Conservative activist posts audiotapes targeting CNN

Conservative activist James O’Keefe on Thursday released what he said are 119 hours of raw audio secretly recorded inside CNN’s Atlanta headquarters in 2009.

The audio was recorded and provided to O’Keefe’s website, Project Veritas, by a source he didn’t identify.

His organization promoted the tapes as exposing journalistic lapses at CNN. One excerpt reveals that CNN did not include a particular poll in its reporting eight years ago. However, it is common for news organizations to be discerning about which polls they choose to report on.

“We don’t know everything that’s on the tapes. We’ve listened to a fraction of them,” O’Keefe said during a phone interview Thursday, adding that the process of sifting through them continues.

He did not explain the yearslong delay in the tapes’ release, but said the source had approached his organization “in recent weeks.”

The audio was initially posted online for only a few minutes Thursday morning before the site crashed. It remained unavailable for several hours after that.

More tapes will be forthcoming, O’Keefe said.

“This is a kind of new era of journalism where it’s WikiLeaks-style dumping of information that we will continue to do more of,” he said. CNN declined to comment. In previewing the planned release, O’Keefe, had said on Wednesday he is targeting CNN because it “has a very important role as an arbiter of news.”

O’Keefe helped found a conservative monthly journal called The Centurion as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. After graduating in 2006, O’Keefe was paid to set up magazines and newspapers on university campuses for the Leadership Institute, which recruits potential conservative public policy and media stars.