know, journalism, and it’s important also to note—you didn’t deceive any of your employers did you—in going to work?
Thompson: I totally deceived every employer because at the outset—it was more of a mission of when I told them my work experiences, did I say I’d spent years as a community organizer or years writing about Mexican immigrants—no. Because none of them would have allowed me access.
[…]
Barnicle: Do you view yourself in a similar fashion as, you know, the guy who got grabbed trying to wiretap the phones of Senator—or whatever they were trying to do at Sen. Landrieu’s office?
Thompson: Well… he was trying to commit a felony, right?
Barnicle: Yeah.
Thompson: I don’t think I was trying to commit a felony.
Barnicle: No.
Thompson: What I was trying to—what I wanted to experience and get access to is what it’s like to work in these jobs.
File this one under you’ve got to be friggin’ kidding me. And don’t tell me Barnicle didn’t know better than to even try to equate these two men. Someone going to work in these horrid conditions for a year and writing about what they experienced and not allowing the employers to know they are a journalist in no way, no shape and no how resembles what the mainstream media keeps trying to call journalism by the likes of O’Keefe.
