Heroes & Villains

22Jul10

Are the right people being blamed in the Shirley Sherrod caper?

Fox News is facing scathing attacks from the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, but Fox wasn’t even involved in the story until after the White House had fired Sherrod.

Many people from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to Shirley Sherrod herself have implied Fox News was a driving force behind propping up Andrew Breitbart’s out-of-context video that forced her to resign.

While Fox can be quite aggressive in stories like this, the level of venom focused on the network bares no resemblance to the network’s role in this story.

Both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post write about a directive from Fox Senior Vice President Michael Clemente for the news hours of FNC to check the story out before devoting any time to it. “Let’s make sure we do this right,” he said.

While the lefties are eager to demonize Breitbart, he offers a New Media outlet that doesn’t fall under traditional journalistic expectations. He is half consolidator, half activist. From where I sit, he provides the material, it’s up to those of us who grab it to research it further. He’s putting paint on the pallet.

Even Media Matters, in their documentation of how FNC disseminated the story, notes its infrequent appearances on Monday – considering the story broke on Big Government at 8amET.

The president is still trying to recover from the White House mishandling of the situation. He called Sherrod today.

And that doesn’t mean FNC was the only one to mention the story Monday night either. It was referenced by a guest on Larry King Live, and Anderson Cooper did have a brief segment as well on CNN. By Tuesday morning, all three cable networks were leading with the Sherrod video.

The biggest screw-ups are the White House/Ag Dept folks, who certainly have a higher fact checking responsibility than Andrew Breitbart has, and that’s why their sycophants are going so strong at Breitbart.

The NAACP are a bunch of morons. Remember, Sherrod was speaking at their event, and they were the ones in possession of the full videotape that Breitbart was sent an excerpt of.

On Tuesday, FNC covered the story a lot – 39 times according to TV Eyes. MSNBC covered it 21 times, but CNN? They mentioned Shirley Sherrod 63 times. Now there will be an argument made about the tone of the coverage, but as the story evolved throughout the day, it shifted so much it had Glenn Beck, the cable news host near the center of the controversy to begin with, coming out with an enormous defense of the former USDA worker.

Lastly, the Mainstream media fell down by replaying the video without doing their own journalism. Considering the mainstreams, the White House, and the NAACP are all part of the same political organization, it’s easy to see why AB and FNC are taking the heat.

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Filed under: Obama   |  2 Comments
Tags: breitbart, Fox News, rachel maddow, sherrod, usda, vilsack, white house