If she shows that Breitbart made her a subject of public ridicule—when before she was an unknown—she will win easily.
Cutting/editing a tape to be misleading/misrepresenting/untruthful is grounds for defamation. Any conservative would agree.
Breitbeardy is merely a scandal monger.
You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. The portion of the tape shown was both uncut and unedited. According to your new standard, the full words and context of anything said by a person speaking in public need to be shown, for fear of being sued.
As I said, though, luckily you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
The ignorant and lazy (pick one) said the words on the tape no matter how you cut it. The MSM edits videos all
the time to shorten them for broadcast. No different here.
Her kind of lazy is what’s wrong with 80% of this once great country. The judge should slap her
with an extra fine for stupidity.
This conservative doesn’t agree with anything you said, but since I doubt you’re a conservative I think I’m on the right side.
“If she shows that Breitbart made her a subject of public ridicule—when before she was an unknown—she will win easily.”
Truth has always been sufficient defense, and from what I understand Brietbart didn’t lie. All he did was excerpt. And like I said, if you can’t take things out of context anymore, goodbye journalism.
“Cutting/editing a tape to be misleading/misrepresenting/untruthful is grounds for defamation. Any conservative would agree.”
There’s editing and then there’s editing. Brietbart excerpted, which did not involve altering the truth of what she said in any way, except to isolate it from context. Which can be misleading, but is something journalists (not that Brietbart’s a real journalist, exactly, but in this case he’s actign no different than most of the industry) literally do every single day. The way it was edited may have been misleading, but it wasn’t untruthful. He represented her words faithfully, and what’s more, linked to the full video, right? Couldn’t he argue that it’s the audience’s responsibility to get the whole story before forming an opion on her as a human being, especially if it the whole story was a mouse click away?
Also, the initial controversy was nothing more than a blip. It wasn’t until the administration overreacted in anticipation of calls for her head that never came that Sherrod was truly injured. Couldn’t Brietbart argue that it was the White House’s tone deaf, knee-jerk response that hurt her, and it was their responsibility to take the excerpt in the manner it was presented (i.e. as evidence of her history of discrimination, if not her present discrimination)?
In summation, I have to again repeat how utterly normal it is for words to be taken out of context, and how utterly inconsistent it would be to penalize Brietbart for a tactic that will no doubt proceed to be exploited unabated on the internet, on tv, and in print for people with names other than Sherrod.