The late Andrew Breitbart, a former assistant to Matt Drudge, ran BigGovernment.com and other websites (now found at
Breitbart.com). In July 2010, the Obama White House forced U.S. Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod to quit after BigGovernment posted a
100-second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod had
boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a
federal employee in the Obama administration. Actually, as
Breitbart later semi-corrected, Sherrod was describing events in the
1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern
Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights
movement to help Black farmers. More importantly, a
fuller version of the speech aired by CNN indicated that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had
overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.
Ten months
earlier, in 2009, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by Breitbart's website (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped
put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow
dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN. (Fox News had
goaded others in media for not doing enough ACORN-smearing.)
It wasn't just Fox News that promoted the misleading ACORN story. The Public Editor of the paper of record, the
New York Times, went to absurd lengths to
defend his paper's inaccurate coverage
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