“THERE ARE PROBLEMS WITH THE TRUTH THESE DAYS”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Feb. 26, 2020) — A video released Wednesday morning by Project Veritas depicts an ABC News producer and veteran journalist criticizing the way in which the network reports the news, particularly news of a political nature.
ABC News responded by suspending correspondent David Wright, an award-winning journalist who has been with the network for two decades.
The video, heralded by Project Veritas on Tuesday, was released as “Part 2” of its “ExposeABC” series.
Project Veritas founder an President James O’Keefe introduces the video by accusing ABC of “corruption” and explaining that the footage of Wright and producer Andy Fies emanated from the network’s coverage of the New Hampshire primaries held on February 11.
Founded in 2010, Project Veritas uses “undercover” journalists to engage in candid conversations with its intended targets, which have included teachers’ union leaders, political campaign staffers, journalists, and politicians themselves. Videos of staffers for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) released in 2009 led to Congress’s defunding of the voter-registration organization later that year.
In his conversation with PV’s undercover journalist, Wright said that ABC News is constantly seeking to report “the outrage of the day” as opposed to news the average American can use. He also pointed to an example of a journalist at the network who reported erroneously on a recent story and was “suspended.”
“I feel that the truth suffers,” Wright says in the video at :53. “Fake news abounds. There are problems with the truth these days,” he said at 1:55.
Wright further described ABC as “a profit center, a promotion center” which features Disney and “Marvel” characters stemming from its ownership by The Walt Disney Company. Disney also owns Marvel Entertainment, LLC and the sports channel ESPN.
In his conversation with the PV journalist, Wright described himself as “a socialist.”
It was Fies’s view that ABC does “not understand voters” and reduces elections to “a horse race.” He said that ABC reporters should leave the confines of New York City and actually speak to voters to discover, among other things, why they like Donald Trump. “We want conflict,” Fies said of ABC’s political reporting. At that point Wright added that ABC’s coverage “used to be better” and that in his view, CBS and NBC follow the same business model.
According to “Deadline” on Wednesday morning, ABC said the video is “heavily edited” but at the same time, suspended Wright and will reassign him to a non-politics desk “when he returns.”
Wright’s Wikipedia page states, as does O’Keefe, that Wright was educated at Harvard University and the University of Oxford (UK). He has extensive experience reporting from war zones, on Pope John Paul II until his death, on worldwide conservation efforts and the 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns.