Pfreak out: Pfizer manager melts down in coffee shop

“The question is,” James O’Keefe says at one point, “why is he calling the police?” The bigger question is whether Jordon Walker will have a job at Pfizer after this epic meltdown. Their director of R&D strategic operations couldn’t decide whether he felt unsafe in the room with O’Keefe’s owner, or whether he wanted them to remain locked in coffee shop with him until police arrive. The first video made him look foolish; this one made Walker look insane.

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Whether one likes PV’s undercover or interview tactics, this video is truly a must-see trainwreck. In the end, Walker’s lucky not to have been arrested for assault, battery, and maybe just for a psych evaluation. Here’s another question — did the coffee shop commit a form of unlawful detention by refusing to unlock the door?

Watch carefully, because there’s a test at the end, or something:

God bless the police! The officer at the end basically couldn’t give two rips about what took place, and who could blame him? Either he’d have to arrest everyone and let his watch commander sort it out, or go back to actual police work.

He chose … wisely. I want to buy that man a beer. Off-duty, of course.

Still, let’s unpack this a bit. The journalistic use of undercover video remains a topic of debate regarding ethics, but it also has a very long history in establishment media outlets. This, however, wasn’t the model followed here. O’Keefe may have gotten Walker to the coffee shop on a pretense, but he walked in there with a microphone and a video crew. If Walker didn’t want to comment, he could have said so and left. (A very good policy, which it has been since CBS’ 60 Minutes perfected the ambush-interview model in the 1970s.)

No one was committing a crime — at least, not at that point. Walker’s call to the police was a hysterical overreaction, one seemingly fueled by too much social-media ingestion of woke slogans. Crimes didn’t get initiated until Walker grabbed the iPad and smashed it and then started a melee. And again, arguably the shop created a potential liability by locking O’Keefe and his crew in the store when they expressed a desire to leave.

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But as Tom Hanks said wryly near the end of That Thing You Do!, “no one’s going to jail, son.” One might imagine that someone will be heading to the unemployment office soon, however. The first video was bad enough, but at least explicable in the terms that Walker claimed here — that he was lying to impress what he thought was a date. (If he was lying, that is.) After watching this meltdown, though, just how sanguine will Pfizer execs be in trusting Walker with its strategic decisions on R&D? Especially if, as Walker claims here, that involves public relations?

That’s the biggest question emerging from this encounter. That, and what brand of beer that cop prefers. It’s on me.

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John Stossel 4:30 PM | December 08, 2024
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