Columbia Journalism Professor Reacts to Investigation with Sophomoric Rant

On Monday, Project Veritas released its first installment of our investigation, “To Catch a Journalist.”

Within the video, we interviewed Columbia Journalism School Associate Professor and Pultizer Prize winner Dale Maharidge.

Maharidge’s impressive background includes ten years at Stanford University as a visiting professor and bylines within The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation and Mother Jones 

among others.

Given his distinction within what he describes as the “Ivory Tower”  Project Veritas was surprised to receive a profanity-laced email apparently from Mr. Maharidge at 5:36 in the morning. We contacted Dale Maharidge about the email and posting and he declined to comment. The email simply read:

Hey shitheads,

Check out my comments about you:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150441931443745&set=a.227490473744.164438.73520048744&type=1&theater

Fuck you, man. Bring it on.

Dale Maharidge

Maharidge, who admittedly stayed up through the night wrote an initial post on his Facebook account (he has since attempted to revise and tone down his comments) disparaging Project Veritas and James O’Keefe.

Within Maharidge’s early morning rant, he went on to state, “O’Keefe does his so-called journalism for. He is a toady of the bankers and 1 percent . . . Michael S. Williamson and I have done our work for the 99 percent.”

Maharidge then segued into a rambling macho-flash paragraph that was then deleted in a duplicate post later in the day:

“This is fun because O’Keefe is so stupid. Remember: you have to laugh. Or you cry. And this dude ain’t cryin’. Dude’s from Cleveland. . .a dying steel town. . . I’ve lived the shit. . .lots of shit. . . .I’ve walked through fire and chortled about it, have had guns pulled on me–and a lot worse. I should be dead. Two times over. Nothing scares me.”

He continued:

“I may now reside in the Ivory Tower, a house of poodles at the moment, but I’m a street-fighting hound dog with lots of scars. I’m a mixed-breed mutt, a college dropout, a steelworker who escaped the fires of the mills that are still licking my ass and want to pull me back, the son of a WWII veteran who was screwed by this country when he came home with a piece of Japanese steel in his back and severe traumatic brain injury for which he was never treated. . .my father was ratfucked. . . I grew up knowing which side of the tracks I lived on. . . I have no right to be where I am now.”

Maharidge also took a moment for a grammar lesson within his post — which we appreciate as we caught a few typos ourselves after the Monday release:

“Note: In the transcribed interview shown on screen early in the video, O’Keefe misspells ‘perish.’ He wrote ‘parish.’ This illiteracy tells you who we are dealing with. This guy is not the brightest bulb in the marquee. He may correct that error after reading this. . . but too late, dude. You needed to read some books and understand the dictionary before spouting off. . .”

In closing, the Columbia professor had this to tell us directly:

“I do hope he takes my advice and stops doing the kind of chickenshit stunt that he pulled. What a waste of his time and life–and of my time. I laughed my ass off when I saw the piece. It’s actually worth watching as parody–if your readers want a laugh. Sorry kid, if that’s ‘gotcha journalism,’ you have to do better. I would have said the same thing if he’d whipped out a camera and asked me on the record. (An idea: try that next time.) Sam Stein is a great old school journalist who works long, long days to get his stories. Maybe he drinks with sources or not. Does it matter? At least he is doing real journalism and not the fake stuff like O’Keefe & Co.”

Since founding Project Veritas, our work has resulted in the resignations of top executives at National Public Radio, a congressional vote to defund NPR, worker retraining within Medicaid offices and accompanying investigations by the attorneys general in Ohio and Virginia.