EJ Dionne hit the nail on the head in the July 26 edition of Washington Post when he wrote: “The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year’s election.
The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.
The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle.
Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.
Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.
There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.
The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.”
We have ALL been suckeered into the 24/7 news cycle that demands instant gratification. WE jumped to conclusions based on a doctored item where a thoughtful lady explained how she came to understand that she needed to re-think the way she looked at things. Shirley Sherrod was portrayed as a “reverse racist” and slammed by Fox (Faux) news who even got the NAACP and the POTUS to condemn her on EDITED material. O’Reilley of Fox issued and “apology” after this came out but still says she is unfit to serve in the federal government—POPPYCOCK! She should accept the new job offered to her and sue the a– off of Brietbart, teh person who put this trash out there.
Let us ALL learn a lesson and the next time something comes out that does not seem right, check it out (SNOPES.COM anyone?, take a deep breath before responding. We have two ears and one mouth because we need to listen twice as hard as we speak!!!
