Josh Green (via):
Awhile back, particularly during the Clinton administration, the media would flagellate itself every so often for rushing, lemming-like, to cover some story or other that was being touted on the Drudge Report, and then, after a period of reflection, deciding that it shouldn’t be. There was usually a Howard Kurtz column to demarcate such an episode. But the recidivism rate was high. Invariably, the media would chase the next Drudge rumor, and the whole cycle would repeat.
That doesn’t seem to happen anymore, at least not with Drudge. But it does happen, and more powerfully than ever, with Andrew Breitbart, who has inherited Barnum’s instinct for what will cause a circus and the certainty that suckers are still being born every minute. One difference is that Drudge usually focused on sex scandals and tawdry personal humiliations, which, in the end, is hardly worth getting worked up about. Yes, yes, shame on reporters for taking the bait. But c’mon.
***But what’s galling to me–gut-wrenching, really, like watching old news footage of blacks being beaten and clubbed at lunch counters–is that Breitbart obviously understood the powerful effect his tape would have, posted it anyway, and then assumed the role of ringmaster, expertly conducting the media circus, fanning the flames. It’s hardly the first time. But the moral ugliness of what’s just happened is glaring, and it’s hard for me to see how the media can justify continuing to treat Breitbart as simply a roguish provocateur. He’s something much darker.
Josh is missing a piece- FOX news. Fox is a pivotal piece that was missing in the Clinton era, and moves all these crazy conspiracies and smears without so much as a thought. Watch Megyn Kelly yesterday:
And there are all sorts of “reasonable conservatives” out there willing to push whatever lie comes across their desk. Ed Morrisey:
The NAACP is about to learn one of the most basic of all lessons in life — those who live in glass houses should avoid provoking a stone-throwing war. After the civil-rights organization threatened to issue a condemnation of Tea Party activism by equating it with racism (a position from which they ultimately retreated), Andrew Breitbart announced that he would publish at least one video of the NAACP itself cheering racism. Breitbart delivers on that promise today at Big Government, showing USDA official Shirley Sherrod explain to an appreciative NAACP audience in July 2009 how she deliberately withheld information from a white farmer in Georgia trying to save his land and his business…
Nothing is going to change, though, because our media is just too afraid of being called liberal, and then when they are attacked, seem to relish being the victim. As DougJ pithily noted: “Why not just hire a hooker to dress up as Sarah Palin and beat you with a riding crop?”
I guarantee this will happen again in a few weeks. Already, the wingnuts are trying to claim this was not about Shirley Sherrod, but about the “NAACP crowd.” It’s absurd, but all signs point to the fact that they will get away with it.
Lee Atwater, eat your heart out.
Corner Stone
“Snookered” is how MSNBC is describing it. Nice.
ajr22
Andrew Breitbart: Whites are over racism, it is now blacks who are racist. Whites are over slavery, jim crow, lynching, ghettos with poor education, gentrification, katrina…etc. Blacks are now the racists as seen by obama being racist and hating his white mother and this edited video of some old black woman taken completly out of context. To prove all this i will launch vicious attacks on blacks until they understand that whites are not the racists. White Power…i mean that is all.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
Fox was around during the latter Clinton years. I remember watching Fox and Friends at the time, way before I recognized how lunatic they are.
Redshirt
I was trying to think of something I could do about this – the media, that is. And I’m blanking. Don’t watch, but I don’t think they care. As we’ve learned from the Washington Times, these conservative media outlets don’t exist to make money, at least in the short term; but rather, they exist only as a cog in this effective propaganda machine.
And we can’t do anything about that, can we? Because what could you or I, or even legions, do against the power of Newscorp? They’d outbid us.
CJ
Breitbart and all the wingnut shit stirrers are like heroin to the MSM. Too good to pass up, but the crash from that high is jarring.
mistersnrub
Fox News reminds me of the crypto-fascist Spectacular Optical Corporation from Videodrome. Only with Fox, they aren’t causing cancer, they ARE the cancer.
The Raven
Me, I want the Fairness Doctrine back. I want to see Noam Chomsky and Stephen Brust (a Trotskyist) on FOX News, for balance.
Corner Stone
“Pavlovian response” as quoted by Mike Vaqeiro(sp) on MSNBC.
Reeeeaaallly nice.
wilfred
Breitbart is too well connected; he’s untouchable. Here he is on the launch of his Big Peace initiative:
Quite a cast. What can you say?
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201007040019
Joshua Norton
Now they’re trying to spin it as Breitbart helping to “spark a debate” on racisim.
Sure. Kind of like how Jack Kevorkian “sparked a debate” on decent health care for terminal patients.
Kill me now.
Kryptik
This contrasts nicely with DougJ’s more optimistic post about the whole matter just above yours, John. Unfortunately, I got the feeling that you’re more right about this than he is.
lol
She should sue Breitbart for defamation of character.
Let’s see how well he does in front of an Atlanta, Georgia jury made up of black folks and Glenn Beck fans who were told by their leader that she got screwed.
Clambone
Not really relevant, but how does Megyn Kelly manage to keep that expression every goddamn minute of every show? Do they have a production assistant whose job it is to hold doo-doo just out of shot?
The Moar You Know
That the left is this country is being outsmarted, outstrategized, and completely punked by an idiot of the caliber of Andrew Breitbart tells you all you need to know about the left’s viability as a political force.
Namely, we are fucking doomed unless we learn, NOW, how to fight back as dirty and nasty as these fuckers are willing to.
Zifnab
@The Raven: That whole song and dance was always a farce. Fox’d bring back Hannity and Colmes, and they’d continue to claim that Bill’O is nonpartisan.
The Fairness Doctrine was never very fair. It just gave “liberal” elitists and “conservative” elitists an opportunity to weasel on to each others’ shows. Bottom line, we need more than two opinions anyway.
I’d like to see more internet TV, a broader spectrum of televised and radio-broadcast opinions, and a more educated electorate in general. The Fairness Doctrine really doesn’t give me any of those things. Lowering the cost of broadband access, breaking up the larger news corporations and limited how much of the media market one company can control, and funding higher education through scholarships and college prep programs – that would go a longer way towards broadening education of the public than any top down black and white mandate.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
For what it’s worth, that’s the word the NAACP itself used in its statement.
The only thing better would have been “bamboozled.” (h/t to whoever mentioned this on another thread yesterday)
shortstop
@Clambone: Hilarious.
Bender
Just like when they used to beat blacks and lynch them and murder them. Just the same! Yeah, false charges of racism are a real kick to the gut. I mean, when they happen to Democrats! Just like lynching blacks! When they happen to Republicans, that’s just an Approved Journo-List Political Tactic.
Fuck you very much.
wilfred
And a pony.
Hovering over all this is the simple fact that we were collectively lied to into a fucking war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost hundred of billions of dollars.
It is about to happen again. The only solution is a forced diet of critical thinking, which starts at home.
beltane
Imagine if the Spooners (the white farmers) did not speak out so forcefully against Breitbart’s allegations. The media would still be pillorying Ms. Sherrod even when it was revealed the video was a hoax. The lies get a megaphone while the truth is forced to speak over a chorus of blaring vuvzelas.
Our country will not function properly until someone goes nuclear on the Fox Empire.
wilfred
Which would only have invited Malcolm X comparisons, like hoodwinked. Didn’t that happen a while back?
Zifnab
@The Moar You Know:
Who is this “the left” you are talking about, white man? This story broke yesterday afternoon. The issue was cleaned up and resolved as of this morning. Outside the administration itself, there was a lot of crowing on FOX News and an ill-advised memo from NAACP quickly retracted, but virtually nothing from “the left” in the aggregate. The story was too new, and people weren’t really diving all over Brietbart’s website to fact check his bullshit 24/7.
We’ll see if this seriously damages Brietbart’s credibility in the future, but this victory for his little outfit seems somewhat Pyrrhic. Sherrod is getting her job back. Brietbart’s outfit appears blatantly hackish. CNN (that’s the non-FOX news channel) got to fill the afternoon with a poor farmer extolling the virtues of the woman Brietbart was trashing. And the Obama Admin’s loss of face won’t last pass the next news cycle.
beltane
@Joshua Norton: “Spark a debate”? Is that what they’re saying? Sort of like how Slobodan Milosovic sparked a debate on multiculturalism, I suppose.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack: Yeah, I know. But I liked it that they used it to say they all were “Snookered” ~ WH, NAACP, Media
And if you believe MSNBC, their timeline suggests that by they time they had a chance to see the edited video the NAACP had already condemned Sherrod and the USDA had already fired her. So that gave them pause to think it may have weight and be legit.
If that’s true then there’s a whole other aspect to this.
Corner Stone
@The Moar You Know:
Lolwhut?
Corner Stone
It may be a really good job of acting but ISTM that Norah O’Donnell on MSNBC is actually really pissed about getting played so hard.
It’s strange because I don’t believe it but she’s selling it very well.
brantl
I think that Breitbart well and truly fucked himself this time. He’s going to have to go a long way to get any coverage other than Faux Snooze for a very long time, and it will only make Fox look worse, not make Brietbart look any better.
Kryptik
@Corner Stone:
Look who gets taken seriously, look who gets the media megaphones. Look who manages to get the White House to jump at the snap of fingers. Guess what. It ain’t lefty activists, it ain’t the center-left folk.
We’re out in the wilderness here, and there really should be no damn excuse for it.
@brantl:
As I said to DougJ in the post above John’s: You have more faith in the long-term memory of media whores than I do.
Mnemosyne
@Bender:
I love how Bender is more outraged about something that never actually happened than he is by Breitbart smearing a good woman’s name.
Hey, look, over there! Some people on Journolist talked about doing something that they never actually did! That’s much worse than going on national television with a heavily edited tape to try and destroy a woman’s career.
Dance, monkey, dance. Your tears are sweet to me.
CalD
The good news is that ratings for cable “news” programming seem to be down across the board this year. If enough people ignore them, they will go away.
Nick
@CalD:
which, of course, couldn’t possibly be a factor in the media’s desire to incite a Civil War by proxy in their split screens.
Those CNN “Black in America” chyrons haven’t gotten much use lately.
YellowJournalism
@Clambone: No need to hold out some doo doo when you’re basically a giant shitbag with a blonde wig.
Sorry, I cannot stand that woman. I think she does more damage than Glenn Beck, since her time on air is supposed to be the “news” period. Yet, she’s as big a pundit as the rest of the Fox primetime lineup.
TCG
Will Megyn Kelly apologize today?
JCT
@YellowJournalism:
I was just scrolling down to say the *exact* same thing– with shit for brains…. She is a real piece of work.
I will be in SC for vacation soon. The last time I was there was in 2008. Right after Walnuts picked the grifter. Every single small store/restaurant/gym had Faux “News” on. It was quite the education for my teenagers (my oldest had just turned 18 and immediately signed on to help with the local Obama campaign) as every time Obama was mentioned on Fox the “comments” would start. My eldest was flabbergasted by the “interviews” (nitwit Kelly didn’t have her show yet, though).
Not exactly looking forward to getting re-acquainted with Fox…
John Bird
I think you have something here. As a pious student of Brock’s “Blinded By the Right”, I also see some similar patterns.
Charges of anti-white racism are being used just like charges of sexual infidelity were used by the right in the 1990s: it doesn’t matter if they stick, because just getting the accusations into the news cycle hits the administration at a point guaranteed to thrill the Republican base (it was sex for Clinton; it’s race for Obama). You saw this with Van Jones, where rather than giving him an opportunity to express his opposition to statements buried in something he signed but did not write years ago, he was fired rather than deal with the administration’s “weak point”.
Honestly, it was pretty lucky that in this case, the full video completely refuted Breitbart’s claim, and the people in question could be interviewed to back up the video. Not because there’s any substance to most of these sorts of accusations, if any of them, but because the right’s fat hand got stuck square in the cookie jar and the way they’re circling the wagons in response is painfully public, actually escaping the event horizon of their media clowns.
Now, I understand that racial issues are something the White House wants to play down because they observe how these accusations stick despite their worthlessness. However, I think it’s probably time for a major national address on race and racial issues – if the left does not want to have this conversation in America right now, the right will continue to have it over top of them by pricking the White House until it bleeds.
And of course, the nation WANTS stories of racial reconciliation like that of Sherrod and the Spooner farm – they want what the left has to say about the issue, and I’d say at most a fifth of them want to hear about how Obama hates white people. It’s time for the left to take command of the message and get it out there, because no amount of restraint is going to stop Republican race-baiting.
Nick
Hmm, ok, and how would this be different than the LAST major national address on race and racial issues?
Sentient Puddle
@Mnemosyne: Ezra also addressed this and the latest story from the Daily Caller. Short of it is, there was quite a bit of context removed from the excerpts, the Daily Caller knew that this context was removed, and yet ran the story as is anyway because evidently, they couldn’t let reality get in the way of their narrative.
Or even shorter, the exact same thing as the Sherrod story here!
Hal
No thanks. I can only take her for a few minutes at a time, if that long, before I’m forced to turn the channel. Kelly is a shrill, amazingly dishonest, astonishingly biased idiot who’s so over the top, she makes some of her fellow Faux Newers look like Cronkite.
All that peroxide has rotted her brain.
Bender
@Mnemosyne:
Never happened? Were you actually born yesterday? Yeah, conservatives NEVER get depicted as racists in the lefty media! Pull the other one… (also, I’ve already denounced Sherrod’s firing and expressed the necessity for Breitbart’s full explanation. If it’s not a good one, he’s dead to me. I mean, I hardly ever read him anyway, but YKWIM.)
The fact is, major national lefty journalists/propagandists (not just bloggers or commenters on blogs or citizens at a rally) have gotten together on JournoList and advanced the political tactic of purposefully throwing the “RAAAACIST!” charge around willy-nilly at any reporter not worshiping at The Zero’s sacred feet, just to make them defend. The left, and especially lefty journos, have lost all moral authority to criticize anyone for throwing around false charges — end of story.
I have heard not one peep among Ball-Juicers denouncing the hundreds of leftwing journalists who read the listserv and either agreed or didn’t mention that MAYBE this was morally reprehensible and would cause Martin Luther King to perform triple-lutzes in his mausoleum. I submit that’s because you all agree with using the tactic against the right, and most of you use it yourself (see that laughably juvenile post yesterday from some minor Ball-Juicer contributor).
YellowJournalism
@Hal: The thing is, she has the acting skills of a porn star, which shows when she opens her eyes and mouth wide to show her shock at some big revelation from someone like John Stossel. And just like some morons who watch porn, there are people out there who actually believe in her excitement.
goatchowder
Iraq WMD. Swiftboat. etc etc etc.
The media is stupid, greedy, understaffed, and cares only about selling advertising. They don’t do their fucking homework, then they whine about getting ‘snookered’. Whatever, you fuckers. Just go away already. You are useless.
cosmosis
“Liberal” Shithead Kneel Conan was on TOTN today defending the integrity of “the right” when a caller pointed out that Faux and Britefart were old hands at this race baiting.
cosmosis
“Some morons”? You mean Bender.
Mark E
This is one of the biggest differences between the right and left. The right gets something wrong and quickly apologizes many times and tries to get it fixed (many conservatives calling for Sherrod to get her job back) and the left, love them or hate them, simply digs in their heels and worries about the instant political damage and denies denies denies they did anything wrong. Seriously, what has the modern left admitting getting wrong in the past few years? Anything?
Steeplejack
@Mark E:
Thanks for visiting from Bizarro World.
brokenwolf
@YellowJournalism:
agree…only takes a few seconds for a male to get an erection…oops..in some cases that is. Unless they are into crush videos and dog fighting videos like our Supreme Court is and then it might take longer.
brokenwolf
Because of Fox we trashed our television last year. We haven’t missed it and our blood pressure has dropped. One question, why is it open season on wolves in national parks and why are wild herds of mustangs being run to exhaustion in the July heat until they drop from heat stress. Twenty four mares and their colts died today in the most recent round-up. What is about white men that they want to shoot wolves from helicopters and run horses to death with helicopters? Is there anything this administration can do or not do to stop this ongoing slaughter of animals? I’m stressed….