Sunday, July 25, 2010

Monday Media Rant: Fair and Balanced?

You may not have noticed it last week, but for a full day, honesty, “journalistic” integrity, due process, and fairness took a day off Tuesday. For nearly a full day, Fox News, the tea party website run by Andrew Breitbart, and the right-wing echo chamber deliberately smeared the good name of a long-time public servant, Shirley Sherrod, and got her fired. Temporarily.

There are at least two lessons here: Fox News (or, as many of my colleagues in the media call it, “Faux News”) is neither fair nor balanced, a message which should come as a surprise to no one with the capacity for rational thinking; and, as I’ve said many times, the blogosphere and talk radio are NOT “journalism”.

Jim Mitchell, who writes editorials for the Dallas Morning News, says the whole Sherrod debacle was created by partisan hatred and fueled by media haste, characterized by opportunism and buck-passing. Shirley Sherrod’s story is one of redemption and healing, not hostility and racism.

All the way from the partisan hack who craftily edited the videotape to make it seem like Sherrod was a racist who wouldn’t use her power as a government ag official to help a white farmer, to the tea party website that posted the altered video, to Fox News, to the NAACP, to the US Ag Department and the White House, there was either intentional or unintentional fanning of racial hatred and fear.

None of the above gave Shirley Sherrod a chance to defend herself; once the story was blasted out by Fox News, the NAACP, the Ag Department, and the White House jumped to a conclusion and acted without even saying “what’s her side of the story?”, and didn’t give her the opportunity to explain.

Fortunately, Sherrod was able to get her message out – through CNN and other media – and it dramatically changed the situation.

These were not good-faith errors made by any of the parties involved. There was a deliberate attempt to deceive, made by Breitbart and Fox News; the NAACP, which gave a knee-jerk reaction, later said it was “snookered” by Fox; and the White House and Ag Department followed the rush to judgment. At no point in that chain of events Tuesday did the NAACP, The White House, or the Ag Department say “wait a minute – this is a lifetime civil servant – what is she saying about all this?”, a fundamental proposition which any accused person or organization deserves.

We report, you decide? Only if the reporting is truly fair and balanced, and the fundamentals of journalism and reporting are honored.

5 comments:

  1. So Fox is now using the cookbook written by the NYTimes, Time, and the WaPo (but always for the Statist/Leftist cause.)

    What's worse: that Fox is using the method, or that TWO are playing the game now?

    Parenthetically and related, we note that the WI DofR released its June tax-take table to the friendly Press (Bruce Murphy's "Buzz" site) last Thursday but has not yet posted it in its "news" section on the web.

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  2. Colonel,

    You said, "All the way from the partisan hack who craftily edited the videotape to make it seem like Sherrod was a racist...". Is it clear yet who it was that actually edited the tape? I've read a number of opinion pieces -- you posted one yourself from Mr. Mitchell -- that say all sorts of things; one of which is that Breitbart posted the bit of tape not knowing (and, perhaps, not caring) that there was more to the story.

    >> We report, you decide? Only if the reporting is truly fair and balanced, and the fundamentals of journalism and reporting are honored. <<

    Well, yeah, but your post here certainly says that the NAACP, the DoA, and the White House all reacted like spooked horses regardless of which news or opinion outlet posted the tape. That, to me, says a LOT more about those people and organizations than it does about Fox News.

    The Town Crank

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  4. FYI a commenter has maligned the Department of Revenue undeservedly. I get the alerts from DOR all the time, and like calendar-work the collections are released about the same day every month. They are emailed first to media, then put on the website. I got mine the same as everyone else on the media list. It just didn't get posted to the DOR's website as usual. Insidious it was not.

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