Posted on 07/21/2010 11:00:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Andrew Breitbart unveils a selectively edited tape to defame a federal employee, conservatives blame Barack Obama.
You want to see media bias in action? Okay — look at the conservative media reaction to the firing of Shirley Sherrod.
Sherrod is the former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee fired for supposed anti-white racism. On July 19, Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website posted a short video clip from a speech Sherrod had delivered to an NAACP gathering in March.
In the clip, Sherrod confessed to having deliberately declined on racial grounds to help a white farmer faced with a foreclosure on his farm. She was immediately terminated by the USDA and condemned by the national NAACP.
But a second look at the tape made it obvious that the tape had been severely edited, abruptly cut short. Within hours it emerged that the story on the tape was exactly the opposite of the story Breitbart had wanted to tell.
Sherrod was telling a story about overcoming her own racial antagonisms. She had repented, had helped the white farmer, had saved the farm, had formed a friendship with the farmer and his family that lasts to this day. Besides which: The episode in question dates back to 1986, long before Sherrod ever went to work at the USDA.
By the morning of July 20 the Sherrod-as-racist narrative had collapsed.
What is most fascinating about that second day, however, was the conservative reaction to the collapse. At midday on the 20th, Rush Limbaugh was still praising Breitbart: "I know that Andrew Breitbart's done great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism and so forth saying she's not gonna help a white farmer."
By the evening of the 20th, however, conservatives were backing away, acknowledging that an innocent women had been defamed.
Here's Glenn Beck :
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/07/20/naacp-and-glenn-beck-agree-people-rushed-to-judgment-on-sherrod/
Here's Rich Lowry, editor of National Review:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODQyN2I2ODRjMDA4YWY5MDlkMWY4ODk5ZDQyZmQ3MWY=
Here's Instapundit :
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/103323/%20%3Chttp://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/103323/
Here's the popular Anchoress blog at First Things :
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/2010/07/20/sherrod-blames-naacp-for-resignation/
Even the racially incendiary Eric Erickson tweeted his disquiet, and then posted this on his RedState website :
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/07/20/collecting-scalps-at-what-cost/
But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.
Breitbart went almost universally unmentioned. Erickson even justified Breitbart's falsehood as a tragic but necessary and justifiable measure of conservative self-defense:
"This is what we have become in politics because of the unrepentant race-baiting on the Left. It has become a tit for tat war of retribution. ... That war has casualties on both sides. Ms. Sherrod is the latest. It is not fair. But that’s how the Left plays and the Right must fight on offense or not fight at all. It disgusts me to have to say it, but that is so very sadly where we are."
Breitbart himself had this to say about those who would manipulate the public record for ideological purposes:
"Journalists love whistle-blowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them. Journalists love transparency. As long as they’re not the ones being exposed. No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means .... They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called "truth seekers" are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down."
But that of course was not a confession or apology. Breitbart continues to defend his own "ends justify the means" bending of the truth, as you can see here in this July 20 interview with CNN’s John King.
No, Breitbart’s indignant words on the 20th were aimed at another snippets-out-of-context scandal for the Right: the Daily Caller’s publication of quotations from the JournoList archive in which liberal activists and bloggers jeered George Stephanopoulos for asking Barack Obama about Jeremiah Wright.
Speaking on a liberal list serve, journalists had wondered how the Wright story could be stifled. One obnoxious young participant had even suggested that the story could be killed by hurling accusations of racism at conservative figures like Fred Barnes and Karl Rove. Conservatives exploded: The media were colluding to quash bad news about their beloved Obama! Only of course the Wright story was not quashed — unlike the story of Breitbart's role in Sherrod's firing, which has been, at least among conservatives.
On the phone on the evening of July 20, a friend asked me: "Can Breitbart possibly survive?" I could only laugh incredulously. I answered: "Of course he'll survive, and undamaged. The incident won't matter at all."
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.
When people talk of the "closing of the conservative mind" this is what they mean: not that conservatives are more narrow-minded than other people — everybody can be narrow minded — but that conservatives have a unique capacity to ignore unwelcome fact.
When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.
Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.
I know Frum is really a Democrat, but lets pretend he is a Republican.
When is the last time a Democrat criticized the huge LeftMedia? We constantly have right wing poseurs criticizing the tiny portion of the media that leans Right.
Yes, let's look at -- conservatives immediately cleared her name after it was obvious her comments had been taken out-of-context.
Has this CINO even commented on the MSM's refusal to cover the Justice Department's refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers? Has he criticized it or the NAACP for using false accusations of racism against the Tea Party Movement? If not, Frum has no credibility.
The full video would NEVER redeem a white person. Also, there would be plans for a Congressional hearing and criminal prosecution.
Breitbart simply reported the problem. He did good!
Nope. The NAACP edited *that* video at the 21 minute mark.
Mr. Fwum? No, “Mr. Danielle Steele”. A nothing desperate for an identity other than that of “the husband of the authoress of hundreds of ‘bodice ripper’ novels”.
Well, are we supposed to hold some guy posting a youtube video to his web site to the same standards as a major news organization doing two month’s worth of research to fake documents to nail a President?
Is there any evidence that Brietbart deliberately altered the video to make a point that was invalid? I don’t think so. His video illustrated the point he was making. Yes, it also gave a lot of people the supposedly wrong impression, but that wasn’t what he was pushing, so is it really his fault, and something he would need to be disciplined for?
Frum is an idiot. All Brietbart COULD do to the woman is post a video of her. It was people in POWER who harmed her — the NAACP and the Administration.
I do hope at least though that this incident will cool the jets of the intermitably short-fused here at FR, who are always jumping at the latest thing and running full-throttle without facts or introspection.
Check, double-check. If something looks “too good to be true”, check the source, think about how it might be biased, and how that bias might effect how you see it. Look for alternative explanations, try to find contrary evidence.
See if the story has secondary sources; check the links to see that they say what you are told, and if it’s about a story, try google to get the actual news article of the story from when it first happened.
And always remember that everybody is biased. People interpret things as they want to see them. Trust your own eyes, but not necessarily how you interpret what you are seeing. It is much better to have an iron-clad attack against your enemy tomorrow, than a half-assed attempt today that backfires.
That’s the really shocking part of this Frum piece and the liberal media response.
Every night the news shows a 10-second snippet of something. And it almost always is something that makes conservatives look bad.
So I guess now we have a right to call for those news organizations to be punished because they didn’t show the entire hour of a hearing, where we would see that the person they are quoting said a lot of other things which mitigate the quote they have given us?
After reviewing the whole thread and the video, I've come to the conclusion that Breitbart was not even trying to discredit Sherrod, he was simply showing the racism of the NAACP.
Everyone should have done the same before jumping on the smack down Breitbart bandwagon. Frum is an idiot. But we all knew that, didn't we?
“It was the audience reaction, stupid!”
That was the comment that Medved would not allow on his show today when he was pointing shame at conservatives at the same time he was shaming the Obama admin for its reaction.
Sherrod may very well have reformed, but her later message was probably lost on the racists in her NAACP audience.
Medved DID not entertain your observation, the typical closeted agit-prop Leftist that he is.
I can not even begin to understand how the argument can be made that this monologue was taken out of context? Did she say “just kidding” at the end? I can’t imagine what else was said that made everything else she said OK.
Oh, and one more thing.
When the NAACP censored Sherrod after the video came out, it was probably to pay her back for having had the effrontery of telling them to reform like herself. The audience that cheered at that point in her story where she said she didn’t help the white man as much as she could have was probably pissed that she tripped them up. Racists are vindictive devils.
Exactly!
Do you know if David Frum has been accused of going "Brockback Mountain" as well...?
Cheers!
Metaphorically, of course.
Cheers!
No, she said that she learned that whites could be victims too, and that she needed to change her own attitude toward this particular white farmer and poor whites in general. She said that she came to the farmer's aid to prevent his farm from being foreclosed, after his lawyer failed him.
That may sound like it exculpates her, but viewed in the context of the entire video, she seems as far from "post racial" as one can get. She has just traded some of her racial bigotry for class bigotry. If it were possible to remove the words "white," "black," "rich," and "poor" from Sherrod's brain, I think she would short circuit. The woman's entire being seems devoted to grievance. She sees everything through the prisms of race and class. Victimhood is a moral achievement. Black=good, poor=good, rich=evil. Whites may not necessarily be evil, but let's not forget that Southern whites routinely murdered blacks for no reason and these crimes were routinely ignored by racist white law enforcement. And so on. In Sherrod's world there is no shared humanity that unites whites and blacks unless the whites are poor.
I was interested in the crowd's reaction to her speech, thinking it would be a better measure of the NAACP's racism than the views of one speaker. Sherrod gave the crowd plenty of chances to show racial bigotry, but with one possible exception I did not see it. Still, I don't know what the NAACP crowd thought of her warped, depressing, obsessive mindset.
If she was speaking at the NAACP, she is a racist.
Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me. I wasn’t seeing it in that exact light. Probably because I was so blown away by phrases like, “his own kind” and I hadn’t heard the entire tape. I still do not know what to make of it. I do know, however, that it looks like it has been neutralized by the MSM.
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