Breitbart vs. NAACP thread

The NAACP got Andrew Breitbart's dander up with the way they smeared the Tea Party organization as racist. I have never seen as much misinformation over a short-term issue as I've seen on this one.  I've decided to start a thread so I can add information as the dust clears.

EARLY DEVELOPMENTS

July 22: Soros-funded Media Matters publishes a timeline which is picked up by Huffington Post, with the ridiculous claim that the timeline shows collusion between "right wing" bloggers and Fox News, rather than bloggers reading each other's posts. They accuse The Anchoress of participating in the "disturbing coordination" WHEN SHE EXPRESSES DISSATISFACTION WITH THE PLACE THE BREITBART VIDEO CLIP ENDED.  Maybe they were upset that she was the only popular blogger or media person to point this out before Sherrod was forced to resign. That's where I first saw the story mentioned, so maybe I'm part of the "disturbing coordination" too.  The "disturbing coordination" amounted to FOUR BLOGGERS picking up the story before CBS News, and FIVE BLOGGERS before Drudge. And this was after Breitbart had threatened to release evidence of racism at an NAACP event, which would be expected to clue bloggers and others in the media to be watching his site.  Pretty lame "coordination", if you ask me.   Especially compared to the irresponsible spread of the lies about Tea Party racisms  by the mainstream media back in March.    Read about the McClatchy timeline, immediately "amplified" by the New York Times and many others in the mainstream media, and watch the video.   Breitbart has since released additional videos countering the reports by the CBC members. He increased his reward for proof of racial epithets to $100,000 but has had no takers, despite all the recording devices at the scene.

 Note that the fake hate crimes were repeatedly reported as if they were true in the New York Times as late as FOUR MONTHS after initial reports had been contested with a reward for evidence supporting the story. And it was AUGUST before the Paper of Record published a lame, face-saving "correction" indicating that there was no evidence that epithets reported by members of the CBC came from members of the Tea Party.  In contrast, every "conspirator" named in the Media Matters timeline above, including Breitbart,  IMMEDIATELY issued corrections once the full Sherrod video was released, and several apologized to Ms. Sherrod.

Media Matters must really be feeling sensitive about the Journolist scandal, in which liberal journalists and "opinion leaders" were shown to have shared ideas about how to shape the news. For example, one journalists suggested that they could kill coverage of the Reverend Wright issue by picking a conservative - any conservative - and calling him a racist.

I think Media Matters also misrepresented the 1:40 notation concerning Fox Nation on their timeline, as later reports indicated that Sherrod's name had never been mentioned on air before she resigned. Additionally, early reports by Fox (including an internet post) stated that Fox was "seeking comment".  Which is more than the USDA and the White House did.

Interesting that the Breitbart report didn't hit the big-time breaker-of-news, Drudge, for FIVE FULL  HOURS. Breitbart used to work for Drudge. That story really spread "like wildfire", alright. The tape first aired on Fox News AFTER Sherrod resigned.  Seems to me that the USDA and White House were the ones who acted like Sherrod was "on fire".  I don't think they expected "push-back" from her.

BREITBART VS. NAACP ON TV

Chris Matthews defends Breitbart - then sends program down the memory hole. Fascinating. Chris Matthews Vs. Howard Dean.

Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So, Joan, that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

You can judge for yourself if Joan Walsh is misrepresenting the "scare tactics" she says the right are using. Breitbart's original post, before the full tape was located and released:

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

August 3:  Breitbart decides to sue MSNBC.  Heh.

Speaking of Howard Dean, the liberal attack machine which pushed the story that Sherrod was fired because of Fox News coverage seems to have lead Dean into heaping false charges upon Fox News, and getting caught with his facts down.   So embarrassing.  Scroll down to watch the whole clip, in which he also jokingly compares Glenn Beck to the murderous regime in Iran.   (This is typical of HATERS on the Left. Have you ever heard a Republican official say anything this divisive about, say, Keith Olberman?)

But then again, maybe Dean wasn't misled in his comments about Fox. I say this because he repeated his mischaracterizations  after being corrected. He seems to be good at making charges of racism against people and organizations "out of context". Doesn't he have the responsibility to check his facts before making malicious claims like this?

Oveer at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, who bears false witness on national TV against more people  than any woman I can think of, made news in Australia on July 22 for her paranoid belief that Fox News got Shirley Sherrod fired before mentioning her on air. Maddow used three clips of Fox News reports which aired AFTER SHERROD HAD BEEN FIRED to prove that Fox News was to blame for her firing. Because no such pieces had aired before she was fired.

By the way, Maddow also falsely suggests that there was nothing to the ACORN tapes shown on one of Breitbart's sites because James O'Keefe did not wear his grandmother's fur "pimp coat" into the ACORN offices (only in the introductory bits on his videos), and because the tapes were edited.  But there is no way he could have faked the efforts of the ACORN volunteers to help them set up a brothel, give advice on managing underage prostitutes from El Salvador, and evade taxes. Prosecutors couldn't find a cause for legal action against some of the workers, I guess.  But ACORN had been getting away with illegal activities FOR YEARS at taxpayer expense, because of their friends in government.  Embezzlement, voter fraud, etc.  And there was a black whistleblower within the organization, too.  ACORN lost much of its government funding as people started to look into its other activities as a result of the tapes.

Here, she helps David Letterman get even more facts wrong.  The typical arrogant bigotry of today's American Left is demonstrated by their belief that they know the motives of the people they are discussing.  And her agreement with Letterman's exaggerated, false summary is completely irresponsible for someone in her position, who reports the "news" during her program.

Watch him go on about getting the facts right, while getting them completely wrong. It isn't about facts at all with these people, it's about the narrative.

More on the decline of David Letterman:

Whatever was left of Dave’s edgy sense of irony died while engaging in a serious discussion about the ethics of journalism with… Rachel Maddow… of…. MSNBC…

Signs of change: Anderson Cooper Says He Was Wrong to Let Shirley Sherrod Smear of Andrew Breitbart Go Unchallenged.  "Well, at least his learned his lesson, as have many. It was a teachable moment on race, I guess, just like the President wanted. . . ." Follow the link from Instapundit above to learn more about Shirley Sherrod's appearances on CNN.

Now we go back to Fox and the sometimes-dramatic  and sometimes odd Glenn Beck, who stated that Sherrod had been treated unfairly after she was fired.  After Sherrod was offered her job back, Beck did a Howard Stern-type bit (minus the obscene language) on Keith Olberman's imcomparable dramatic comparison of Sherrod's ordeal to being imprisoned on Devil's Island. Olbermann:

”Shirley Sherrod has been to her own Devil’s Island thanks to the perpetual fraud machine that is FOX News and the scum that is the assassin Breitbart.”

As one commenter to another piece noted, Breitbart didn't get Shirley Sherrod fired. The hyper-vigilant atmosphere produced by unsupported charges of racism from the Left got Sherley Sherrod fired. Along with the actions of her employers, who, if they were in the private sector, would be facing a big lawsuit for the way they handled this.

July 31: Andrew Breitbart at Uni-Tea - speech presenting his story. Whole speech, PJTV. Part 1 - Need for unity vs. design to divide - "tainting the Tea Party as racist" as a political strategy. Part 2 - How watching the Clarence Thomas hearings changed his political views. Part 3 - Congressional Black Caucus makes false charges of racism. Part 4: Rebellion against the stifling of dissent and continued collusion of mainstream liberal media with politicians.

BLACK FARM WORKERS VS. CHARLES AND SHIRLEY SHERROD

Unexpected Black vs. Black fallout - Monday, Aug 2: Ron Wilkins, a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1974, under an assumed name, hired-on at New Communities Inc. The Emergency Land Fund, an Atlanta-based black land retention organization, which shared oversight responsibility for NCI’s progress, wanted to know the basis for NCI’s continued poor performance. He reports that the Sherrods exploited and mistreated black workers, including children, at New Communities, Inc. He was fired after organizing a union action.

This would be an explosive accusation to make if it weren't true, especially since Shirley Sherrod has already promised to sue Breitbart for defamation. But there also seems to have been a lot of in-fighting in the leadership of these various black activist groups, so it's prudent to take that into consideration in weighing the veracity of this story.  August 3:  Glenn Reynolds notes that the quality of information in CounterPunch is "not especially reliable". Wretchard, July 21:

The public policy arena can be compared to a grand opera house, whose foundations were laid in turmoil, and which despite the magnificence of the Grand Staircase and Grand Foyer is reputed to contain numerous secret passages and dank cellars. Two of the chambers marked “do not enter” are the Hall of Race and the Chamber of Journalistic Collusion respectively. This week the patrons of the opera, unsettled by the changing times, have taken a turning into these dark chambers. Now they’re there, what is going to happen next?

August 5: Zombie finds an old union publication which confirms the story that the Sherrods exploited and mistreated blacks on the neo-Marxist commune they ran - land held in their names. So, why were the Sherrods the big winners in their Pigford lawsuit, instead of the people who made 67 cents an hour working for them?  Her participation in exploiting black people under slave-like conditions puts her charges that Andrew Breitbart wants to see blacks back in slavery and that those who protested the takeover of health care by the federal government are racists in a different light.

From the comments: 

As the well-known legal scholar, Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”