GOODY TWO SHOES: Whatever Happened To Fact-Checking?
When CNN's Howard Kurtz asked Bob Schieffer why he didn’t ask Attorney General Eric Holder about the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, “Face The Nation” host explained he hadn’t heard anything about it because he had been “on vacation” the week before.
If you went to the same place Schieffer did for your vacation, you are unaware that Andrew Breitbart posted a video snippet on his Website, BigGovernment.com, from a speech Agriculture Department offical Shirley Sherrod gave at the NAACP 20th Annual Freedom Fund Banquet on March 27th in which she told about how she half-heartedly assisted a farmer avoid foreclosure because he was white. In the final seconds of the clip – which Breitbart says he posted without editing – she seems to regret her actions. But the overall impression was that she stuck it to the white farmer because she didn’t like his “superior” attitude - and that the incident occurred under Obama’s watch, suggesting that a second cabinet-level department had become indifferent or hostile to the civil rights of white Americans. The NAACP – which has yet to denounce the New Black Panther Party - and the president – who took nearly a year to mull over the pros and cons of a troop surge in Afghanistan and waited 56 days from the deadly explosion on BP's offshore oil rig on April 20th to make his first statement on the human tragedy and environmental disaster – couldn’t take the time to hear Sherrod’s side of the story, or to view the footage of her speech in its entirety before swinging into action. (The White House claims that, despite the Agriculture Department being able to reach Sherrod - three times - while she was driving in her car to ask her to tender her resignation via BlackBerry, the president was unable to make contact with her for several days). The next day the NAACP released the video - presumably, the organization’s leaders watched it first - and it became apparent that the event she described date back to 1987, and that when she saw the lawyer the farmer hired to help him avoid foreclosure was doing nothing to earn his fee her righteous indignation overcame her prejudice and she did everything she could to hook him up with someone who was able to help him. Sherrod is rather long-winded - which is probably the reason the person who recorded that portion of the speech truncated it, not because (s)he was trying to frame the woman – so you can save yourself some time by reading the transcript. Anyway, as quickly as Sherrod was fired, she was invited to rejoin the Agriculture Department and got an apologetic phone call from Obama to boot. Naturally, liberal journalists were all too happy to be able to deflect attention from the JournoList scandal and wale on bloggers in general, and Breitbart in particular, for not doing due diligence by getting the entire video to determine whether the snippet was a fair representation of the speech (this used to be known as “fact checking”), or calling Sherrod to ask what she meant by her remarks. Take, for instance, this criticism by JournoLister and Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall: Breitbart got a piece of video he knew nothing about and published it with a central claim (that it was about Sherrod's tenure at the USDA) that he either made up or made no attempt to verify. No vetting, no calls, no due diligence, not the slightest concern to confirm anything or find out what was true. … [F] for anyone else practicing anything even vaguely resembling journalism, demonstrated recklessness and/or dishonesty on that scale would be a shattering if not necessarily fatal blow to reputation and credibility. As it turns out, MSM reports that SC Senate candidate Alvin Greene (D) released a campaign video, "Alvin Greene is on the Scene," could only have been published with “no vetting, no calls, no due diligence, not the slightest concern to confirm anything or find out what was true.” According to CNN blog Political Ticker: The catchy video ("When I say Alvin, you say Greene!") lays clips of Greene's many television appearances over a throwback hip-hop beat and even takes aim at Greene's Republican opponent Jim DeMint ... Multiple news organizations, including the New York Times, said the video is an "official" product of Greene's campaign, but Greene says he had nothing to do with it. … Jay Friedman, the San Francisco-based producer behind the song, is amused at the attention the video has gotten. The entire concept, he said, was developed among a group of friends "goofing off" on Twitter who had been following the Alvin Greene phenomenon. … He said he was taken aback when the video was billed as an "official" Greene campaign video. A fatal blow to reputation and credibility? That ship has sailed.
Reinforcing the impression that the entire speech was as incendiary or worse than the snippet Breitbart posted, Sherrod’s remarks were immediately disavowed by the NAACP - which had a video of her entire speech in its possession – and she was quickly kicked to the curb by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at the behest of the White House (though he denied it) so she wouldn’t become a political liability at a time when polls are showing that Obama’s approval rating amongst white men has cratered. But it turns out that the NAACP and the Obama administration swung into action based solely on Breitbart’s post.
Editorial Note: This post has been updated with additional background and links.
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