The Shirley Sherrod affair is one of those stories that has absolutely no ambiguity to it. Alex Pareene basically captures what happened in the subhed of his authoritative explainer: "Andrew Breitbart lies about a USDA appointee, and a cowardly White House forces her out as a result."
That's basically it! We can all see for ourselves that Sherrod's speech, truncated to afford maximum hysteria, was actually a lengthy oration on Confronting Prejudices, and Overcoming Obstacles In Race Relations, and Personal Growth. And it's a pretty compelling story, made all the more so by the fact that when someone in the media finally had the bright idea of contacting the Spooner family -- the ostensible "victims" of "racism" -- they were quick to point out that Sherrod was a friend who saved their farm, she wasn't a racist, and that everyone saying so is an idiot.
This is, point blank, some of the least ambiguous shit in the whole wide world! But over at the Washington Post, they've been having this existential crisis of journalism, where no one knows if they are allowed to "have opinions" or "form conclusions" based on "extant immutable facts." Is it possible, really, to "know" anything anymore? Or are all the things we know merely two sides in a great debate?
That's their current mindset. And so it's not surprising that three Post reporters have conspired to craft a story in which no one is sure what is happening in America, or who is to blame.
A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.On the other hand, maybe that fuzzy video which wrongly implicated an innocent woman of racism was Andrew Breitbart's fault.
Shirley Sherrod, a black woman appointed last July as the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit organization 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have. Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."AND THEN THE REST OF THE VIDEO HAPPENED. Why aren't Post readers allowed to hear the rest of the story? This is like describing "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" as a story about a pitiless and irredeemable anti-Whovite monster.
But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first African American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism.I love how this can be a "sinister" narrative but not a narrative that is entirely founded on bullshit -- from whence comes its "sinister" nature. I also love how this can be a "large" narrative, despite the fact that it only comprises "some on the right." And how "some on the right" are that "some on the right?" Pretty "some on the right," as it turns out!
Suspicions on the right that Obama has a hidden agenda -- theories stoked in part by conservative media and sometimes involving race -- have been a subplot of his rise, beginning almost as soon as he announced his campaign. They lie beneath many of the questions that conservatives on the political fringes have raised about his motives, his legitimacy and even his citizenship.Let me pass the mic to Tom Scocca, over at Slate, to stare witheringly at this trainwreck:
On the other hand, some of the president's allies on the left have at times reflexively seen racism as the real force behind the vehemence of the opposition against Obama's policies and decisions.
Every issue has two sides. Some people believe that an Ivy-educated establishment striver who put Wall Street loyalists like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in charge of the economy is really a Muslim Communist demagogue and a sleeper agent who used time-travel powers to forge his own birth announcement. Other people believe that those people's passion might be grounded in something other than the president's performance and policy agenda.For God's sake. You stipulate that a "large sinister narrative" exists and go on to state that it's driven forward by people like birthers? As a reporter, how much Ativan do you have to take to miss the insanely obvious conclusion that maybe we ought not to be paying attention to this narrative?
But all of that is beside the point! This article started off with Shirley Sherrod as the subject, and determining "which side is at fault" as the task. Look how far off the map we've wandered! What are we even talking about anymore?
That's when we get to the second half of the article, which, if you are reading online, is on an entirely different page.
But in Sherrod's account, her firing was driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle -- and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."This is what one calls "the literal truth." Why isn't this in the lede?
A video of the full speech -- which runs more than 45 minutes -- shows that Sherrod was trying to make a very different point from the one her critics saw in her inelegantly worded account of the episode with farmer Roger Spooner. An examination of her own prejudice, she said, taught her that "there is no difference between us."Why isn't this in the first half of the story? Why did you leave readers hanging to find out this critical detail, until way after you raised the suspicion that the truncated video may have had some truth to it?
Ultimately, she did help the farmer -- and on Tuesday, his family was among those who came to her defense. "She's a good friend. She helped us save our farm," Spooner's wife, Eloise, told CNN. "She's the one I give credit for helping us save our farm."Why isn't this in the first half of the story? Is it because there's too much invested in tying up this elaborate Gordian Knot of journalistic whimsy to risk the possibility that the Spooners might just slice right through it, with sensibleness?
The reason is because all the actual details of the story are far too conclusive! It takes away from the vagued-up, on-the-one-hand-now-on-the-other-hand, self-indulgent "narrative" that desires, at all costs, to pretend that the ultimate concern here is that there is "ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics." (And remember, that important war is dominated by fools and cranks, like birthers!)
This story tells me nothing about what's going on in America. And it forces me to hang around, in suspense, before it deigns to tell me about what actually happened in this specific instance. It doesn't just steadfastly refuse to assign blame for Sherrod's ouster, it refuses to admit that blame can be assigned at all. Maybe it's my fault this happened. Maybe it's nobody's fault! Maybe we're all just bouncing without control or agency within the gauzy tesseract of the media narrative, spinning evermore in complete confusion. Or maybe the Washington Post just lives in mortal fear of cognition.
At the end of the piece, you learn, "Staff writer Ed O'Keefe contributed to this report." So there you have it: it took the expertise of three people to completely drain this story of expertise.
White House Apologizes To Shirley Sherrod
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/21/gibbs-apologizes-to-shirl_n_654623.html
The Obama administration formally apologized on Wednesday to Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official abruptly fired earlier this week for comments taken out of context by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.
"On behalf of our administration, I offer an apology," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said during Wednesday's daily briefing, acknowledging that the administration had not seen a full tape of Sherrod's comments prior to Tuesday evening. "Look, a disservice was done, an apology is owed. That's what we've done."
Gibbs relayed that Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had been trying to speak to Sherrod on the phone. And later in the day, the Secretary held a press conference of his own during which he relayed that he had, indeed, talked to Sherrod, offered to hire her back, and apologized profusely for the episode.
"I did not think before I acted and for that this poor woman has gone through a very hard time," he said. "There will be changes, one thing there needs to be a more deliberative process, obviously, and I need to do a better job reaching out to get input before a decision of this magnitude is made."
"This is a good woman," he added. "She's been put through hell. She was put through hell and I could have done and should have done a better job."
Vilsack would go on to take complete responsibility for the firing saying that the buck stopped with him and not the president on this decision. But Gibbs cast a wider net, blaming the episode, in part, on the "frenzied culture" that exists in modern politics. "[W]e have a society and culture that's pervasive in this town where everything is viewed through the lens of who wins, who loses, how fast, by what margin," he said.
The Press Secretary also called the episode a "teachable moment," but declined to address who exactly was being taught or who was doing the teaching.
Certainly, the firing has provided a lesson in how quickly racial politics can captivate much of the conversation even during what has been described as a post-racial presidency. Earlier in the day, the president signed into law sweeping financial reform legislation, a major accomplishment that was given only mild attention during the daily briefing.
As the administration waxed apologetically for the firing, so too did Breitbart, who said he felt "bad that they made this about her."
Sherrod, not surprisingly, was not so quick to forget her treatment. She called Fox News' coverage of her out-of-context remarks (in which she appeared to talking about her past hesitancy in dealing with white farmers but was merely explaining how she overcame her race-based dispositions) unprofessional and even racist itself.
"They intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said, of the cable news station in an interview with Media Matters. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."
Sherrod, who was watching the Gibbs briefing on television, did not immediately say whether she would take her job back. Though it's fair to say that the White House would desperately welcome a peaceful ending to the saga. Gibbs stressed repeatedly that the administration had acted in haste. Sherrod said that a USDA official called her three times on Monday night demanding her resignation. Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith reported that top-ranking White House aides were initially pleased with how quickly they responded to the apparent crisis -- an account seconded to the Huffington Post by a Democratic source.
Gibbs insisted that the White House was not directly involved in the firing, an assertion that Vilsack confirmed. He vehemently denied that the administration had been too eager to quiet its conservative media critics. Indeed, he declined to criticize Breitbart by name. He did, however, offer subtle lectures to the reporters in attendance for (like the administration itself) not waiting to see the full context of Sherrod's remarks.
"Members of this administration, members of the media, members of different political factions on both sides of this have all made determinations and judgments without a full set of facts," he said. "Without a doubt, Ms. Sherrod is owed an apology."
Political opponents of Breitbart, meanwhile, are using the incident to drive home their argument that his hybrid form of activist-reporting work should no longer be trusted. The progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America released a video on Wednesday titled, "The End of Andrew Breitbart's Credibility."
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