- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 1
- 7
-
Sparkle (0)
In just 48 hours, Shirley Sherrod became a household name for those who read political blogs and follow the news. Sherrod, a long-time advocate for farmers, was the State Director for Rural Development in the Department of Agriculture in Georgia until Monday of this week, when right-wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart posted a deceptively-edited clip of a speech she gave to a local chapter of the NAACP last March on his website, BigGovernment.com. The clip gave the impression that she had discriminated against a white farmer because of her anger over injustices black people had experienced over the years. The Department of Agriculture promptly fired her; the NAACP promptly condemned her, and FOX News personalities seethed with indignation as they played the clip over and over again.
Then Tuesday, everything changed because a few journalists did their jobs. They bothered to do some research and ask Sherrod for her side of the story, spoke to people who actually knew her, and took the trouble to find the farmer referred to in her anecdote. The first decent piece of reporting I saw on the story came from Tony Harris at CNN on Tuesday morning:
Like CNN, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had done some actual reporting, and they, too, spoke to the family whose farm had been saved with Sherrod's help. They spoke to her family to learn about the experiences that shaped her -- especially the murder of her father, allegedly by a white neighbor who was never prosecuted.
Other friends, family and colleagues rallied to her side with testimonials such as this letter from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, her former employer:
"Shirley Sherrod in her remarkable career has been one of the most active practitioners in assisting untold numbers of black and white farmers to access the credit, conservation and other programs at USDA. Shirley has essentially been an ambassador for the USDA in her work at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and as Georgia State Director of Rural Development. If anything, she deserves to be honored for this work and not falsely condemned and forced to retire in disgrace. "
After the revelations, the NAACP recanted, made the whole speech available, and asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod's firing. On Wednesday, Vilsack apologized, as did White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. As of this writing, Sherrod was reportedly considering whether to accept a new job offer from Vilsack.
FOX personality Bill O'Reilly apologized for not doing his homework.
Breitbart said he didn't anticipate that Sherrod would be fired. On Breitbart's site, Editor-in-chief Michael Walsh said that while Sherrod might not have been racist, her audience was because they expressed verbal agreement when she shared her past resentment. However, if you watch the whole video, she prefaces her story by explaining that she wants to share how she had overcome that resentment, and the loudest acclamation comes as she says that she learned that the plight of the poor was what mattered, not race. (By the way, blogger Ann Althouse is perturbed by the overtly religious tone of her remarks, although she found Sherrod's personal narrative compelling.).
Once upon a time, there was a good chance that a story like this would never have seen the light of day, because any reporter or editor worth their pay who was presented with Breitbart's tape would have done a little investigating before running with the story. Once upon a time, the fact that Breitbart had been associated with the phonied-up videos that had been used to bring down ACORN would have tainted him as a source. But as the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media report for 2010 reports, cable shows featuring opinionated journalism (and sometimes pseudo-journalism) garners more money and ratings than straight news channels, such as CNN.
Rachel Maddow told her viewers last night that Fox's coverage was part of its larger pattern of "scaring white people for fun and profit" -- and conservative political advantage. On the PBS Newshour, David Challian, PBS NewsHour's political editor, said the
