THE NEW ERA OF NEWS MANIPULATION
The Sherrod Charade is the new pinnacle of the modern downfall of American journalism. The objective professional standards of news gathering has been set aside by the partisan 24/7 sacrificial goat bleating of cable news pundits fueled by reckless, bitter and uninformed bloggers. The news organizations no longer want to control their own industry, but merely lazily react to what is being shouted around them.
Shirley Sherrod, the government worker at the center of the controversy, was used like a tether ball by individuals who wanted to create, shape and spin their view point in the mainstream media. Sherrod was speaking to an NAACP meeting. She was telling a story about her dealings with a poor white farmer. Many people took her remarks and conduct as being racist against white people. The video footage of those remarks were leaked to a conservative web site, that pounced on the story as a counterbalance to the NAACP's accusation that the Tea Party movement is a racist organization. Race baiting in order to push an agenda is a long held, worn out, political tool in America.
Before a rolling boil of public outrage could simmer, the White House through its Agriculture Secretary, immediately fired Ms. Sherrod. Within 24 hours, it was found that the leaked video footage was edited out of context of Ms. Sherrod's speech. In the full text, she had said her negative remarks about white farmers, but then realized that she was wrong. The skin color of poor people did not matter when her job was to help all agricultural workers in need. The farmers in question said Sherrod did help them, and they considered her a friend to this day.
All this story has done was increase the decibel level of public discourse. Lost in the yelling is the manipulation of media by someone.
Ms. Sherrod was a sacrificial lamb led to the 24/7 news scream cycle. If you start to backtrack the story, it is clear that someone at the NAACP meeting filmed her speech. That same person either a) gave a copy to another person or friendly organization to (or) b) edited the tape to create the impression of racist remarks in order to be given to a conservative group to spread the misinformation. The purpose was to destroy the credibility of the conservative group getting the tape. The tape was the smoking gun to run with the story of a civil rights group promoting racist doctrine. It did not matter whether Sherrod got caught in the cross fire (and losing her job). The manipulator never thought or did not care that there would be casualties in this war of words.
Briebart's BigGovernment.com was the epicenter of this controversy. The owner of the site had offered a $100,000 bounty is anyone could back up the previous claim that the Tea Party movement used racial slurs to boost their membership message. No one could prove that gross allegation against that conservative group. But the pump was primed for retaliation, and the Sherrod story served the golden goose of ironic story twist: a liberal civil rights organization was harboring its own racist doctrine. As you can tell, this is a real down and dirty, lowest of the low, type personal character assassination.
In the aftermath, Sherrod got apologies and a new job offer. However, she is aggrieved and may sue instead to seek revenge. Briebart has not disclosed the source of the tape which was the basis of the story, which could lead to the news manipulator who created this media bomb. It is the news manipulator setting in motion the bait to hook the conservative media that is the real story within the Sherrod story. But no news organization wants to investigate this issue.
The general consensus in the news industry is that it is dying institution on the verge of collapse. Why bother running down political stories that could lead to dead ends. Just parrot what the rolodex sources tell you on today's headlines, and hope that one's paycheck does not bounce. It is a dangerously sad commentary on national news organizations to take a defeatist outlook. The founding fathers carved the First Amendment as the ultimate check against abusive government power. As the Sherrod case illustrates, people in government circles are exercising vicious and personal assassination in order to score political points without the fear of being caught by the press. If that is true, then America is heading toward the second world socialist dictatorship that some people fear under the Obama administration. Second world countries do not have an independent press to counter the official propaganda of a ruling elite. Unless the press finds its constitutional back bone soon, the news manipulators will win the day and the country.