Sometimes it’s best to let the dust settle on a “story” before entering the fray.
From a little distance, the story of the forced resignation of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod begins to resonate with eerie familiarity with another recent story about the mishandling of “news” from dubious sources. The pattern is worth taking serious note of, but first some background.
Last month, the mediaverse was all awhirl over the story of Shirley Sherrod who was forced to resign from her position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a heavily edited video excerpt of Ms. Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP event.
To briefly recap highlights of the sad series of events, Breitbart took a 43 minute video and edited it to about 2 minutes, retaining just enough clips to make it appear that Ms. Sherrod was confessing/boasting to the NAACP audience that she had once used her authority as a USDA official to discriminate against a white farmer who’d come to her seeking help for his failing family farm.
The video went viral, FOX went apeshit, the chatterati went all ‘let’s get serious about this outrageous case of reverse discrimination’, the NAACP said it was outraged by Ms. Sherrod’s speech and actions and called for her resignation, and the Obama administration made a big public show of shoving her out the door, and then…
Well, even if you don’t know the details of this particular episode, you can easily guess what happens next…The video was revealed to be essentially phony.
Mr. Breitbart, sympathetic to the cause of teabaggers everywhere, had been angered by the NAACP’s call for the Teaparty to renounce racist elements within the “movement” (really, must we dignify this mess by calling it a movement? Unless we have in mind something scatological…), so he decided to “prove” that the NAACP is a racist organization with his video.
AND IT WORKED.
The same day Breitbart posted his carefully edited video, FoxNews.com news gave it the full rightwing echo chamber treatment; they breathlessly reported that "days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy." (The use of the word “regaling” is a nice touch, see, because it not only points out--falsely as it turns out…oops!--Ms. Sherrod’s bigotry, but also cleverly imputes to the whole NAACP audience her alleged anti-white discrimination--since they were apparently “regaled” by her account of stiff-arming some poor struggling farmer just because of his hated white skin.) Rightwing pundit and frequent contributor to the Catholic journal First Things, Jim Hoft, weighed in on his blog with this even-toned and temperate observation: “The former civil rights group known as the NAACP does not just invite anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and radical America-hating Marxist Jeremiah Wright to speak at their event, they also invite government officials who hate whitey, too.” (Nice job, Jim; you managed to get all the race-baiting stories of the last 3 years into one sentence!) Of course, the ever-professional Drudge Report couldn’t resist piling on with its own headline highlighting the alleged racism “evident” at the NAACP: “SHOCK: Video Suggests Racism At NAACP Event.”
By the time the full video was released, it was all over but the phony mea culpas from the media for not fact-checking the story before running with it, and the hollow apologies from the Obama Administration, the NAACP (who had condemned her alleged acts of discrimation before seeing the full video), and from the vast array of media outlets and pundits to Ms. Sherrod for unwarrantedly smearing her reputation.
In one of this circus’s funnier moments, House Minority Robotman and Official %5B3%5D.jpg "Boehner, whose spraytan makes his face the same color as the wall.")
This would all be a comi-tragic story of the plight of a mistreated government employee…
HOWEVER…
Note that in all of this, although the story would eventually evolve into a tale of the “tragic mishandling” of the whole affair as it relates to the fate of Ms. Sherrod, the initial target of the smear is not Sherrod, but the NAACP. Breitbart wanted to publically slap the crap out of the NAACP for daring to call out the teaparty’s racist rhetoric and image mongering. For some, maybe the pattern here is beginning to sound familiar…
Here we have another rightwing blogger-hacktivist using heavily edited video excerpts to smear an “enemy” organization. Again, the target organization is one that represents the interests of minority folks. Again, the target organization is one that has been a successful opponent of rightwing policy and politics. Picture getting clear yet?
Remember ACORN? You would only be able to access ACORN in memory now, since it was dismantled in the aftermath of a fullbiltz media attack based on a set of videos so phony they screamed SCAM from the first time the Official State Inquisitors at FOX began thier 24/7 coverage of the bogus story of ACORN workers offering assistance to sleazy characters involved in apparent acts of crime. Let’s take a moment to recall the almost laughably obvious bogusness of the video-taped “sting” on ACORN upon which Fox “News” was basing its entire “gotcha” storyline about corruption at the “leftist” organization.
It’s almost as if part-time hactivists and fulltime (right)wingnuts,Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe were daring the rightwing media to call them out for the amateurishness of their attempt at a “sting”… But, no, the echo chamber just went into a feedback loop so profound you couldn’t watch TV for a week without seeing this white, capitol hill-intern-looking dork all dressed up in what he imagines to be “pimped out” urban drag (apparently after getting pointers from watching 70s era copdramas like Starsky and Hutch) strutting into ACORN with his streetbitch and appearing to get helpful advice from ACORN people on how to set up a successful child-prostitution ring.**
And, just as in the Sherrod/NAACP scandal, by the time anyone got around to putting out the real story and showing the exculpatory portions of the video that O’Keefe had carefully edited out (portions that demonstrated that ACORN workers had in fact worked to thwart O’Keefe’s fictional criminal plans), ACORN had spent a ton of money defending itself, lost its donor base, been stripped of its government contracts, and dissolved itself as an organization.***
To recap: progressive organization with long track record of success in fighting the man gets targeted by conservatives; “independent” rightwing pseudo-journalists produce phonied-up video evidence of evildoing by the target group; the rightwing media machine amps up the story, and after the damage has been done, all the rightwing vigilantics gets exposed as fakery.
A few important differences: (1) in the NAACP scandal, the original storyline—an attempt to “expose” the NAACP as a racist organization—got lost in the human-interest story of the fate of a government employee; (2) the mainstream media went out of its way to sing the mea culpa song about their irresponsible treatment of Ms. Sherrod, while in the ACORN story, the media's post-fuckup focus was on the bad deeds done by O’Keefe and the dubious legitimacy of "independent" bloggers as "real" journalists, with little acknowledgement of how the "real journalists" had bought the whole scam wholesale and whose "legitimacy" was deliberately leveraged by the rightwing machine to successfully destroy ACORN; (3) the NAACP still exists and its reputation as a social justice institution remains intact within the mainstream media; meanwhile the truth that ACORN was shamefully slandered and wrongfully—sinfully—driven out of business has only been grudgingly acknowledged;the general media zeitgeist surrounding the downfall of this once effective tool for poor folks fighting city hall and the predatory lending practices of financial institutions large and small has a disturbing ‘well they had it coming anyway’ vibe to it—as if it amounts to some sort of comeuppance.
While the NAACP episode was undoubtedly full of pain and humiliation for Ms. Sherrod, she probably does take some satisfaction from the fact that her reputation has been vindicated; just as CitiBank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, et.al. no doubt take satisfaction that ACORN’s has not.
* Note that Boehner’s spray tan makes his face appear to be the same color as the wood paneled wall behind him.
** Note that in O'Keefe's edits, ACORN workers, who would almost always be residents of the neighborhood, appear to buy these clown costumes with no comment or trace of suspicion...
*** While there are many reasons to have serious issues with ACORNs ethical practices, many of the chapters, especially Baltimore and Houston, were fighting the good fight and keenly attuned to needed reforms within the organization. Those reforms will now not take place, of course, and neither will the good work of the ACORN lay-staff.
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