James O’Keefe was back in the news this week when his “Teachers Union Gone Wild” investigation of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) went viral and was even praised by Governor Chris Christie. But not everyone was convinced O’Keefe had hit paydirt; consider the Fox 29 Philadelphia news team among the skeptics. According to the station, their own Bruce Gordon spent the day in Trenton getting the “context” of the video, and he enthusiastically reported that Mr. O’Keefe and his team may have selectively and maliciously edited the tape to take one particular teacher, Alissa Ploshnick, out of context:
But yesterday, “Teachers Union Gone Wild” director and Big Journalism contributor Christian Hartsock cleared up the discrepancy when he released the full, unedited audio of the sequence. From Hartsock’s explanation:
NJEA Communications Director Steve Wollmer has come forward on behalf of the “sheltered” Ploshnick, insisting that the recorded talking points of hers we have — including her emphasis on how “hard” it is to fire a tenured teacher, as well as her sharing of an anecdote in which a tenured teacher called a student the “N” word only to be slapped on the wrist with a demotion — were manipulatively tossed into the same context when they were uttered in totally separate contexts.
Wollmer explains that Ploshnick was recounting an episode from her own high school days in Clifton High twenty years ago, in which a mere student called another student the “N” word in the hallway, insinuating it was shared in a totally separate context from her emphasis on how hard it is to fire tenured teachers.
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Did I separate the two soundbites to accommodate a voice-over punctuation in between? Yes I did. But now, I will present to you the monolithic clip incorporating both soundbites side-by-side which she has since claimed to be uttered on separate terms:
Mr. Gordon and Fox Philly dedicated a significant portion of this segment to allowing a forum for the now discredited NJEA Communications Director Wollmer to advance the notion that this segment of “Teachers Union Gone Wild” was edited to smear Ms. Ploshnick. Now that Mr. Hartsock has provided the audio that confirms this is not the case, we request that Mr. Gordon report these findings to his audience, informing them that Mr. Wollmer’s testimony is not credible and that there is no reason to suggest the video was selectively edited in any way that would invalidate the findings of the investigation.
It should also be noted that while we expect nothing less than human deviancy from the Senior Fellows at Media Matters for America, they also picked up on Wollmer’s spurious explanation and should also correct the record.