There is much more to say, but I’m angry, and I want to say this quickly: We’re all on notice now. Keep your eyes open and your ears cocked. Public life is becoming a maze of entrapments, and the press is enabling the deceit.

Yesterday James O’Keefe, the conservative trickster who has previously targeted ACORN and other organizations with fraudulent schemes aimed at exposing what he sees as liberal bias and malfeasance, unveiled his latest act: his confederates impersonated Muslim donors and recorded a meeting with an NPR fundraiser, Ron Schiller. Schiller said some impolitic things, some of which were true, others of which were overstatements, none of which was that different from what you can hear in any bar and on any blog. (Unless you believe nobody has ever charged that there are racists in the ranks of the Tea Party, or that anyone has ever suggested NPR might be better off without the federal funding that conservatives are constantly threatening to cut.)

NPR rejected the bogus Muslims’ bogus contribution, but Schiller’s words got him suspended yesterday. And today we learn that NPR’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (no relation), has resigned too.

In a saner cultural moment, a serial liar like O’Keefe would not be taken seriously by the rest of the media or by a board of directors. Here’s why (courtesy TPM):

Previous tapes by O’Keefe’s group have later turned out to be misleadingly edited, including the video that launched them to stardom featuring O’Keefe posing as a pimp in front of ACORN offices, so it’s worth taking the overall footage with a grain of salt until further details emerge. Last year, O’Keefe’s credibility took another major hit when he reportedly tried to invite a CNN reporter onto his boat to try and seduce her as a prank, an effort that was revealed when one of his own colleagues blew the whistle to the press.

But just as the White House dumped Shirley Sherrod the moment Andrew Breitbart’s doctored video of her supposedly damning admission of racism surfaced, NPR’s board chose not only not to fight but to cave in immediately to O’Keefe’s tactics. By not fighting back, NPR has invited an open season on truth, and ushered us into a new age of mistrust.

You should go listen to O’Keefe’s tapes of Ron Schiller’s statements — first, to see that much of what he said is harmless and reasonable, but more important, to ask yourself whether you have any expertise or standing to determine the recording’s authenticity. How can we possibly trust O’Keefe’s reports when the essence of his technique is deception? Who knows how this recording was edited or doctored? Does the phrase “consider the source” mean anything any more?

Sting operations conducted by law enforcement officials have a dubious record themselves, but at least they require oversight and must meet court standards of evidence. For public actors like Jame O’Keefe, the oversight, we assume, is performed by the media. The press prides itself for serving as truth’s first line of defense, democracy’s bullshit filter. This week it failed in a big way.

The larger problem here isn’t Viv Schiller’s ultimate fate, and it’s not even the final disposition of Congressional funding for NPR — an institution I admire in many ways but which, let’s face it, we’d survive without.

The problem is we are crediting creeps and letting liars take over our public discourse.

This is hardly a partisan concern. Roughly similar tactics caused major headaches for Wisconsin’s embattled Republican governor recently, when he got taken in by a caller impersonating conservative billionaire David Koch. (This led Wisconsin’s legislature to start talking about outlawing prank calls.) Increasingly, public deception carries little apparent cost.

If a James O’Keefe can win attention and scalps by ruses and lies, why should he stop? And does any public figure have a big enough megaphone and a strong enough spine to say to him, “Have you no decency”?

BONUS LINKS: Jeff Jarvis: ” The stations’ interests and NPR’s interests are no longer aligned.”

Ira Stoll points out the irony in O’Keefe’s outfit’s name, “Project Veritas”:

It’d be one thing if NPR were actually taking money from Muslim Brotherhood members announcing they wanted to get more of the Hamas and Hezbollah perspective on American airwaves. And it’d be one thing if journalists were exposing that reality. But that’s not what’s happened here.

Jack Shafer suggests that Ron Schiller was just doing what fundraisers do to butter up donors:

Pardon me if I’m not outraged that 1) a pair of NPR officials hosting potential donors would merrily slag conservatives, Republicans, Tea Party members, and other non-liberals or 2) display temporary deafness when deep-pocketed potential funders say ugly and demented things.

I still get both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on paper, and every morning I have the opportunity to compare their front pages, and thereby, their world views. Increasingly, it looks like the US’s two weightiest national papers are presenting fundamentally different pictures of the world to their readers.

Friday offered a particularly striking contrast: Both papers led with stories about campaign finance.

If you read the Times, you came away with the impression that the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobby, was blowing out the gaskets this cycle. The chart accompanying the Times’ lead story identified the Chamber as “The top non-party spender” in the election, having spent $21.1 million, an amount raised largely from “a relatively small collection of big corporate donors” who have been able to remain anonymous.

Meanwhile, over at the Wall Street Journal, the lead story painted a vastly different picture: “Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays,” the headline reads. “The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections,” according to the Journal, with a war chest of $87.5 million. The Times chart, by contrast, has AFSCME spending only $7.9 million.

There are any number of possible explanations for this discrepancy. I’m no campaign finance expert, but I assume it has to do with different sourcing; different definitions of “outside group” and “independent” or “non-party” status; different timespans aggregated in the totals; and no doubt other factors.

Observant readers will note that each paper’s version of this story neatly maps to the ideological positions their critics have assigned them. Blue-state liberals are outraged that the Supreme Court has allowed business to pour anonymous millions into this election cycle; red-state conservatives have long believed that business cash is only a necessary counterweight to the mighty electoral power of union dollars. The Times and the Journal are both playing the roles their opponents have cast them for in this partisan drama.

Still: campaign spending is one of those matters of fact that we ought to be able to nail. Somebody is the biggest “outside spender” in this cycle — either it’s a union, or it’s some conservative lobby like the Chamber of Commerce. Or it’s some anonymous group. Which raises the question of how either paper can make a claim to knowing who the top outside spender is in the elections, since it seems pretty clear that astroturf groups flush with unmarked bills are flooding these elections with unprecedentedly huge sums that no one has been able even to begin to count.

In order to argue about this picture with any confidence, you need data. You need to know who is spending what. And of course that is the problem with this election cycle: Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn our already highly inadequate campaign finance rules, we voters don’t have even the most basic information about who is spending how much on the elections.

You can argue that “money is speech” from now till doomsday. We aren’t anywhere close to the stage of having the important discussion of how we actually restrict this kind of spending. All we’re saying is: surely the American people have a right to know who is buying its lawmakers.

Right now this demand comes from the left, but I have a feeling we might hear a little more of it from the Tea Party types after this election, when they see how effectively all that corporate cash deep-sixes their hopes of dynamiting the status quo.

As Frank Rich points out in his column today, the Tea Party’s angry populists are in for a rude surprise when they discover just how completely the candidates they aim to elect are owned by deep-pocketed contributors:

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates.

Those candidates were bought with unmarked bills. This campaign money is now as hard to trace as the mortgage dollars that two years ago blew up the economy and that are now jamming the works of the foreclosure machine.

How can you even begin to claim to have fair elections or an honest government without transparency in political spending? Why should the right to free political speech also cover the right to anonymous political speech by the million-dollar-load? Until we repair this colossal breakdown of our system, we’ll be stuck in the 2010 cycle’s banana-republic mode.

UPDATE: For another slice of campaign-finance reality, read Greg Sargent’s Washington Post piece:

According to data from the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation, conservative groups that have spent significant sums have plowed nearly $75 million in undisclosed donations alone into this election. By contrast, liberal groups have spent under $10 million…

“Don’t they fact-check this stuff?”

This is the perennial cry of the outraged reader and the wronged article subject. The latest party to raise the fact-checking howl is the White House, which yesterday went public with its discontent over Forbes’ ludicrously poisonous new cover story.

The article depicts President Obama as a deranged anti-colonialist whose ideology of business-hatred was somehow implanted, Manchurian Candidate-style, by the estranged father who abandoned him when he was two. (Imagine, if you will, a leftist critique of George W. Bush that attributed his torture policies to secret indoctrination in his father’s CIA dungeons. I know, I remember reading that cover story too…)

I’ll let others do the actual point-by-point refutations of the Forbes article. I want to come at this story from two other angles.

First, that question about fact-checking: four times out of five, the answer to it is “no, they don’t.” Much of the public still believes that “fact-checking” is actually a routine part of news journalism, and most journalists aren’t in any rush to bust the myth, but myth it is.

There are two types of “fact-checking”: One is a formal procedure of the news work-flow, where somebody with the title of “fact checker” actually attempts to verify every single fact in a piece. This is the sort of thing the New Yorker is famous for. It used to be the norm at glossy magazines, but the norm is decaying in this era of media-business meltdown. I did fact-checking work at the start of my career, as many journalists did, and it’s a good discipline, but an increasingly rare one.

The other sort of fact-checking is the more informal spot-checking that has always taken place in daily newsrooms and today is common in the better online operations. This is fact-checking by sniff-test, for the most part — story editors and copy editors (where they still exist) backstopping beat reporters, looking up stuff that sounds wrong or that’s in some sensitive area. Informal spot-checking is vital but necessarily spotty. Stuff slips through. That’s why we have corrections. (We need more.)

The fact-checking picture is further muddied by the divide between reporting and analysis or commentary, a theological line that many editors still believe it’s both possible and necessary to draw. This gives some old-school editors heart in today’s overheated partisan landscape. The news reporting is where they’ll continue to fight the battle for fact; the opinion stuff can sell the product with fact-mauling innuendo.

Readers don’t care about this line. If you put the story on your cover, it’s your publication’s reputation that’s at stake. And Forbes’ has taken a serious hit.

Forbes’ defense of its work has been a classic circle-the-wagons move. Here’s the magazine’s statement in its entirety:

Dinesh D’Souza’s cover story was presented as an analysis of how the president thinks. No facts are in contention. Forbes stands by the story.

In fact, the statement “no facts are in contention” is itself counter-factual. You can’t say “no facts are in contention” when the staid Columbia Journalism Review has described your article as “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia.”

The second point I want to make is about the changing cast of characters in this media drama. The Forbes piece is written by Dinesh D’Souza; it’s a trailer for a new book. (Books are another media type that’s far less “fact-checked” than most readers understand. That’s ironic, since magazine fact-checkers treat books as authoritative sources.) D’Souza’s career was hatched in right-wing think tanks and funded by conservative foundations. That in itself is nothing new; today, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages serve as a full-employment act for Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute hacks.

But if you read just five paragraphs into Howard Kurtz’s piece on the Forbes flap, you notice this line: “The magazine would not make Editor in Chief Steve Forbes, who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000, available for comment.” That’s right: In case you forgot, Forbes is edited by a, pardon me, politician — a conservative GOP presidential candidate.

Perhaps this has some bearing on its willingness to launch brazenly absurd and inaccurate assaults on a Democratic president. Ya think?

So we’ve moved beyond putting the commentariat on the partisan payroll. Now, more and more of your political commentary, particularly on cable, is being delivered by actual politicians. Not people who might someday consider a career in politics, but rather, people who — like Sarah Palin — are presumed active candidates. This phenomenon cuts across parties (now we’ve got New York’s former Democratic governor hosting on CNN), but plainly it’s the Republicans who have made the most of this new revolving door. Fox News has become their shadow-cabinet government. And the pols are laughing all the way to the bank: used to be, the broadcasters got their footage for free, but now, they’re collecting checks.

In this new world, the public is forced to look at news coverage with the same jaundiced eye it has long turned on stump speeches and candidate debates. Forbes’ cover story isn’t journalism; it’s essentially a campaign attack ad. Its technique is to introduce outrageous lies into the discourse so that public figures can parrot them and spread the misinformation before the truth squad can arrive on the scene.

We shouldn’t be surprised. But neither should we expect the practitioners of this dark art to care when we wonder why they’re abandoning journalistic norms.

I do feel sorry for those self-respecting journalists laboring on Forbes’ payroll who have to carry this albatross around their professional necks. Or those employees of the Web operation who landed at Forbes when it recently acquired the blogging network True/Slant. Their predicament is likely to be one that more and more journalists face over the next couple of years.

UPDATE: CJR’s Ryan Chittum did a second, more detailed takedown of the errors and misrepresentations in D’Souza’s piece.

I hesitate to add any more verbiage to the Breitbart/Sherrod post mortem, but there’s one lesson I’m extracting that may be useful.

I do not hold it against Breitbart that he is a partisan. Most of the information I get online about politics today comes from partisans. My problem with Breitbart is that he is a partisan I do not trust, based on his track record with ACORN and other stories.

For me, the Sherrod video reduces Breitbart’s credibility to zero. This is not because he published a story that was later discredited — after all, so did many other media outlets. It is because, in the wake of overwhelming evidence that his original version of the story was inaccurate, misleading and irresponsible, he has done nothing to withdraw or disavow it.

This, to me, is the litmus test for good-faith journalism. Everyone makes mistakes, and every publication seeks scoops and exclusives, and today every news outlet is racing against the clock. Bad decisions are going to be made. If you expect to retain any shred of trust, though, you’d better cop to them and make amends when you mess up.

At Salon we once withdrew a major cover story because we came to realize that the freelance reporter we’d worked with wasn’t leveling with us. (In a later memoir, he confessed to a variety of substance abuse problems, which explained a lot in retrospect.) This was no fun, but our self-respect as journalists demanded that we take the fall.

Breitbart claims that at the time he posted the Sherrod video he didn’t know what was on the rest of it. I find that hard to believe. But if it were true, he would have only one option now that he does: fall on his sword. Withdraw and apologize. Instead, he ran a laughably narrow correction and has continued to make defensive excuses. This is why he has lost all credibility: he lacks the menschlichkeit to clean up his own mess.

One final thought: The most pernicious tactic in Breitbart’s arsenal is his habit of declaring that the little snippet he is posting is the tip of an iceberg, that he’s got way more where that came from. This gambit is straight out of the Sen. Joe McCarthy playbook, and should be called each time it surfaces.

Greg Sargent says all this in a different way:

it’s true that “both sides,” to one degree or another, let their ideological and political preferences dictate some editorial decisions, such as what stories to pursue, how to approach them, who to interview, etc. But what’s underappreciated is the degree to which the Breitbart-Fox axis goes far beyond this, openly employing techniques of political opposition researchers and operatives to drive the media narrative.

This simply has no equivalent on the left. The leading lefty media organizations have teams of reporters who — even if they are to some degree ideologically motivated — work to determine whether their material is accurate, fair, and generally based in reality before sharing it with readers and viewers. They just don’t push info — with no regard to whether it’s true or not — for the sole purpose of having maximum political impact.