The late Andrew Breitbart, a former Drudge Report staffer, ran
BigGovernment.com. In July 2010, the Obama White House fired US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod soon after BigGovernment posted a
100-second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod had
boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a
federal employee during the Obama administration. Actually, as
Breitbart later corrected, Sherrod was describing events in the
1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern
Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights
movement to help Black farmers. MORE IMPORTANTLY, a
fuller version of the speech aired by CNN showed that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had
overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.
Months
earlier, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by
BigGovernment.com (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped
put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow
dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN. (Fox News had
goaded others in media for not doing enough ACORN-smearing.)
It wasn't just Fox News that promoted BigGovernment.com's misleading ACORN story. The Public Editor of the paper of record, the
New York Times, went to absurd lengths to
defend his paper's inaccurate coverage
No comments:
Post a Comment