Andrew Breitbart Owes Shirley Sherrod and Us an Apology

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:

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:

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 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.

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.

In Defense of Andrew Breitbart
by Dan Riehl
Posted 07/22/2010 ET

The media and progressive-left Democrats now appear in a rush to convict Andrew Breitbart of shoddy journalism, while exonerating Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP from charges of abiding racism within their ranks. Both Sherrod and the NAACP have charged the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party with racism, while offering less proof than Breitbart did of the racism he correctly alleged. In many cases, the Left has outright manufactured evidence of racism regarding Tea Party events, yet no one has raised a voice about that slander at all. If one didn’t know better, this wouldn’t be today’s news, but an Orwellian script circa 1984.

At approximately 17 minutes into the now-released full video of the event, Sherrod can be heard relaying a tale from her past in which she initially failed to help a white farmer with the full effort she would reserve for a black farmer.

The assembled crowd of card-carrying members of the NAACP took great pleasure in that, their laughter was not nervous at all. That is a contemporaneous expression of racism by today’s politically correct standards, not racism from some 40 years ago.

Sherrod later says, “It’s not so much about white…” then catches herself and says, “It IS about white and black.” Perhaps Sherrod should explain why, even today, color is so centrally important in her work, be it at the Agriculture Department or elsewhere.

Breitbart’s web-posting of the speech showed more racism at one NAACP event than those charging Republicans and Tea Parties with racism have yet to produce after making accusations for months on end. The people making that charge include both Sherrod and the NAACP, neither of which has produced any proof. But it is Breitbart who should be convicted for false charges in the court of public opinion? That is totally absurd given the actual facts.

Sherrod twice decried present-day racism, as if it was 400 years ago. That suggests a person whose views on race have not truly changed at all. But she doesn’t stop there. Sherrod says, “I haven’t seen such mean-spirited people as I have seen lately over this issue, healthcare. Some of the racism we thought was buried, didn’t it surface.”

In Sherrod’s world, no one is allowed to object to a significant Obama-supported policy change impacting the healthcare of all Americans without being labeled a racist. Clearly Sherrod sees everything through the lens of color or race. If her view is not racist, it is supremely ignorant and unfit for a public official. It is meant to marginalize any and all legitimate opposition to a political act. Sherrod is merely projecting her own racism into a perfectly rational, legitimate political debate so as to avoid it. That is not democracy; it is race-based demagogy commonly employed by racists everywhere. And still she was not done.

During the Bush years, says Sherrod, “We didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black President.” Gone is any valid argument over actual policy, fiscal restraint, government growth, or control of healthcare—supported or opposed by entire national political parties. In Sherrod’s world, everything is all and only about race. If that isn’t a tenet of racism, then what is? Without ignorant race-based presumptions, otherwise known as racism, Sherrod’s entire scope of political argument falls apart.

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said America is a nation of cowards on matters of race. He was correct, but in a manner he likely didn’t predict. The racism Breitbart revealed is the racism of the Shirley Sherrods of the progressive-leftist Democratic Party and the NAACP. Afraid to honestly look at and address that, the usual leftist suspects are simply turning the tables as a distraction in a weak effort to instead attack Breitbart.

Breitbart did exactly what he set out and claimed to do, put the inherent racism of the NAACP and the American left on full display.

Additionally troubling are Sherrod’s race-based political views that amount to Marxism. She sees an America in thirds. Evil capitalists are at the top, exploiting racist divisions to maintain control. She argues that whites were deliberately propped up to make them feel superior to blacks, which they apparently still do in Sherrod’s view. Blacks then bring up the rear, seemingly oppressed by all. The racism in that view is inherent and severe, no matter how much she would try and dismiss it with an anecdote or two. Clearly in Sherrod’s view, what is needed is the type of government-dictated economy more like a Marxist state, than the America we know and live in today.

Sadly, Sherrod wants to pass on that view to young black Americans. How tragic that she would saddle a next generation of black Americans with such an ill considered, ignorant, utterly divisive and ridiculous view.

If there’s anyone who needs to apologize, it is a Shirley Sherrod unfit for public service and the NAACP—not Andrew Breitbart, who did precisely what he claimed he set out to do.

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