Jason Mattera, editor at large at Human Events, is famous for his hardball jouralism was caught with his pants down this time. The original Breitbart.com story has been removed and the Jason Mattera videos have now been moved to “private” on YouTube. There is widespread discussion on Twitter that the person Mattera interviewed in the videos may have been a Bono impersonator. May have ! Well any fool that was listening the the interview could have noticed the answers to the question.
Check out the conversation between Mattera and fake-Bono, which is quite funny in its proper context (i.e. Jason Mattera’s “basic shoeleather journalism” resulted in his ambushing the wrong guy):
Jason Mattera: By dodging taxes on royalties are you raiding the poverty programs you purport to champion?
“Bono”: No.
Jason Mattera: No? Don’t you want governments to be generous with other people’s money and not yours?
“Bono”: I don’t have control over that.
Jason Mattera: How do you not have control over that? It’s your company. Are you not in charge of your own company?
“Bono”: It’s not my company.
Jason Mattera: You have no say in what U2 does?
“Bono”: Not particularly.
Jason Mattera: You don’t? You don’t have a say in what U2 does?
“Bono”: No.
Pavel Sfera only impersonates Bono as far as appearance, and does not do interviews in-character. Jason Mattera acknowledged the error, saying that he “got punked”. That’s not entirely accurate, though, since Mattera himself initiated the interview. Sort of like when someone steals a bait car.
Well, now Bono knows that Jason Mattera is after him. Perhaps he’ll keep a few impersonators on hand in the future. Actually, this isn’t a bad way to deal with ambush journalism in general.
The ambush video has been set to private, but has re-emerged via other outlets. You can see the Jason Mattera video below
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