Mary Frances Berry, the former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,  writing in Politico:

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

Prominent black conservatives have denounced the remarks, and yet the MSM meme remains — based on no evidence — that the Tea Party is a racist organization.That’s because it fits the narrative.

And once you remember that nearly every MSM reporter is a frustrated and/or failed screenwriter, you can begin to understand how important the narrative is to them.

It’s the only story they have.

According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.”  It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”

It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”

As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that:

[a]side from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio — a grandstanding publicity hound who already stages immigration raids for the television cameras — virtually all prominent law enforcement officials in the state opposed the law.

Really? Presumably, just to pick one example, the Arizona Police Association, which “represents nearly 9,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers in the state of Arizona” and strongly supports S.B. 1070, contains no “prominent law enforcement officials.” I guess not, since there couldn’t be any “prominent law enforcement officials” among its members, including:

• Arizona Corrections Association
• Arizona Highway Patrol Association
• Arizona Police Officers Association
• Avondale Police Association
• Buckeye Police Association
• Chandler Law Enforcement Association
• City of Peoria Police Supervisors
• Copper Corridor Police Association
• Deputies Law Enforcement Association
• Gilbert Police Leadership Association
• Glendale Police Officers Association
• Goodyear Police Officers Association
• Mesa Police Association
• Peoria Police Officers Association
• Peoria Police Officers Association
• Phoenix Law Enforcement Association
• Surprise Police Employees Association
• Tempe Officers Association
• University and College Law Enforcement Association.

Even Time and the New York Times recognize that many, perhaps most, law enforcement officials in Arizona support the law. As the Times noted,

…some of the largest rank-and-file police groups have come out strongly in favor of the bill.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the city police department’s largest union, has promoted the bill as a “common sense proactive step in the right direction in the continuing battle on illegal immigration.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 6,500 officers statewide, endorsed the bill but said it had reservations over the potential costs to departments and the lack of training for local officers to identify who might be in the country illegally.

Bryan Soller, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said if officers ended up arresting large numbers of illegal immigrants, that could add to already crowded jails and costs. Mr. Soller also said departments were worried about the expense of defending any lawsuits by people contending that the law was not being enforced.

But he said he thought many concerns were overblown. His group initially opposed the bill but endorsed it after language was included that he and sponsors believe give officers discretion to use it, in part to ward off federal civil rights claims.

Mr. Robinson, like so many of the post-/Post-partisan Obamanauts, seems congenitally incapable of recognizing that many — perhaps most — smart, decent, reasonable people disagree with him and his Dear Leader. Perhaps he should learn to disagree without being so disagreeable.

Shirley Sherrod says she plans to sue conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, the Associated Press reports from San Diego: “Speaking Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Sherrod said she would definitely sue over the video that took her remarks out of context”:

Sherrod said she had not received an apology from Breitbart and no longer wanted one. “He had to know that he was targeting me,” she said.

Does she have a winning case? Probably not.

For one thing, the alleged defamation (or, to be precise, the defamation that she would allege if she filed suit) took place while she was a public official and involved claims about the performance of her public duties. Thus she would have to meet the rigorous standard, set forth by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), of proving not only that Breitbart published a damaging falsehood about her but that he did so “with ‘actual malice’–that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” Even if she proves that Breitbart published false and defamatory statements about her, he wins the case if he did so only negligently.

To put it in layman’s terms, she would have to demonstrate that the falsehood Breitbart published about her–the claim that the video showed “her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions”–was a lie, not just an error. But Breitbart issued a timely correction of this statement, creating a strong presumption against such an allegation. (As to video itself, Breitbart could almost certainly defend it as truthful.)

Blogger William Jacobson notes some other pitfalls for Sherrod of suing Breitbart–the most notable is that if the case went ahead, he would be able to use the discovery process to uncover new information about her and about his other adversaries whose conduct is relevant to the case, namely the NAACP and the Obama administration.

Of course, she hasn’t actually filed a lawsuit, and our guess is that a smart lawyer will advise her against it–and that if she does sue, she will end up settling in exchange for an apology or a more emphatic correction. Her threat to sue, in short, is largely an empty one, even if one can empathize with her feeling of having been wronged by Breitbart.

But one aspect of this story strikes us as passing strange: The venue in which she issued this threat was a convention of journalists. What’s more, someone who was there tells us that when she said she planned to sue, the audience applauded. Our source was careful to note that there were nonjournalists in the audience too (PR men and corporate sponsors). Still, we have to ask: What kind of journalist would applaud the threat of a defamation lawsuit?

Journalists have an institutional interest in maximizing the scope of First Amendment protections, and that means keeping it as hard as possible for plaintiffs to sue for defamation. Even meritless defamation suits against journalists and news organizations are a nuisance. Thus one would expect journalists to have a general antipathy to the idea of defamation lawsuits, even when sympathetic to a particular prospective plaintiff.

We have noted that Breitbart is not a traditional journalist, and it follows from this that he has no special claim on the sympathy of those who are. Our point, however, is that the interests of defamation plaintiffs run counter to those of journalists, regardless of whether the defendants are journalists or are doing journalism.

New York Times v. Sullivan is itself a case in point. Although the defendant was a newspaper, the published material at issue was not news but a political ad–an open letter from the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, which criticized officials in Jim Crow-era Alabama for their treatment of civil rights demonstrators.

Journalists depend more on the First Amendment than just about anyone else, but we more than anyone should be cognizant that the protections we enjoy as we do our work apply to everyone, including civil rights advocates–and Andrew Breitbart.

In the early stages of the Shirley Sherrod controversy, the media began to craft the narrative Shirley Sherrod was the embodiment of the term “post-racial.”  Then on July 22nd on Anderson Cooper 360, this happened:

SHIRLEY SHERROD: I think he [BREITBART] would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again. And that’s why…

COOPER: You think — you think he’s racist?

SHERROD: … I think he’s so vicious. Yes, I do.

Cooper, dumbfounded by Sherrod’s comments, did not muster any type of a challenge to Sherrod.

Flash forward to yesterday, and AC360 went on record to admit that he had erred by allowing Sherrod to deliver such provocative remarks unchecked, and said that he’d handle the situation differently if he had the opportunity again.  Still, a good-faith Nexis search indicates that Cooper has not adequately alerted his viewership that Andrew Breitbart had in fact granted Shirley Sherrod her redemption in both the originally released footage of her speech to the NAACP audience and in his write-up that accompanied the video.  We would appreciate it if he would broaden the contextual frame of the story to include that bit of information that has not been adequately conveyed by the media up until this point.

After his mea culpa, Cooper did something completely unexpected.  He, along with reporter Joe Johns, aired the viral video clip of Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s Civil Rights legend husband delivering some choice remarks of his own:

CHARLES SHERROD: Finally, we must stop the white man and his Uncle Toms for stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black. We must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interest.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: So, is this taken out of context the way Shirley Sherrod’s comments were taken out of context?

JOE JOHNS: It doesn’t appear to be. Apparently, he said what he meant, meant what he said.

Anderson Cooper not only owned up to a mistake, but granted this revealing footage (that turned up originally on conservative blogs) of Sherrod’s husband a broader audience.  This is solid journalism, and hopefully others will take his lead.

In the aftermath of the saga that thrust Shirley Sherrod into the news cycle and spurred a national discussion about race, the former USDA employee has said she’ll “definitely will sue” Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger at BigGovernment.com who posted the original edited video taken widely out of context. Breitbart talked with Newsweek’s Daniel Stone about the whole episode, a potential lawsuit and whether he has any regrets.

Shirley Sherrod has said she will sue you. What’s your response?
I’m not going to respond to the lawsuit. She mentioned it last week, when it fueled 36 hours of coverage, and then again this week, when it fueled another round of coverage. Until there’s a lawsuit, unless there’s something to answer to, there’s nothing I can comment on.

If it came to pass, would you settle or fight it?
If there’s a lawsuit, there will be a legal team.

She said she simply wanted an apology? Why not just do it?
All I can say is that this is a person on national television who said I wanted to put blacks back into slavery. This thing has gotten to a place that’s far beyond where it should be. I’d be more than happy to meet with her in private and have a discussion with her.

Is that an invitation?
Sure, I’ll go whoever she wants. I’ll go to Albany, Georgia. I’ll go anywhere to have a private discussion with her.

How do you think this got so out of control?
At the beginning, Shirley Sherrod’s first comments were that she got caught between the NAACP and the Tea Party and she said that the NAACP is the reason for this. That’s her quote. The intent of my post was to challenge the NAACP in its six-day media enabled negative branding of the Tea Party as racist using provably false information that the N-Word was thrown at the Congressional Black Caucus [earlier this year during the health care debate]. I’ve been doing this for over a year and this is just one more attempt of mine to point out to the general public that there’s consistency here in the Democratic Party to strategically issue the race card. My regret was that has been lost and Shirley Sherrod became the focus.

If Sherrod wanted to meet with you, what would you tell her?
I’d have a long discussion with her and I’d tell her that I’m not one of these people in this country that thinks racism doesn’t exist. And that I’m not one of these people who says that she hasn’t suffered from racism. And that the scars of her racism aren’t warranted. But I’d also tell her that my passion in life and my political trajectory from left to right was born from watching the Clarence Thomas hearings. I didn’t understand how he NAACP sat on its hands while privileged white gentlemen hammered him mercilessly and humiliated him and the media and the NAACP allowed for it to happen.

What do you say to people who call you a racist?
I’ll tell them that this weekend I’m going to the Uni-Tea minority-based Tea Party in what was a pre-planned event long before this. I’m going to tell the crowd that their investment in the American experiment of limited government and individual rights, that their stance on those worthwhile ideals is going to save this country. I have no bigger goal than to eradicate racism, to grant Americans who have a different color of skin the right to disagree against the left’s style of orthodoxy.

So your broader effort is to tap the minority vote that historically has been helpful to Democrats?
Yes. It may be a task that’s so herculean, but I think it’s a worthy goal to try to open up America to individuals who just so happen to have a different skin color, that they have every right and every freedom to think what they want to think. That’s my battle, it’s my goal.

Can you understand how this has been difficult for her to get caught up in that?
As difficult as it probably was for her, it’s been difficult for me as well, especially to hear her hurl an accusation of racism at me, when my motivation is absolutely pure and is driven by a desire for this country to move beyond its horrid racist past.

But do you agree that the edited video took things out of context?
Well, yes. But I put up what I had. It granted a great portion of her redemptive tale, but not all of it. If I could do it all over again, I should have waited for the full video to get to me.

So why not apologize for that?
I’d first like to speak to her in private and outside of the media circus.

Do you regret how this all went down?
Look, there’s a lot of blame to go around on this story and it’s very convenient to try to place it all on me when the Obama Administration and the NAACP were also involved. I don’t think anybody looks particularly good in this thing.

JournoList founder Ezra Klein

Yes, thank you Ezra, for finally realizing that you were embarrassing yourself with these complaints as those of us watching this story wondered why you didn’t just go ahead and prove the Daily Caller a liar with a fully contextual response of your own, using that unique WaPo perch combined with the magic of the Internet and your very own personal copy of the full JournoList archives.

While I never took seriously my challenge to Mr. Klein to go right on ahead and clear up all his contextual concerns, he might want to consider doing so now. On June 29th, weeks before the Daily Caller announced the glorious fact that they were in possession of all or part of the JournoList archives, Klein wrote the following:

What if I told you I ran a secret e-mail list that connected progressive writers with staffers for Democratic politicians so that those staffers could tell the progressives what, exactly, their bosses wanted them writing about that day?

Sadly, I don’t run such a list.

You have to love that last sentence. The use of the word ”sadly” is soooo sly. Especially when it appears, that at times, that’s exactly the type of list Klein was running.

The context of his June 29th article is that after Klein’s WaPo colleague Dave Weigel was, uhm, resigned, from the Post after the Daily Caller and some other sites released transcripts of Weigel’s shockingly un-conservative JournoList emails, Klein was desperate to take the spotlight off his own personal online monster and so he played a game of LookOverHere! with a private RNC Listserv … as though he were blessed with the magic powers necessary to turn that orange into his rotten apple.

The context I’m most interested in, however, and the context his employers at the Washington Post should be most interested in, is Klein’s June 29th assertion that:

The rule for Journolist was that no one who worked for the government in any capacity could join or, if they took a job with the government, remain.

According to today’s Daily Caller article titled, “Political operatives on Journolist worked to shape news coverage,” that doesn’t appear to be completely true:

Despite its name, membership in the liberal online community Journolist wasn’t limited to journalists. Present among the bloggers, reporters and editors were a number of professional political operatives, including top White House economic advisors, key Obama political appointees, and Democratic campaign veterans. Some left to join Journolist. Others took the opposite route. A few contributed to Journolist from their perches in politics. At times, it became difficult to tell who was supposed to be covering policy and who was trying to make it.

Jason Furman, JournoList member

Two of the administration’s chief economic advisors, Jared Bernstein, the vice president’s top economist, and Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, were members of Journolist until they began working officially for Obama.

If Klein ever plans to lay out that contextual case he was so eager to play the victim over, what I see as an obvious contradiction between what he published June 29th on the Washington Post website and what Jonathan Strong of the Daily Caller has reported, appears to be the perfect opportunity.

And if Klein won’t do so of his own volition, his employers at the Washington Post might want to ask him to. Or is Klein’s explanation to the Daily Caller that, “It’s possible I missed someone,” good enough when one of their own uses their website to declare something that doesn’t appear to be true?

Has a shadowy gang of left-wing journalists and intellectuals been plotting to manipulate the news cycle…

His answer is, yes, perhaps so, but they’d be doing it with or without JournoList. Salan is more right than he probably knows.

The list of those identified as former members of the group is now up to more than 150 names, out of 400 in all. Nearly a quarter of those individuals were connected with another media organization called the Media Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of progressive media outlets formed in 2005, a full two years before JournoList. Its dues paying member organizations include The Nation, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, Ms., Democracy Now! and many more (a complete list is here). The purpose of the group was explicit and can be found on their website:

Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones. We believe it is possible and necessary to seize the current moment and change the debate in this country. We will accomplish this mission by fulfilling our five strategic principles:

• Foster Collaboration and Coordination
• Build and Diversify Media Leadership
• Focus on Audience Development
• Bring Money and Attention into the Sector
• Support Innovation in Journalism and Business Models

Several phrases, such as “foster collaboration and coordination” and “increase our collective clout” seem to be exactly the sort of thing that, at least occasionally, took place on JournoList. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. All three staff members of the Media Consortium were JournoList members. And if you add up those who came from media outlets (e.g. The Nation) which are dues paying Consortium members, you find that an additional 25 of the 135 names were connected in this way:

• The Nation – 6
• American Prospect – 10
• Brave New Films – 1
• Alternet – 1
• Talking Points Memo – 1
• Mother Jones – 4
• Washington Monthly – 2

All of these organizations had previously committed to collaborating and coordinating to push a progressive agenda through the media. Should it really come as a surprise that some of this happened on JournoList? If I throw a pot luck for a large group of people, nearly a quarter of whom are vegans, it’s a safe bet that tofu is going to make a showing in somebody’s crock pot.

Of course we don’t know that any particular reporter is committed to the goals of the Consortium. And for all you know, that vegan across the table secretly loves corn dogs. But the Media Consortium is an indication that using the media to push a progressive agenda was an idea at least generally acceptable to many of JournoList’s members. At the least, it would explain why there was so little pushback when nakedly political operatives attempted to co-opt the list.

Just to give you an idea how serious the Consortium was about this, have a look at this paper and accompanying graph co-authored by the Media Consortium’s head, Tracy Van Slyke:

It’s not quite a smoking gun since it’s not clear how accurate any of this is, but it’s certainly a sophisticated consideration of how progressives can (and indeed should) push stories into the mainstream to create change. Whether they ever succeeded is an open question, but the desire to try is beyond doubt.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out how often the Media Consortium linked to Ezra Klein’s work for the American Prospect (his job before joining the Washington Post). Given this chummy history and the fact that, when forming JournoList, Klein invited all three staff members of the Consortium to join, it seems reasonable to conclude that he was both familiar with and sympathetic to their goals. Klein may not have countenanced open media collusion on JournoList, but he certainly seems to have welcomed lots of people who did. In the case of Consortium staff, it was quite literally their job.

If nothing else, it helps me understand why Klein’s online house party repeatedly devolved into such an unappetizing tofurkey fest. In the end, the people you invite make or break the party.

Faced with years of disaster-level ratings, MSNBC has announced it will change its name to MPTV, Microsoft Progressive Television (the Microsoft name was kept because, well you don’t want to upset Microsoft).  Along with the name change is a more family friendly TV lineup.

For example in the late morning there will be a block of game shows, the most promising of which is based on the health care bill and called Take the Money or Let Granny Die. Contestants will be offered the chance to guarantee the funds of their social security retirement plans if they agree to withhold expensive medical treatment from an aging grandparent or other elderly relative.

Another daytime show is designed to compete with programs like The People’s Court; it’s called Arrest President Bush, every day a regular person gets to charge former President Bush or someone from his administration with a crime.  The first episode deals with something that progressives have been mourning about for ten years.  The episode’s called, “He Stole the 2000 Election.”

The dinnertime lineup includes a remake of an old Art Linkletter show; it’s called Republicans Say the Darndest Things. Each show will feature guests from Media Matters and Daily Kos who will take comments made by Republicans and tell everyone what they really mean.  For example according the show, when a Republican says” let’s cut the size of the federal government,” he is really saying “I despise all minorities”

Not wanting to give up on one of its most valuable assets, the former MSNBC found the perfect show for its political reporter Pat Buchanan. It’s called, “The Jews Did It.” This is right in Buchanan’s wheel house. A documentary series this show will detail all of the things that Buchanan blames on the Jews, from the Iraq War and the bursting of the Housing Bubble to the L.A. Lakers’ loss in the last NBA Championship and the cancellation of Law and Order.

Made Just for MPTV is a new version of the popular CSI series, Called CSI Small Town, it follows a crime scene investigation team as they work in small Red State towns. Well at least what matches their vision of Red State towns. Follow these investigators as the search for answers in towns where everyone sits on their front porches clinging to their guns and religion. According to the Progressive TV writers, making their job even more difficult is that they can’t do DNA tests or examine dental records because these former MSNBC writers believe that in these small red state towns everybody has the same DNA and no one has any teeth.

There are even Sitcoms on this new version of MSNBC.  My favorite is called Everybody Hates Keith. Follow the comedic exploits of arrogant superstar Keith Olbermann as he goes through the day realizing that his opponents hate him, but not understanding that his “friends,” co-workers, family and even his parish priest despise the very sight of him.

Perhaps the number one upcoming television program on MPTV will be broadcast in early November. It’s called Election Results. On this show we find out which party will be in control of Congress. Will the people understand that the Democratic Party knows what is good for them or will they vote GOP? Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann will star in this special as they make up excuses about why the American voter has handed major losses to the Progressive Democratic Party. Look for exclusive segments on the racism of Middle America and why Americans are stupid.

To those of you who will complain about the loss of the ideological point of view of MSNBC I say rubbish. MPTV, the new MSNBC will be broadcasting the same progressive propaganda as the old news network; the only differences now are that it cuts out the pretense of being fair and puts the selling of the progressive agenda into a more entertaining package. Fun for the whole family!