E. J. Dionne on the Sherrod Situation: Good One

I haven't said anything here about the Shirley Sherrod situation, mainly because I was so upset by it. A news story does not usually affect me so personally, but this one did. To summarize, the NAACP said the teabaggers need to get rid of the racists in their group, and so a teabagger took a video of a lady who works for the Agriculture Department talking at an NAACP convention, and they edited it to make it look like she'd said the opposite of what she was really saying, they made her look like a black racist. So far that is kind of typical dirty trick that we have often seen from the Nutty Ones, it is a kind of lying that we are familiar with. I usually don't even bother to mention those things when they happen.

But then the NAACP saw the video and immediately denounced her. Her talk had been about how she overcame prejudice in her own life after her father was murdered by white racists and a white farmer came to her for help. The edited video only showed the part where this white farmer came to her and she had reservations about helping him, but the rest of the story was that she thought about it and realized she supported poor people, not black ones only, and she ended up helping the man keep his farm.

The office of the Secretary of Agriculture saw the teabagger's video and called Ms. Sherrod and forced her to resign. Pull over to the side of the road right now and text in your resignation before Glenn Beck runs this, she was told.

Again, I am not surprised if rightwingers lie. That is really the reason TeachTheFacts.org exists, to counter those lies, and we are very well familiar with the techniques. Our approach in Montgomery County has been to stand up to them. We call them nuts when they're nutty, we publicize their lies and offer the truth in its place, and the result has been that our county's rightwing nuts never got a foothold here. They may speak up for conservative positions, but they never got anywhere with dirty tricks and they never will.

The Shirley Sherrod situation has largely retreated from the front page, but E. J. Dionne had a very good summary piece in The Post this morning.

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president's inner circle. Enough right-wing propaganda

I can't read the minds of those who made and publicized that video, but they did not have good intentions toward the President and his administration. Maybe they meant to show that there are black racists in the government, and maybe they meant it as a set-up, to show that the White House is a bunch of cowering fools who will surrender under any attack. They did succeed at that.

Dionne is good this morning.

Obama complained on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet," but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

And remember here, E. J. Dionne is part of the traditional media. He writes for the Washington Post, and in his analysis they take the blame as much as anyone.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party." Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers," she told Politico's Ben Smith. "This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration." Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He's a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense -- and it's nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.

Liberals tend to believe in a democratic process where all opinions are respected. And that would work if conservatives felt the same way, but they don't. The other side feels that their viewpoint is inherently correct and that they should get their way no matter what anyone else thinks. You can't have a debate like that, democracy cannot succeed under those conditions. At some point, somebody needs to tell the offenders to sit down and shut up and let the grown-ups talk.

Because citizens can't attend every event, can't have firsthand knowledge of everything that happens, we rely on the media to inform us. And the media are intimidated by rightwing thuggery -- well, look, the government of the United States is intimidated by rightwing thuggery. How in the world can we make good decisions when the information we receive is packaged and presented by ideological extremists?