NEARLY A WEEK AFTER THE SHIRLEY SHERROD CONTROVERSY SHOOK THE POLITICAL FIRMAMENT, THE DEBATE OVER WHAT IT ALL MEANS CONTINED TO DRIVE THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE. BUT NO CONSENSUS EMERGED AS PARTISANS AND PUNDITS CONTINUED TO ARGUE OVER WHO SHOULD BEAR THE BULK OF THE BLAME FOR THE MESSY SAGA.
By Kenneth Vogel, POLITICO, July 25, 2010
Jesse Jackson blamed Andrew Breitbart for posting the misleadingly excerpted video that started the controversy; Howard Dean blamed Fox News for hyping it; Newt Gingrich blamed the Obama administration for prompting his own criticism of Sherrod; and host Chris Wallace blamed President Barack Obama for failing to change the fickle and sensational nature of the news cycle – and that was just on “Fox News Sunday.”
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd blamed Obama for not having more African Americans in his White House inner circle, which she labeled “the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him.” And former White House communications director Anita Dunn, a member of Obama’s inner circle, blamed the media for pushing a “false meta-narrative” that Obama is skittish about dealing with racial issues, and for urgently pushing sensational story lines.
Dowd’s colleague Frank Rich opined that “The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode,” leaving most Americans “grappl[ing] with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.”
The saga started Monday when Breitbart, the conservative Internet entrepreneur, posted a video excerpts on his Big Government site that appeared to show Sherrod, who is African American, boasting during a March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet in Georgia of discriminating against a white farmer. The posting, which falsely asserted that the alleged discrimination took place while Sherrod was an official at the Agriculture Department (in fact, she had been working for a non-profit group at the time, and Breitbart later issued a correction admitting the error), sparked widespread condemnation of Sherrod – including from the NAACP, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Gingrich, among others – and she resigned from her post with the Agriculture Department under pressure from the Obama administration.
But, when the NAACP released the full video of her speech, it showed her describing how she ultimately did help the farmer and in the process set aside her racial assumptions and concluded that "there is no difference between us” – prompting apologies from the NAACP, Vilsack, Obama and others, and an offer to have her job back.
Breitbart’s other major scoop – a video exposé of the liberal community organizing group ACORN that helped contribute to the group’s ultimate collapse – also prompted questions about his journalism. The ACORN video left the false impression that Breitbart protégé James O’Keefe was dressed in a cartoonish pimp suit while secretly filming ACORN employees offering advice on how to set up a brothel for underage girls – a claim Breitbart echoed, though he later admitted he “did not know that there was a discrepancy” between O’Keefe’s dress during an introductory sequence in the videos and what he wore during his secretly filmed discussions.
Breitbart’s posting of the misleadingly excerpted footage of Sherrod “was morally wrong and created of course a very difficult climate,” Jackson told “Fox News Sunday” host Wallace.
The civil rights leader also criticized the Obama administration for pressuring Sherrod to resign before more complete video footage and information showed Breitbart’s posting to be inaccurate and misleading, saying that “the reality is that the Shirley was not [afforded] due process and the White House was wrong.”
Breitbart’s ability to spark the controversy is symptomatic of a larger problem with the Internet’s influence on the news cycle, Jackson argued, adding “he has a conglomerate of blogs and once he unleashed his blog, which was about to go on Huffington Post and other blogs and moving its way towards Fox News,” it prompted “a fear factor.”
Jackson said he hoped the saga would spark a conversation “in days to come [about] the idea of character assassination on the media, whether it is by a blogger or by YouTube.”
Gingrich, though, in a separate appearance along with Dean on “Fox News Sunday,” refused to apologize for blasting Sherrod as “viciously racist” based on the incomplete video excerpts, and instead faulted the White House for “act[ing] with destructive irresponsibility in the way that they fired” Sherrod.
“Remember, I was acting in the context of the Secretary of Agriculture having summarily fired her,” Gingrich told Wallace. “And, therefore, there was no reason to disbelieve the clip and what you see is one more example of the Obama administration’s continuing incompetence,” said Gingrich, adding “it’s very worrisome to me” that the administration felt compelled to fire Sherrod before the full context of the video was made public, because they feared that the video would be featured prominently Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.
“If the Obama administration is this afraid of Glenn Beck, how do they deal with the Iranians?” Gingrich asked.
Fox News and Beck do bear major responsibility, asserted Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who interrupted Gingrich to crack that “there may be some similarities” between dealing with Beck and the rogue Iranian regime.
“I don’t think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and I don’t think you’re a racist,” Dean told Wallace, “but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a – they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff.”
Wallace suggested that the Obama administration’s rush to oust Sherrod in response to the Breitbart post was emblematic of Obama’s failure to live up to his campaign promise to change Washington, and he interrupted Dean to point out that Fox did not air Breitbart’s Sherrod excerpts until after the Obama administration had fired her.
Dean dismissed Wallace’s point about timing, asserting “you didn’t do your job,” though he also mildly rebuked the Obama administration.
“We’ve got to stop being afraid of Glenn Beck and the racist fringe of the Republican Party,” he said.
“But Fox News was not blameless during this. You played it up,” he charged, accusing the network and the Republican Party of fomenting racism by fostering a narrative that the administration condones reverse racism.
“The Republican Party’s got to stop appealing to its racist fringe. And Fox News is what did that. You put that on,” Dean said. “Continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this – some of which are taken out of context – does not help the country knit itself together.”
Dunn, who while at the White House led a campaign against Fox News, said the media as a whole bears responsibility for the Sherrod saga.
“There are plenty of people in the news media who wish that they had stopped and thought of the fundamental job of journalism before they started asking for reaction to something that wasn't there-- based on their original reporting,” she said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
And she pushed back against the idea that the administration botched its handling of the controversy because it is hyper-sensitive about avoiding racial issues.
“There's a new meta-narrative, I think, based on another false premise: the idea that somehow Barack Obama is the problem with race relations in America or the reason we don't have a conversation,” she said. “How is this suddenly Barack Obama's problem? He has written an entire book about race. ... He has publicly spoken more to this issue—and talked more about this issue,” she said.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Monday, July 26th 2010 at 10:25AM
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