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Scott Prouty: The Man Behind The 47% Video Comes Out On The Ed Show (Video)

Egberto Willies

Original blog post HERE.

Ed Schultz dedicated his Wednesday show to feature the man behind the Mitt Romney 47% video, Scott Prouty. Mr. Prouty is a hero. He understood the power of his video early on. He systematically and methodically decided how it would be released.

So who is Scott Prouty? According to the Huffington Post Prouty is a 38 year old bartender from Boca Raton, Florida. He was bartending at the $50,000 per plate fundraiser for Mitt Romney.

Prouty said that he took the camera initially because he believed that like Bill Clinton did at other occasions, Romney would have come and spoken to the staff. Of course Romney did not. He further stated that what really unsettled him was Romney’s disdain for the factory workers in China. That raised his resolved to make the tape an issue. Ironically, he seemed more concerned about the factory workers and not the 47% comment.

So how did he get this tape out? Huffington Post reports it as  follows:

On May 31, under "Romney Exposed," he began posting audio snippets to YouTube. Soon he started hitting the comment sections of The Huffington Post — not the best way to stand out among all the reader debates.

Prouty said he later posted it to Daily Kos with mixed results. The Daily Kos readers ended up bouncing him from the site, suspecting his footage was bogus. He threw up clips on Pastebin. He did it in the comments of The Washington Post’s stories. "Just trying to go build a little head of steam and get people talking about it," he said.

By late August, he said there were a few sites, including BuzzFeed, that had picked up at least one of his Romney videos. He said he had some success when he posted videos as the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on YouTube. "She came out and denied having any knowledge of it," he said. "But she linked to the video and left it on her site all weekend long."

He found James Carter, the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, who had discovered a talent for opposition research and finding gotcha videos deep in the C-Span archives. Prouty had followed Carter’s work on YouTube. "He had good sense enough to follow me back when he saw my videos after I followed him," Prouty said. "Then he had the good sense enough to contact me after that."

Prouty said he wanted Carter to help him get in touch with Mother Jones’ David Corn. He had been a big admirer of Corn’s work — especially his investigative pieces on Romney and the Hong Kong-based Global-Tech Appliances, a firm that sought to profit from U.S. outsourcing. He saw Corn on television all the time, he said. Maybe the veteran journalist could get his little film on the air. "They were picked," he said of Carter and Corn.

By late August, he said there were a few sites, including BuzzFeed, that had picked up at least one of his Romney videos. He said he had some success when he posted videos as the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on YouTube. "She came out and denied having any knowledge of it," he said. "But she linked to the video and left it on her site all weekend long."

In the interview Prouty comes across as simple and nonchalant. His actions and methods in which he released the tapes and how he used the Internet showed the sophistication we want in every citizen activist out there.

This man could have made millions early on. He chose not to. In doing so he likely ensured that the focus stayed on the video and not on him. The Right Wing would have so bastardized him that the focus would have been taken off of Romney and placed on him. We all know how easy it is in general for the Right and Fox News to manipulate the mainstream media.

The Man Behind The 47% Video

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