Posted on 07/22/2010 7:40:30 AM PDT by Kaslin
The fiasco of the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod has become one of the major stories of the day. It began when BigGovernment.com released a video given to Andrew Breitbart, which seemed to suggest, as Breitbart wrote, “video evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient and in another clip from the same event a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist.”
What irked Breitbart — correctly — was that the Tea Party was being branded as racist by the NAACP and other liberal media outlets. As we have now learned, the original video handed to Breitbart included only part of the Sherrod speech. It was best explained by Roger Mackey in a New York Times blog:
Ms. Sherrod and her supporters said the edited clip was misleading because the excerpts were taken from a longer story she told about overcoming prejudice and learning, from working with this white farmer, that her job was to help poor people regardless of their race. After the N.A.A.C.P. reviewed a longer tape of the speech (embedded at the top of this post), the group said in a statement posted on its Web site, “we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart,” the conservative blogger who drew attention to the speech.
The NAACP then backed down, releasing a statement indicating that after reviewing her entire speech and listening to the testimony of white farmers whom Sherrod actually helped, “the fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech. They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm. Moreover, this incident and the lesson it prompted occurred more than 20 years before she went to work for U.S.D.A.”
Sherrod, in her full speech, made it clear that what she was trying to convey was a change in her perspective, from seeing things only through the prism of race, when it was a matter of poor people of all colors needing help that was being denied them. She learned when “it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those that have and not so much – it is about white and black but, it opened my eyes because I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands and felt, O.K., I’ve done my job.” The white farmer then had his farm foreclosed.
The white lawyer Sherrod had sent him to did not help stop the foreclosure, but told the farmer to let the farm go. At that point, Sherrod sprung to his defense and went on to help him save his farm. From this experience she learned “it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t … And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people, those who don’t have access the way others have.”
After finally hearing her story, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack promised to review the decision asking for her resignation. But there is more. On CNN, Sherrod told the story of how Undersecretary of Agriculture Cheryl Cook called her three times as she was driving to clients in Athens, Georgia, a three and a half hour car drive. “They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said. The undersecretary told her that the White House wanted her to resign, because “you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
The irony is that Glenn Beck did not show the video on his program at all that day. On the following day’s program, Beck came on the air — before the full video of Sherrod’s entire March speech had been made available by Breitbart and by the NAACP — and told his program’s viewers that Sherrod “shouldn’t have been fired.” Why, Beck asked, would they force a resignation based on a 24-year-old incident that might have been “taken entirely out of context”?
As for Breitbart, we have to ask: Who gave him the incomplete video? Why didn’t he ask whether the entire speech was in the clip? Not having done that, it was clearly irresponsible for him to run it. Perhaps it was a setup. At any rate, he should have asked for the complete speech before releasing it, since the subsequent rush to judgment — including the forced resignation of Sherrod — was the result. Breitbart appeared this morning on ABC’s Good Morning, America, where he said that:
The video shows racism and when the NAACP is going to charge the Tea Party with racism … I’m going to show you it happens on the other side. This is not about Shirley Sherrod. This is about the smears that have gone against the Tea Party. What this video clearly shows is a standard that the Tea Party has not been held to.
Indeed, Breitbart refused to back down from what he said was simply his intent to show the double standard applied to the Tea Party, and he refused to apologize for showing the incomplete video that cost Sherrod her job. “They were clapping racist behavior,” he said of the audience who heard her speech. Refusing to apologize, he said “the audience showed racism.”
The NAAP acknowledged that they were “snookered by Fox News and Andrew Breitbart,” and apologized for their condemnation of Sherrod and asking for her removal. Breitbart, having now seen the entire speech, should do the same. Sherrod herself blamed the NAACP for throwing her to the wolves, without calling her and even looking at the video, which they had.
As CNN’s Campbell Brown told NAACP chief Benjamin Jealous:
I don’t believe you were snookered. You allowed yourself to be snookered and you’re the ones to blame here because you had the tape in your possession and you could have easily watched it and known the full context of her remarks. You didn’t have to take your information solely from these conservative bloggers you now say snookered you.
As for Fox News, the Special Report with Bret Baier did not show the video, and on the panel, Charles Krauthammer said she should not have been dismissed and was owed an apology. Moreover, Shepard Smith, who anchors the 7 o’clock news show, called Andrew Breitbart’s website one that is “widely discredited” and posts “inaccurate” videos “edited to the point where the world was deceived.” So Fox News as a whole not only came off guilt-free, one of its anchors even blasted Andrew Breitbart. Yet Sherrod herself told Media Matters, the left-wing media-watch site, that “Fox News would like to take us [African-Americans] back to…where black people were looking down…not looking white people in the face, not being able to compete for a job, and not be a whole person.” Talking for the network, Baier said, “Mrs. Sherrod, that is just not true.”
Clearly Sherrod, although she herself had blamed the NAACP for not checking out the small edited video clip, now joined in the same spurious attack on Fox as the civil rights organization previously had done. Yet some on Fox News were guilty of a rush to judgement — particularly Fox News top rated pundit Bill O’Reilly, who showed the incomplete and misleading video and demanded on the air that Sherrod be fired. So did Sean Hannity, who called it “just the latest in a series of racial incidents.” Newt Gingrich then told him that firing here “for viciously racist attitudes was exactly the right thing to do.”
Both of them did not consider that the tape might have been incomplete. But even more guilty is the White House, whose pressure — which of course they deny having been made — resulted in the secretary of Agriculture’s demand that she be removed from the job. Why would the administration not phone Sherrod, ask for her side of the story, and first ask for the video of the complete speech before acting? Is it that because having branded the Tea Party as racist, they clearly could not afford to look like they were allowing someone who appeared to be a black racist to stay on the job, after she confessed in a speech how she did not help a white farmer?
As we learned tonight, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack blamed himself, said it was all his own fault, and exonerated the White House completely, although he previously noted that the demand she be fired came from the president. Now, he noted that the White House had asked him to apologize, and to quickly offer Mrs. Sherrod her job back.
The New York Times report noted: “Ms. Sherrod took to the airwaves on Tuesday, especially CNN, where she said that the N.A.A.C.P. was ‘the reason why this happened.’ ‘They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that,’ she said. Mr. Breitbart reached a similar conclusion, though from a different perspective. ‘They’re trying to make this about me and Shirley Sherrod. This is about the N.A.A.C.P.,’ he said by phone. He said that the civil rights group had ‘spent an inordinate amount of airtime trying to brand the Tea Party as racist’ while tolerating racism itself.”
Breitbart is partially correct. The NAAcP has shown its irrelevance many times, trying to act as if the U.S. is still in the segregated 40s and 50s, when it was a necessary and major civil rights organization with a mission to complete. It has a stake in charging racism where it no longer exists. But the organization’s head acknowledged he was disturbed about the audience reaction when Sherrod was accounting her first response of not wanting to help a white farmer, and pledged to look into it. Breitbart is also right that the group snookered itself, and it was not his fault. But this is not an excuse for his own failures. He too must apologize for putting out a video without checking whether or not it was complete, and considering what it might do to Sherrod.
It was not simply about the Tea Party. Thus, David Frum is correct when he writes: “There will be no apology or statement of regret for distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone. There will be not even a flutter of interest among conservatives in discussing Breitbart’s role. By the morning of July 21, the “Fox & Friends” morning show could devote a segment to the Sherrod case without so much as a mention of Breitbart’s role. The central fact of the Sherrod story has been edited out of the conservative narrative, just as it was edited out of the tape itself.” So this conservative is not writing Breitbart out of the narrative. He too must apologize and admit his error. If he does not, and persists in saying it is just about the Tea Party, he only hurts his own credibility and reputation. Sometimes those with the best of intentions can become their own worst enemy.
Update: Thursday, July 22, 10:04 am, EST
I cannot answer each of my critics directly, but their points are the same: Breitbart does not owe an apology; the NAACP and the Left are exclusively at fault; Shirley Sherrod is a Marxist or perhaps even a communist; etc etc etc. Here is my response:
Last night, even Bill O’Reilly apologized to Sherrod for running the Breitbart released video and for not putting her comments in their entire context. Is O’Reilly now also a tool of the Left? Hardly, and he did the right thing. Breitbart, after hearing the NAACP’s attacks on the Tea Party, rememebered he had asked for the relevant parts of the video (not the entire speech) and then saw it, and released it to prove that the NAACP itself was playing a racist card. That means he responded with his own one-sided and misleading racial card, without trying to see if Sherrod’s entire comment proved his point.
Virtually everyone who has watched the speech, even Charles Krauthammer, notes that her speech was one of inspiration and reconciliation. Despite the horror of having her own father murdered by the Klan and a cross burned on their lawn in 1965, Sherrod calls for all of us working together, and transcending racial appeals. It is, as many have pointed out, an American story—not a racial story preached by the racial hucksters of the Left. True, at times she contradicts herself. In my blog entry, I included her own misguided statements about Fox News to Media Matters, and said she was wrong and losing her own high ground. But she has not repeated this on the numerous other programs she has been on.
The simple reason Andrew Breitbart owes an apology is this: He alone released the edited video- that did not include the rest of Sherrod’s story, in which she shows how her original reaction was wrong and how she moved on, and then helped the white farmer as best as she could- thereby indeed saving him from foreclosure and saving his farm. He and his wife have been Sherrod’s friends since then. Breitbart now says over and over “They made it about her,” as he did on a TV interview. No, HE made it about her, by releasing the misleading video. If he refuses to own up to his mistake, he has then squandered any credibility he may have had. So, I repeat: Andrew, apologize to her and to all of us.
Bump!
“This video has exposed the racists at the NAACP.
If Sherrod was a pillar of fairness, she would have admonished the audience....”
Oh, and you could “Just like Obama admonished his fellow parishioners cheering in Jeremiah Wright’s church.”
The video of that landmark moment is coming up any day now, right? (It might be best to add a sarcasm tag so you can point to it when your “testimony” is posted out of context.)
What “profound consequences”?
The video clearly demonstrates the racists in the ranks of the NAACP.
The video has gone viral and ANYONE that thinks this will ultimately hurt Conservatives more than the Left needs to RUN away from the television...
No. You keep making excuses fro the racism in the NAACP and Sherrod. There is no excuse. Breitbart exposed them.
What you don't seem to understand is that this isn't about Sherrod anymore. It's about the purposeful obfuscation with respect to what the import of her "speech" was that day in front of the NAACP.
Maybe she's a Marxist, maybe she's a racists, maybe she's a child-beating axe murderer. It's ALL immaterial to Brietbart's characterization (or mischaracterization) of her speech, and the excerpts of the speech he posted online.
You asserted that it (Breitbart's story) "wasn't about Sherrod", but quite clearly from Breitbarts original story it was ALL about Sherrod.
"It's not the first time you have been called a troll."
Well, if I'm a "troll", then I'm in excellent company with the likes of Anne Coulter, Jonah Goldberg and Powerlineblog.
Conservatives, to include conservative journalist, shouldn't engage in the same kind of yellow journalism that the liberals so frequently use. It's too bad you don't agree.
Breitbart had 2 exerpts and he aired them both on the story..the second vid she explains her “revelation”..so it WAS there in the story..not just her actual story when she did discriminate against the white farmer.
That's the only rational take, why in the world should we line up and ask Breitbart to apologize for pointing out racism in the NAACP?
Her complete speech was more egregious than the excerpt.
And you still haven't addressed the links that I posted to you.
I guess you don't pay attention to the news....
Riiiiight. How's about a little proof of that, son? Or is honesty beyond your capabilities?
You mean the same news that would have you believe obama is still popular?
You continually hammer at Breitbart as if exposing racism was a crime. That’s making excuses by pointing a finger at someone else. He exposed them. For that he has to be brought down.
No, I did. I said that it was immiterial. You're saying that just because she's a racist - and she very well may be - that gives someone license to take her out of context. It doesn't. It's like the liberals saying "fake, but accurate". It's wrong when they do it, and it's wrong when we do it.
"Her complete speech was more egregious than the excerpt."
I don't see how anyone giving a fair reading to that entire speech can make that assertion. She says she acted in a way based on the color of a man's skin, and she's critical of her own actions. She's being circumspect.
THIS STORY IS ABOUT THE PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE WHO LAUGHED DURING HER SPEECH, THEREBY AFFIRMING *NOW* THE RACISM SHE PRACTICED *THEN*.
THIS VIDEO PROVES THAT THE NAACP HARBORS RACISTS.
The left claims that conservative news broadcasts/blogs are hopelessly biased and skewed, but then, rather than rally to support Sherrod, they can't distance themselves from her fast enough.
Finally, we have the specter of the Obama Administration being jerked to and fro by Fox News, fashioning his statements and actions so as not to appear racist.
The idea that Obama gives more than passing interest to what the media says makes me very uncomfortable. I want my president to be above the fray. I can't recall a single instance where W, who was barraged with negativity from the press, ever engaged in these gutter debates with the media.
Post-racial president? That's a good one.
In what post? And that's "immaterial".
that gives someone license to take her out of context.
Take her out of context?! OMG! Her whole speech in much worse than the excerpt!
She says she acted in a way based on the color of a man's skin, and she's critical of her own actions.
While accusing Republicans of being racist for opposing Obama. In the SAME speech! LOLOL!!! Oh yeah. She's changed. And the NAACP didn't laugh and applaud. Listen, too many have seen the video. You can try to tell them they didn't see what they saw but it ain't gonna work out for you.
NAACP Video: Sherrod Says Republicans Are Racists for Opposing Obama
Saint Shirley Sherrod: Shut Down BigGovernment.com for Good of the Country
I read through the entire thread through #152 and your post rang true for me.
I've seen a quote posted here and there on threads that says something to the effect, the problem isn't that Obama got elected; we will survive that. The problem is that so many people saw fit to vote for him.
In that same vein, I worry about our future, if the quality of thought, opinion and analysis demonstrated on this thread is indicative of conservatives in general.
First, Breitbart owes no one an apology. He isn't required to give the presentation those who disagree with him would desire. He gave a truthful account. The full tape, if anything, is more d@mning. She's a racist. I wonder why so many want to give her credit for being a kinder, gentler racist? If you buy that line, shame on you.
Those who say more context was required somehow resist the notion that context should include any other facts about her life or any statements she made before or since. They will underline the fact...she's a racist. That context includes the fact that she's giving a friendly presentation to the NAACP. That is, by definition, racist.
She was shown using her own words. News stories never include every fact; they are limited by space. No clip of a speech ever shows the entire speech.
If this were a distorted quote, the full clip would show that. The facts of her life would contradict it.
No, we're talking about this because the full clip, the other facts we've learned, and her statements since support the notion she's an unrepentant racist.
Sherrod is not the victim of a press lynching. In fact, her only qualification for the job seems to be her color. She's the recipient of stolen goods. She rode the race tiger and one day it turned on her.
The NAACP and the Obama Machine were not snookered by anyone. First, the entire tape was in the possession of the NAACP. Second, they do not consider Breitbart to be a reliable source on anything. Third, the president of the NAACP was supposedly in the audience. If you buy the victim nonsense, again, shame on you.
She was thrown under the bus by both of them for political reasons, then, I guess, pulled out from under. The facts did not change, but the politics did...you don't throw your base under the bus. If you can post here day after day, and be marinated in the idea that "Journolists" lie, and swallow any other interpretation, then...shame on you.
The press has succeeded in making this about Breitbart, even among some so-called conservatives. They have appeared here and on other threads. Again, for those who swallowed the hook...shame on you.
That's the brilliance of Breitbart; he threw this out and the fools acted in type.
As for conservatives, I'm convinced some haven't bothered to define racism in any objective terms. If they had, they would recognize Sherrod as a kindler, gentler racist, but a racist just the same. I wonder if part of the issue is white guilt, perhaps "the soft bigotry of low expectations?" In any case, if you buy any of that...shame on you.
While I have little patience for racists, I have none whatsoever for race pimps.
So, some I suppose will come to understand; some never will. Then, there's a couple others on this thread (and others) who seemingly fit into neither category.
One seems to be confused about the phrase "The Court of Public Opinion." It's not a real court, and rules of evidence and finding of guilt do not apply. Surely an adult would know this, and not insist that conservatives must meet this standard...
The other seems to view conservatism as a spectator sport, one he has endless interest in faultfinding about, but not a demonstrable participant.
I think we have those on this thread who are just wrong. I think we have a few fools, and I believe we have a few trolls.
Is she really any better than former Sen. Byrd and KKK member?
Well?
Post # 154.
"Maybe she's a Marxist, maybe she's a racists, maybe she's a child-beating axe murderer. It's ALL immaterial to Brietbart's characterization (or mischaracterization) of her speech, and the excerpts of the speech he posted online."
And, you're now the spelling police? That should keep you busy.
"OMG! Her whole speech in much worse than the excerpt!"
Ann Coulter doesn't agree....
""The whole key to this story is that Andrew Breitbart was set up. He was sent a tape that, as we now know, was massively out of context. It did look like this woman was saying something racist. When she first said it was taken out of context . . . we've heard that before from politicians telling racist jokes. This is the first time in world history it was literally taken out of context."It was a lovely speech. Of course the White House reacted that way -- of course you reacted the way you did. Anyone would have. I think Breitbart ought to reveal his source, because he was set up. This was a fraud. The person who sent the edited tape has to know what the full speech said, and whomever sent only that segment to Andrew Breitbart is the one who should apologize to Shirley Sherrod."
I'll have to side with Coulter. Let me guess, Coulter's a troll and Dummie plant, right?
I continue to hammer Breitbart because he posted something out of context.
That's making excuses by pointing a finger at someone else.
A rational person would come to a different conclusion.
He exposed them. For that he has to be brought down.
You're still making excuses for Breitbart's lack of integrity on this matter. He failed to give the whole story -- it appears that he failed even to consider the possibility that there's more to the story -- and he got caught. And now he's trying to spin his way out of it.
Were a leftist to do that, I'm sure you'd be right up there in front, casting stones. But you're not doing so here.... amazing.
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