As soon as the mainstream media discovered the Shirley Sherrod speech was longer than the clip posted on Big Government, they practically tripped over their underwear to pounce on Andrew Breitbart.

The craziest example was Keith Olbermann coming to work from vacation to broadcast a rambling “frothing at the mouth” He started by telling the story of Alfred Dreyfus, an eighteenth-century French Officer who was falsely convicted of treason because he was Jewish. At least I think he was talking about Alfred Dreyfus, Olbermann kept mentioning someone named Draayfus.

Olberman followed by going after Andrew Breitbart as if he was to become unhinged. In fact he reminded me of another Dreyfus, the Herbert Lom character, Police Commissioner Charles Dreyfus, Inspector Clouseau’s mad boss in the Pink Panther movies.

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…But this evil has not become institutionalized just because of the hard, soulless work of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and the scum Breitbart. Our society has not bought into the premise of this 24-hour parade of feces dressed up as news just because of a clever marketing plan….

..We didn’t first ask if the doctored clip perverted by the scum Breitbart did not seem to be leading up to a “however.” We didn`t even today, when even this network let this pornographer of propaganda Breitbart come on and spew his lies and his venom and his fraudulent, obviously false self-defense…”

Olbermann and the mainstream media missed some important points; the first of which was the Sherrod story exposed the laziness of the media. They didn’t read or listen well.

The original article was critical of Ms. Sherrod, but she was not the piece’s focus. Breitbart was going after the NAACP and their politically motivated attack on the Tea Party. The purpose of the video was to provide examples of the NAACP siting on their hands while her comments were being made.

The media saw the video as an opportunity for a “food fight” developing between the NAACP, Tea Party and Breitbart that would fill up a few news cycles.  If you watch the video again; you will see Ms Sherrod pivot at the end of the segment, saying she realized it wasn’t about black and white,  it was about have and have not (then going back to black and white). If the mainstream media was as concerned about Shirley Sherrod as they were about round two of “NAACP vs. Tea Party” maybe they would have noticed the pivot then.


Losing their first story the media has taken up their disingenuous attacks on Breitbart. Consider this, if Andrew Breitbart was really the evil genius described in the mainstream media, would he have left in the part of the video where Sherrod started pivoting away from race?

As the media watched the administration overreact to Shirley Sherrod, they blew another story; this administration overreacts early and often. For example, the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., President Obama said the Cambridge police “acted stupidly,” before he knew the facts of the case. Another example was the administration’s overreaction to the ousting of Honduran President Zelaya, they bashed the new government before bothering to learn the ouster was both constitutional and approved by the Supreme Court of Honduras.

A huge media news story broke on the Daily Caller the same day the Sherrod video was posted. It involved JournoList, a cartel of 400 progressive journalists conspiring to distort and limit the news. Since Tuesday we learned these “journalists” conspired to use the “race card” as a way to kill the Jeremiah Wright story and, from the very first day her nomination was announced, they conspired to unfairly discredit Sarah Palin.

Where is all the anger about this story?  Where is the coverage of this story? Where is the frothing Keith Olbermann ranting his disgust for MSNBC, and the rest of progressive media for the way Sarah Palin and her family were abused? Why is there no shame for the way the “fourth estate” violated the public trust? Andrew Breitbart has become a very convenient way of distracting the public away from the real violation of journalistic ethics.

An interesting part of the Dreyfus story was not mentioned by Olbermann yesterday. A Paris reporter for an Austrian newspaper, Theodore Herzl, covered the Dreyfus case and witnessed mass rallies in Paris following the trial and the chants “Death to the Jews!” That hatred motivated Herzl to become the force behind the Zionist movement that became the nation of Israel, proving that good can come out of something bad.

Perhaps, like the Dreyfus case, some good can come out of the Sherrod debate and the JournoList scandal, an honest discussion of the role of the press, whether it’s the people or the media that should be setting the political agenda of the country, and the need for transparency in the way media reports the news. In the end, news isn’t supposed to about Andrew Breitbart, Keith Olberman or the 400 members of the JournoList news cartel. News is supposed to be about finding and honestly reporting the truth, something the mainstream media forgets on a regular basis.