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Tom Jackson is in a 12-step program for recovering sports writers; as part of his rehabilitation, he writes a column centered on the people, politics, passions and peculiarities of Pasco County. Email

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Pasco County News | Breaking News

Beguiling parallels from a couple of Jims

Posted Mar 9, 2011 by Tom Jackson

Updated Mar 9, 2011 at 07:58 PM

As it stands today, I am no fan of the so-called “farm” bill – sponsored by freshman state Sen. Jim Norman – that would made it a felony to photograph or publish photographs of “legal agricultural activities” without written consent from the farm owner or its management. It is desperately overbroad and constitutionally problematic.

Nonetheless, Norman’s bill and yet another stealthy hidden-video sting of a cherished liberal institution – NPR, as represented by Ron Schiller, the network’s suddenly former development director (aka: fundraiser) – presents a beguiling parallel.

At a luncheon with what he believed were representatives of a front group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood ready to bestow $5 million on NPR, Schiller unleashed a typhoon of bigoted scorn on opponents of the left – real and imagined—including the Tea Party movement and Israeli/Zionist media influences.

Schiller, who had already given notice that he was taking employment elsewhere, was cut loose almost immediately after the edited video was published. Also swiftly dispatched – er, “allowed to resign” – was NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. (The disgraced pair are “unkindred except in spirit,” notes Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto.) In the wake of the unflattering tumult over the firing of former news analyst Juan Williams—now routinely venting on NPR for Fox News—this second earth-shaking scandal on Vivian Schiller’s watch was one scandal too many.

After all, while NPR’s disdain for conservatives is an open secret, this latest upset has all the timing of Bobby Thomson’s legendary “shot heard ‘round the world.” Here was more fodder to embolden U.S. House Republican leaders already eager to cut public broadcasting off the federal dole as part of an overall budget-reduction plan.

Now comes the righteous handwringing. O’Keefe, famous for masquerading as a pimp to reveal the nefarious tendencies of ACORN a while back, is being scolded anew for employing untruthful methods to bag his subject. Let us weigh the virtues of pirate journalism – it pretty much comes down to: hate it when it nails my side; love it when it nails the other guys – while we wait for CBS to return the case full of Emmys won for hidden-camera stories broken by “60 Minutes.”

Which brings us back to Norman’s tortured attempt to head off – by making them illegal – similar episodes involving Florida’s agriculture industry. As noted above, the bill is shot through with problems, and Norman has promised a rewrite.

Meanwhile, Trilby businessman and egg farmer Wilton Simpson, a constituent whose fingerprints are on the bill, says commonsense farmers would never try to prosecute tourists photographing bucolic scenes of cows and calves lounging on roadside meadows, or aerial photographers hired to map fields targeted for development.

Instead, Simpson says, the law is necessary to prevent activists from posing as job applicants who would shoot undercover video once they were employed – much the way ABC News producers acquired access to a North Carolina Food Lion grocery store for its ballyhooed 1992 expose on the company’s food-handling policies.

About that: Following a review of more than 40 hours of video “outtakes” and depositions from Food Lion’s lawsuit against ABC News, Accuracy In Media, a right-leaning watchdog, concluded Food Lion had been railroaded. By then, however, the damage to the grocery chain’s profitability, stock price and expansion plans was done. Simpson would wonder where Food Lion goes to get its reputation back.

Moreover, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals routinely publishes undercover video on its web site, and ferociously defends the practice. What’s needed is more video, not less, says PETA’s Jeff Kerr.

Kerr calls PETA infiltrators courageous “whistleblowers” who play a vital role in exposing misbehavior in the agriculture industry.

As we have seen in the attacks on O’Keefe, however, one side’s whistleblower is the other side’s lowlife anarchist rule-mangler. Good luck writing a law to fix that.