Part of the "Obama Nation" strip by James Hudnall and Batton Lash, the cartoon shows an overweight Michelle Obama scarfing down hamburgers while telling her husband about her anti-obesity efforts. Barack, meanwhile, is shown with enormous ears (bonus points for originality) and complains that Michelle is going to undermine his reelection efforts.

The punch line? Michelle shouts back, "Shut up and pass the bacon!" Bravo, Breitbart and co. Bravo.

You can see the comic here.

Continue Reading...

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod has filed a lawsuit against conservative firebrand and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. The suit stems from the notorious video Breitbart posted online last year, showing an out-of-context excerpt from a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP Freedom Fund in March 2010. The clip suggested she had  used her position at the Department of Agriculture to discriminate against white farmers. The media devoured the Breitbart's version of story so voraciously that the NAACP denounced Sherrod and the Obama administration fired her. The charge was, in fact, entirely untrue.

Sherrod argues in the lawsuit that the clip "damaged her reputation and prevented her from continuing her work." Breitbart, meanwhile, denounced the suit, saying he "categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech."

Continue Reading...

Obtained by Salon via the Freedom of Information Act, the internal emails and other documents fill out a picture of USDA officials scrambling to first get rid of Sherrod, and then, once they realized their error, to do damage control. Throughout there is an overwhelming concern with managing the media stories on the flap.

The Los Angeles Times, which also obtained the documents, has a good timeline here. Here are some tidbits from the emails and other documents, which we've posted in full below and which total nearly 400 pages. The page numbers in parantheses refer to the source of the quote, and the document from which it came:

Continue Reading...

Sherrod and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that she may work with the agency in a consulting capacity in the future to help it improve its outreach to minorities. She told reporters she did not think she could say yes to a job "at this point, with all that has happened."

"I look forward to some type of relationship with the department in the future," she said. "We do need to work on the issues of discrimination and race in this country."

Vilsack, who apologized to Sherrod for pushing her out, had offered her a position in the Office of Advocacy and Outreach, which works in the civil rights area.

"I think I can be helpful to him and the department if I just take a little break and look at how I can be more helpful in the future," Sherrod said.

Continue Reading...

Subjected to a similar barrage, a normally unflappable editor curtly informed me that "if you would double-check your facts, it might save us a whole lot of time."

Ah, but I had, you see. And therein lies an instructive little tale.

First, here's the offending passage from last week's column: "The assault on Sherrod ... was so mean-spirited, crass and dishonest, not to mention so astonishingly stupid, that even Fox News provocateurs like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck -- after initially falling for the hoax -- were pretty much forced to apologize. I expect O'Reilly actually meant it."

I gave O'Reilly the benefit of the doubt out of personal experience. The man can be a blowhard, and frequently goes off half-cocked. Having appeared as a guest on his program, however, I know that he also has the self-confidence to book dissenters from his worldview, and lets them finish sentences. That's more than you can say about Beck, Limbaugh and talk-radio cult leaders generally.

Continue Reading...

Here's Kurtz's rundown of recent "crossfire" examples:

In just the last few weeks, Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh and CNBC contributor Howard Dean have accused Fox News of racism; conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart has delighted in pushing a maliciously edited video smearing Shirley Sherrod and refused to apologize; Fox hosts have denounced mainstream organizations as Obama lap dogs for downplaying a case involving the New Black Panther Party; e-mails from an off-the-record discussion group showed one liberal pundit wishing for Rush Limbaugh's death and another suggesting that conservatives such as Fred Barnes be tarred as racist; Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings was accused of betraying journalistic ethics with the story that torpedoed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Hastings's critics were ripped as lackeys of the military establishment.

It's journalism as blood sport, performed for the masses.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

It's too bad, because I think we could have had a good discussion otherwise (and Matthews and I did better in the second hour of the show.) The experience was a perfect case study of how Breitbart and the right wing noise machine manage to hijack the debate over race and politics in this country, even when they're wrong.

First, let me make one thing clear: According to Media Matters, and you all know they pay attention, Matthews was right about the first video posted by Breitbart. It did include Sherrod alluding to the epiphany she describes in detail later, about the fact that many issues aren't about black and white, they're about the haves and have nots. There are also versions of the video that don't include that quote. I had seen both versions; Dean had only seen those that didn't have the short allusion to her epiphany about the importance of "have nots" cooperating around economic issues.

Continue Reading...

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to predict the outcome of any Sherrod libel claim. A court -- and Sherrod herself -- would have a number of issues to consider, however.

One is whether Sherrod was a public official or public figure at the time when Breitbart posted his now-infamous Web article featuring an excerpt from a video that purported to show her, an African-American, acknowledging racial bias against white farmers and then acting on it to their detriment. (Your town's mayor is a public official; Lindsay Lohan is a public figure. Which makes California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger both, I suppose.)

Continue Reading...

Addressing the National Urban League on Thursday, Obama said the full story Sherrod was trying to tell "is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in America."

Sherrod was forced to resign last week after a conservative website posted an edited video of her speaking about race. Sherrod said the video took her remarks out of context. When her full remarks were discovered, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized and offered Sherrod a new job at the department.

Obama called the incident a bogus controversy and bemoaned the prejudices that still hold Americans back.

Continue Reading...

The edited video posted by Andrew Breitbart led Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to ask Sherrod to resign, a decision he reconsidered after seeing the entire video of her March speech to a local NAACP group. In the full speech, Sherrod spoke of racial reconciliation and lessons she learned after initially hesitating to help a white farmer save his home.

She said she doesn't want an apology from Breitbart for posting the video that took her comments out of context, but told a crowd at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention that she would "definitely sue."

Vilsack and President Barack Obama later called Sherrod to apologize for her hasty ouster. Vilsack has offered her a new job at the department, which she is still considering.

"I have many, many questions before I can make a decision," Sherrod told the group. "I don't know what will happen from this day forward in terms of whether I'll be back in the department or what I'll do."

Continue Reading...

The assault on Sherrod, however, was so mean-spirited, crass and dishonest -- not to mention so astonishingly stupid -- that even Fox News provocateurs like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck (after initially falling for the hoax) were pretty much forced to apologize. I expect O'Reilly actually meant it.

By inadvertently giving us a simple, compelling drama with an admirable protagonist unfairly maligned, it's even possible that Brietbart has awakened sleepwalking Washington journalists to their responsibilities to something besides their own careers. But don't hold your breath.

As for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and whatever craven and anonymous White House political operatives pressured Sherrod to resign even before the right worked itself into an operatic fury of phony indignation, if anybody in the Obama administration should be shown the exit, it's them.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Certainly, the right-wing pundits who've taken to Fox News to attack the NAACP have warped the story. Glenn Beck has laughed off the notion of Martin Luther King as a radical. "The Civil Rights Movement," Beck says, "has been co-opted by progressives." He's horrified by the idea that "you need civil unrest in order to meet demands" -- apparently forgetting that civil unrest is pretty literally what the Civil Rights Movement was. For guys like Beck, black people on the receiving end of fire-hoses and police dogs were sticking up for free enterprise. As he put it, "It's the same rights that Abraham Lincoln and blacks and whites fought for in the Civil War. Those were the same rights that King fought for. Tonight, we're going to talk about those rights, individual rights." So, Lincoln and King: proto-libertarian individualists. Bull Connor and George Wallace, on the other hand? Probably liberal fascists. (Remember, they were Democrats!)

Continue Reading...

Our conversation quickly devolved into a weird discussion of Fox's timing: Did the right-wing propaganda arm run with the Sherrod story before or after her resignation/firing from her post at the USDA? I'm not entirely sure why that matters: What matters is she was slandered by two alleged news organizations, who didn't bother to try to get to the truth about her inspiring message of racial reconciliation to the NAACP. But I also want to state for the record: Fox ran with the story before Sherrod was fired. It was on FoxNews.com during the day on Monday, July 19; it's gone now, so I can't check the exact time it was posted.

Continue Reading...

But when it comes to the Sherrods, it's hard to detach my deep sadness about American politics from my disgust at the media. (You can watch my discussion at both on MSNBC's "The Ed Show" at the end of this post.) I'd like to get a few observations about politics out of my system, letting me focus on media tomorrow morning.

I have found myself saying to many people this week, black and white people, that I'm surprised President Obama didn't have someone close to him who recognized the Sherrod name right away, especially in the context of Georgia – at least the name of Shirley's husband, Charles, a major figure in the civil rights movement, if not Shirley herself, a long-time civil rights and agricultural reform leader.

Continue Reading...

That is the thesis of the Thinker he wrote today with his Politico co-founder, John "the considerably less annoying one" Harris. It is called "The Age of Rage," and it is about how no one will learn any lessons from the recent Breitbart/Sherrod affair. I share their pessimism, actually. But I don't think they're blaming the right parties.

The VandeHerris conclusion is that no one will learn any lessons because of the vile Internet partisan media that plays so rough.

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Sherrod is still considering a new job offer from the USDA. (According to Jake Tapper, the "specific job offer" -- Vilsack was pretty vague yesterday -- was just emailed to Sherrod this morning.)

Continue Reading...

And if you get away with this sort of stunt repeatedly, despite being exposed and shamed for it, then you are pulling off a grand heist -- stealing the credibility of larger media and government institutions that continue to pay attention to you.

This, in a nutshell, describes the challenge Andrew Breitbart has presented to the world of journalism, first with his ACORN deception and now with his Shirley Sherrod stunt. So far, journalism is failing to meet it.

By this point, Breitbart ought to be an object of snorting derision in the journalism profession. He ought to be shunned by respectable news organizations and mocked in public. He deserves the sort of ostracism that until recently was reserved for serial plagiarists.

Continue Reading...