Fox and the high-tech lynching of Shirley Sherrod

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.