“No it wasn’t deceptive, that’s what everybody’s saying about it. I saw the first version of it, and it told pretty much the whole story, of how that woman had gone through an epiphany of understanding how race works.”

Related:
Nolte: Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed (July 30, 2010)
Marlow: WaPo’s Kurtz “dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption” (August 3, 2010)

As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it.  The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter.  Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation.  In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant.  This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur.  On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.

And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted.  BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.”  Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story.  They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)

I had difficulty in telling this actual <fingers>news article</fingers> apart from a Facebook posting. Behold, the in-depth analysis of one Kansas City Star writer Barb Shelly:

Two University of Missouri professors — one in Kansas City and the other in St. Louis — are in the crosshairs of Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing hitman whose doctored video falsely presented an exemplary black employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod, as a racist.

I’m amused by individuals who are unable to differentiate between an “excerpt” and “edited,” or “doctored.” What Big Government published was an excerpt, an excerpt of a full video from the NAACP. Logic dictates that if the excerpt was “doctored” then the entire video from the NAACP itself, online, was doctored since the excerpt was the same thing as was and is in the original.

(more…)

I love how MSNBC’s Martin Bashir essentially begins the interview with Andrew Breitbart as such: “I think you’re Satan and you eat babies. Why do you do that?”

Bashir spends the remainder of the interview using borrowed intel from Media Matters and works overtime to cast Andrew Breitbart as “guilty by association.” Nevermind that Bashir was silent on the numerous Wisconsin death threats (or Tucson death threats, or RNC bomb plot, etc).

Breitbart asked why Bashir hasn’t held Shirley Sherrod accountable for calling him a “racist” or vowing to bring down his websites. Bashir doesn’t answer. His mind works overtime to connect the dots and mentally edit his version of what actually happened in the Sherrod story as opposed to reality.

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Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.

For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.

Believe it or not, Matthews defended Breitbart.

In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that… (more…)