Since I’ve been working and lost in the world of Dragon Age I haven’t been as much of a news junky recently -- which is probably a good thing.  So, this flap about the “black racist” at the Agricultural Department went past me with only a small blip.

Then Connie called last night and gave me some more information, and by this morning it had blown up into a huge story.  I’m washing dishes and watching the Today Show, and I’m reduced to spluttering incoherence by the coverage.

Is the media calling out that shit Breitbart, the Right Wing tool who hired a kid to dress up like a pimp and go to ACORN?  NO!  (Except he WASN’T DRESSED LIKE A PIMP at the interviews.  That was all cut in later, and they never showed the tapes where the employees at ACORN told him to get the hell out, and what he was doing was illegal.)  But I digress.  It’s that guy who posted this video of this woman talking about a white farmer that she didn’t want to help because so many black people had lost their land.

Well, guess what.  This subhuman had edited the tape, and cut out how she talked about how this happened 24 years ago, and how it was a moment of epiphany for her.  When she realized this attitude was wrong, and that it wasn’t about black and white it was about poor.  All that was left off.

So Fox picks up this garbage, and runs with it with out bothering to watch the entire video.  They really aren’t a news organization.  News men and women do their research.  For 24 hours Fox and Right Wing radio pilloried this woman.  Aside from Ms. Sherrod herself who has behaved with the greatest of grace and elegance the only other  hero in this whole sorry mess is this is the white farmer who is 87 years old, and who had the guts to call Rush Limbaugh, and Fox and try to set the record straight.  He and his wife were interviewed, and said Ms. Sherrod was a wonderful person who had saved their farm.  It takes a brave man to go up against these liars and destroyers, but he did it.  The administration panicked and also didn’t bother to watch the entire tape.  If they had Shirley Sherrod would not have been asked to resign.  I understand why they overreacted.  They’re trying to deal with the NAACP rightly, and accurately calling out obvious and in-your-face racists in the Tea Party.  And they are super sensitive to the accusation that they are playing the race card when they are led by an African/American president.  So they took what looked like the quick and easy solution -- have her resign and get the story off the front page.  It was dumb, really dumb, _but it’s not the story_.

Did the mainstream press actually find the real story?  Of course not, they made the story about “the administration’s rush to judgment” instead of coming down on Breitbart and Fox and talk radio for ruining this woman’s life by presenting a lie through creative editing.

Why did the Right Wing do this?  Well, aside from continuing with the Nixon method of dirty tricks designed to play on white anxiety, they are desperate to find a way to say, “Well, there might be some racism in the Tea Party, but it’s _worse_ with the blacks and the Democrats.  And when they couldn’t find anything, they fabricated something by editing this poor woman’s words.

If any legitimate news outlet ever takes anything from Breitbart on face value again, then the robust and free press in this country is gone.  Given what a crap job their doing on the real issue at the heart of this story, they may already be gone.