In reporting on conservative activist James O'Keefe's latest absurd adventure, major media coverage acknowledged it was a flop and something of a joke, except for the New York Times.

O'Keefe held a press conference to announce that his group Project Veritas had released an undercover video of the Clinton campaign allowing a Canadian to give a Project Veritas operative money so that she could purchase a Clinton t-shirt, which was a campaign product that could not be legally purchased by a non-American. At his event O'Keefe presented the incident as if it were a major scandal, while most of the press reported that it was at best a trivial infraction of less than $80.

Bloomberg Politics compared the offense to “jaywalking,” National Journal described O'Keefe's press conference as a “vortex of political absurdity” and noted that “we had been snookered in­to an­oth­er sup­posedly sa­la­cious re­lease from O'Keefe's or­gan­iz­a­tion.” The Los Angeles Times said the story, “billed as a blockbuster,” was “hardly the stuff of a Pulitzer Prize. ” The event and revelation were so underwhelming that a reporter from the Daily Beast asked O'Keefe, “Are you sure it's not a joke?”

The New York Times' Alan Rappeport, in an article headlined “James O'Keefe, Political Sleuth,” was far more charitable than the rest of the media. Rappeport wrote that O'Keefe “fired an opening salvo” in 2016 coverage and “campaigns were put on notice on Tuesday.”

The Times accepted O'Keefe's framing of the exchange between the Canadian woman and the Project Veritas staffer, writing, “Mr. O'Keefe made the case that the video showed a willingness by the campaign to skirt laws that forbid taking donations from foreigners by using a conduit.” In fact the video shows a Clinton staffer pointing out that a foreign national is prohibited from buying the t-shirt in question.

Rappeport proceeded to parrot O'Keefe's argument by noting, “Foreign donations are a sensitive subject for the Clintons, as their family foundation has been under scrutiny for accepting money from overseas.” The Times has repeatedly misinformed its readers on the nature of donations to the Clinton Foundation. To reiterate, this is in reference to a $75 transaction over a t-shirt.

The paper even sought comment from the Federal Election Commission, reporting that “at least four commissioners would have to agree that there was a violation before any penalties could be imposed.”

While the Times noted that reporters attending O'Keefe's presentation snickered at the obvious absurdity of the occasion, the Times report gave O'Keefe's deceptive claims an enormous and largely uncritical platform.