James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, connected a lesson he learned from Andrew Breitbart regarding being oneself and transparent to recent engagements he had with New York Times journalists in an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily Monday with special guest host Jerome Hudson.
Project Veritas recently published video of O’Keefe’s interaction with the New York Times‘s Matthew Rosenberg, a target of one of its undercover investigations. O’Keefe said he employed Breitbart’s recommendation to “be yourself.” Mark Mazzetti, also of the New York Times, remained silent and refused to acknowledge O’Keefe’s presence during a similar encounter days later.
“That was quite a moment,” he said. “I walked into [Andrew Breitbart’s] apartment. There was a New Yorker reporter, and I was reluctant to talk to her, and I think that was one of the things I first realized about Andrew was that he was very open, and very – he just said, ‘Be yourself,’ like, ‘What do you have to hide in front of these journalists? Just be yourself.’
“We’re all kind of scared and pinned when dealing with the press, we care about how we’re perceived by the press, but I think the biggest lesson I drew from that experience was be yourself, and Andrew had this ability to just be himself in front of the media. I myself have become more that way in recent times.”
O’Keefe continued, “[Andrew Breitbart] had this ability to simultaneously work with the mainstream media, get covered by the mainstream media, and also hold them to account, a very difficult skill. I don’t think really anybody else these days does it like he did it. It taught me a lot, what you saw on that movie Hating Breitbart, in that scene, was a very early version of me. The same person, just a little fearful of the press.”
O’Keefe said Breitbart told him, “Be yourself. Be open in front of them.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.