Eight Feet Deep

It seems that a trav­esty of the size of the lat­est so-called “viral video” could not have hap­pened. A heav­ily edited video of a speech that made Shirley Sher­rod, a black U.S. Agri­cul­ture offi­cial in Geor­gia, look as if she had pur­posely dis­crim­i­nated against a white farmer. This got her fired by Obama admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who are racially sen­si­tive. Sher­rod was instantly made a pariah by Fox News, who ran with the story either before they knew the entire con­tents of the video or pur­posely jumped on the story because they seem con­stantly on the look out for high pro­file blacks who can embar­rass Obama.

Here is how that warm ray of Fox sun­shine Bill O’Reilly played the story:

O’REILLY: Well, that is sim­ply unac­cept­able and Ms. Sher­rod must resign imme­di­ately. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment can­not have skin color decid­ing any assistance.

This was on Tues­day, a full 24 hours after the story ini­tially aired on Fox. Bull O’Really insisted that since some san­ity — albeit lim­ited — existed on other news out­lets and the story was slow to sur­face else­where than Fox, the lib­eral media was obvi­ously afraid to hurt Obama. This after the so-called “main­stream media” was slow to jump on other sto­ries involv­ing blacks with alleged ties to Obama such as those in ACORN and the New Black Panthers.

O’REILLY: In the big pic­ture scheme, this is a small story. Every admin­is­tra­tion in his­tory has had employ­ees do dumb things. Ms. Sher­rod made a mis­take and is pay­ing for it.

But what about the Amer­i­can media? Why the news black­out when things become unpleas­ant for the Obama administration?

The sim­ple answer is bias. The estab­lish­ment press tilts left and is reluc­tant to do dam­age to a very lib­eral pres­i­dent. I think that is absolutely true. There is no other rea­son to spike sto­ries that bring mil­lions of view­ers to the Fox News Channel.

You’d think the other TV news oper­a­tions would want to attract that large audi­ence as well. Appar­ently, they don’t.

Well, Bull O’Really you’d think those oper­a­tions would also want to get the story right, but all didn’t. Now it turns out that the story as reported by Fox was mad­den­ingly wrong. And now Fox is all look­ing like their com­plic­ity didn’t exist.

I can’t give the great syn­op­sis of all that is wrong with the Shirley Sher­rod story that is exam­ined by St. Peters­burg Times media critic Eric Deg­gans. A won­der­ful read.