over the past, very few years. Shock jocks and dishonest media count
on it. Even if exposed the public will forget as soon as another, maybe
totally false blast can be reported or created. History and just plain
memory and the ability to think though what's presented are severely
impaired and masses can be manipulated, thereby. That's probably
the most important lesson to be grasped while it all blazes through.
I'm sending this article out of the dozens floating about because it
displays the power and breadth of these dynamics. Frightening.
Ed
PS. Rachel Maddow, properly lauded in this article, made a serious
error in saying, several times, this was about politics, not race. The
LA Times got it right in yesterday's editorial 'Post-Racial" Ask Sherrod:
"That this message was twisted by those seeking to worsen racial
divisions is the most tragic aspect of this affair."
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/71-71/2491-laffaire-sherrod
L'Affaire Sherrod
Charles Kaiser
R.S.N. Wednesday, July 21, 2010
A completely discredited right-wing blogger posts an edited video which
seems to convict a black Agriculture department official of racism. Fox
News runs the distorted clip continuously on all of its shows Monday.
Before giving Shirley Sherrod a chance to tell her side of the story, the
Agriculture department demands and receives the resignation of the head of
its rural development office in Georgia.
Sherrod said the final call came from Cheryl Cook, an undersecretary at
the Department of Agriculture. White House officials, she said, told her to
pull her car off the road and offer her resignation -- because the
controversy was "going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."
No one with any sense would credit anything posted by the blogger in
question, Andrew Breitbart, after multiple investigations have revealed that
the ACORN videos he posted last year were heavily edited and completely
misleading.
The fact that the Obama Administration jumped to fire its own official
on the basis of evidence provided by Breitbart and exploited by Fox is as
shameful as it is inexplicable.
Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs apologized
to Sherrod:
"Without a doubt, Miss Sherrod is owed an apology," Gibbs said at his
afternoon briefing. "I would do so on behalf of this administration."
[Second Update: an hour after Politico reported that apology, Times White
House Correspondent Sheryl Gay Stolberg hadn't bothered to add that to her
story either. Third Update: by 4:15 PM, it was finally in her story.]
In the edited version of the video, Sherrod appeared to say that she had
not given her full support to a farmer facing foreclosure because he was
white. What Breitbart left out were the facts that 1) this took place
twenty-five years ago and 2) the full video makes it clear that after
struggling with herself, Sherrod realized that the white farmer deserved
just as much help as the black farmer.
By mid-day yesterday, Breitbart's allegation had been completely
discredited by CNN, after the white farmer in question, Roger Spooner, and
his wife, Eloise, said that it was only because of Sherrod's intervention
that they had been able to hold on to their farm a quarter century ago.
Breitbart, the idiot right-wing blogger, responded to the CNN interview
by attacking John King for accepting the farmer's "purported story" and
questioning whether Mrs. Spooner was really Mr. Spooners wife.
All this was the subject of one of the most incompetent stories FCP has
ever read in The New York Times. Written by Sarah Wheaton many hours after
the farmer had appeared on television, it should have led with the farmer's
repudiation of the allegation of racism.
Instead, it never reported anything about what the farmer had said on
television. Inexplicably, the story led this way: "The president of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People apologized
Tuesday to a black civil servant whose ouster the civil rights organization
had originally cheered."
It is true, of course, that the N.A.A.C.P. behaved as badly as the Obama
administration by excoriating Sherrod before it had investigated the
allegation against her. But it is also true that by far the most important
news of the day was the fact that the farmer Sherrod had supposedly
discriminated against was now describing her as a hero.
Wheaton also identified Andrew Breitbart as "a conservative blogger
known for promoting videos that emerged last year and ultimately brought
down ACORN, the community organizing group" - without mentioning that those
videos had been completely discredited after it was revealed how Breitbart
had edited them.
The person who owned the story last night was Rachel Maddow, who exposed
Breitbart's fraud, interviewed an embarrassed Benjamin T. Jealous, the head
of the N.A.A.C.P.-and put the blame for the whole catastrophe squarely were
it belonged:
This is what Fox News does, this is how they are different from other
news organizations. This is why the White House argued months ago that Fox
should be treated as a media organization but not as a normal news
organization, because they don't treat news the way a normal news
organization treats news. Just like the fake ACORN controversy, Fox News
knows that it has a role in this dance....
Fox does what Fox does, that is dog bites man, that is not interesting.
What is interesting about this story is that the Obama administration
inexplicably keeps falling for it...
Dear White House, dear administration: believing conservative spin about
what's so wrong with you and then giving into that spin is not an effective
defense against that spin. Just buying it and apologizing for it, and doing
whatever they want you to do doesn't make the problem of them lying about
you go away. In fact, it makes it worse...
The huge tide of negative publicity that followed these video tapes and
the coverage they got on Fox wall-to-wall was a dishonest political stunt
that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the actual
facts of what happened. But it worked. Means be damned, in the end it
worked.
Partly because of Maddow's show, by the middle of last night the White
House had realized how badly it had behaved, and just after 2 A.M.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack issued a statement saying he was
reconsidering Sherrod's firing. On the morning chat shows, Sherrod said
she wasn't sure if she would take her job back if it were offered to her.
Vilsack's statment was reported in an e-mail alert from Politico's Mike
Allen at 7:03 this morning:
BULLETIN -- Yielding to a late-night phone call from the White House,
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack reversed himself early today and said he
will reconsider the abrupt firing of Shirley Sherrod, a Georgia-based
Agriculture Department official who was the victim of a media frenzy over
comments that turned out to have been distorted by video editing.
[Update: an even earlier alert was sent out by Politico at 4:21 A.M.]
It was on the Washington Post's website by 9:07 and the Wall Street
Journal's at 9:18-but as of 11 o'clock this morning, The New York Times had
still reported nothing about Vilsack's reversal. After multiple e-mails
from FCP to Times reporter Wheaton, and Times national editor Rick Berke,
inquiring about this omission, the paper's Washington Bureau finally woke up
at 11:59 A.M., and posted a new lead on Wheaton's story:
"The White House intervened late Tuesday night in a racially-tinged
dispute that prompted Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to fire a black
civil servant, and Mr. Vilsack is now reconsidering his decision."
But more than twenty-fours after the farmer had been on CNN to repudiate
the central allegation, the Times still failed to include that fact in its
updated story. Wheaton did not respond to an e-mail asking whether she had
omitted the farmer's comments because she didn't know about them or because
she didn't think they belonged in her story.
As Kurt from Astoria pointed out onthe Times website,
Where in this article does it say that Brietbart [sic] severely edited a
video to change a woman's story from one about overcoming personal prejudice
through personal experience, to one that brags about acting in a prejudicial
fashion? You missed the story. It's not about the NAACP. It's about
Brietbart's [sic] manipulations.
And another reader added,
Poor reporting. You don't connect the dots between the highly edited
video circulated by the teabaggers, the "conclusions" of racism announced by
Fox "News", and Vilsack's decision to fire Sherrod. This was an
orchestrated, racebaiting smear job designed to dupe millions, raise the
overall fear and hate quotient, make white people feel victimized and
resentful, and destroy a decent person's life. You don't report how the
farmer in question came out against the Fox story yesterday...
The article in The Washington Post by Karen Tumulty and Krissah Thompson
at least managed to include the essential facts that the Times had omitted -
but its lead was just as off-base as the one in the Times:
A fuzzy video of a racially themed speech that prompted the ouster this
week of an Agriculture Department official has opened a new front in the
ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for
stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.
What that "fuzzy video" actually proved was that the Obama
administration was so intimidated by a disgraced blogger and a completely
dishonest television network that it jumped to fire a wholly innocent
employee, without bothering to investigate any of the idiotic allegations
against her.
And what the whole mess proved was that Rachel Maddow is frequently more
thorough, more intelligent, more sophisticated, and more reliable than all
of her competitors in the mainstream media put together.
-30-
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