Ugly America

I just saw something like that today. It was over at the Daily Beast, and it has to do with the Odious Breitbart. Lloyd Grove writes:

For the media-savvy Breitbart, it’s an unalloyed triumph—even better than last year’s redacted videos of a fake pimp and prostitute seeking business advice from ACORN, which resulted in Congress voting to defund the community group. But lest anyone think he’s savoring his moment in the sun, he says think again.

“I hate this!” Breitbart told me Wednesday morning. “I feel bad for this lady.”

Well, as they say, sincerity is the key to success. Once you can fake that, the world's your oyster. Grove continues, apparently capable of processing such an enormity with a straight face.

“[Breitbart's source] told me about this back in early April—he said ‘I just heard a really sensitive speech, where this lady recounts this story and the entire audience affirms it,’ ” Breitbart said about the unidentified man who provided the video of Sherrod’s March 27 speech, adding that he can’t explain the highly selective editing. “I don’t know this person. I can’t divine what that person’s motivation was. I don’t know.”

In the full video—which Breitbart has since posted as well—Sherrod tells NAACP members about her experience decades ago as a case-worker for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund helping a financially strapped white farmer, and how she overcame her own prejudices to embrace the notion that whites and blacks share common interests and problems. “When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people and to black people only,” Sherrod tells the crowd. “But [with God’s grace] you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.”

I asked Breitbart if he regretted posting the redacted video: Wouldn’t the full context of Sherrod’s words be considered exculpatory? “’Exculpatory’ is in the eye of the beholder,” Breitbart answered. He stoutly defended his redacted video, claiming that the audience’s approving response to Sherrod’s confession—of initially not wanting to help the white farmer more than minimally necessary—demonstrates that the NAACP is guilty of the same racially charged attitudes for which the civil-rights organization recently slammed Tea Party activists.

Within hours of Breitbart’s post, Fox News stars such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were inaccurately presenting her remarks as though they reflected the current policy at the Department of Agriculture, and demanded her head on a pike. Weirdly, the NAACP, which had access to her full remarks, joined in calling for Sherrod’s resignation—and Vilsack followed suit.

Oh of COURSE it's a triumph! Yep. If that's what you need to tell yourself. And of course, by the way, the full version of the tape PROVES that "reverse racism" is a terrible, terrible problem, and that black people are out to get "whitey." Didn't people applaud when Shirley Sherrod revealed that she hadn't "gone the extra mile" for a white farm family? Well that proves she's a racist!

In the full video—which Breitbart has since posted as well—Sherrod tells NAACP members about her experience decades ago as a case-worker for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund helping a financially strapped white farmer, and how she overcame her own prejudices to embrace the notion that whites and blacks share common interests and problems. “When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people and to black people only,” Sherrod tells the crowd. “But [with God’s grace] you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.”

I asked Breitbart if he regretted posting the redacted video: Wouldn’t the full context of Sherrod’s words be considered exculpatory? “’Exculpatory’ is in the eye of the beholder,” Breitbart answered. He stoutly defended his redacted video, claiming that the audience’s approving response to Sherrod’s confession—of initially not wanting to help the white farmer more than minimally necessary—demonstrates that the NAACP is guilty of the same racially charged attitudes for which the civil-rights organization recently slammed Tea Party activists.

That's the message the people who like Breitbart want to hear. But, you know, they really don't need him to tell them. They can pull it right out of a Media Matters interview. The truth is irrelevant.

timeisnow (The Daily Beast Forums)

She is a racists, the tape was not edited, which would mean the tape was tampered with. When she refers that she gave the white guy to one of his own kind, that is sooooo offensive to a white person, who are you kidding.

The fact in Media Matters interview she was very Racist shows how racist she really is. She also admitted she didnt help him the best she could have, again thats racist... pay attention and stop making excuses, thats the double standard Breitbart is talking about. 

Breitbart - and Beck, and Limbaugh and Boortz and quite a few others make quite a nice living serving up the stupid for those who want to be told what they want to hear. I'm starting to think that there ought to be some recourse, beyond economic pressure, for those who feel the public airwaves are being abused for private profit at the expense of the Social Contract.  This clearly exceeded the bounds of protected speech;  it was a deliberate and malicious ploy, performed with the clear intent to do grave, personal and unjust harm; disrupt the administration and deprive it of a surprisingly poised and competent civil servant.

Few of us would do so well under such circumstances. I'm sure that's what Brietbart presumed - that she'd do no better than any other person in such circumstances.

The political appointee turned out to be an ass - and admitted as much. He's embarrassed, as well he should be. And I can't even imagine what went through the minds of the people over at the NAACP. That utterly baffles me, as has been pointed out; they had the full tape. I presume they are humiliated. 

 "We were snookered," [into believing that Ms Sherrod made racist remarks] Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP president, noted ruefully.

Apparently nobody considered the source, and there were those involved who should know very well that Brietbart is in fact a committed political enemy - a propagandist, not a journalist.

But this is not about them; Mr. Grove, you treated Breitbart in the way one would treat a colleague. 

I shall presume that judgement to be accurate on your part. Meanwhile, Sir, here's how the pros do news and analysis.



Quick update:
Some useful introspection seems to have come out of all of this. 

On Behalf of Truth, Justice and Shirley Sherrod, Olbermann Leaves a mark...

Substantially expanded.

A Special Comment about La Affaire Sherrod: (H/t All That Natters)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let that stand in all it's magnificence. I can but raise my lighter high...

From the transcript:

Let me make this utterly clear: What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites, is the utter and complete perversion of journalism, and it can have no place in a civilized society. It is words crashed together, never to inform, only to inflame. It is a political guillotine. It is the manipulation of reality to make the racist seem benevolent, and to convict the benevolent as racist — even if her words must be edited, filleted, stripped of all context, rearranged, fabricated, and falsified, to do so. 

What you see on Fox News, what you read on Right Wing websites… is a manipulation. Not just of a story, not just on behalf of a political philosophy. Manipulation of a society, its intentional redirection from reality and progress, to a paranoid delusion and the fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans. And nearly every last word of it is never, in any tangible sense, true. Ask Shirley Sherrod. 

But this evil has not become institutionalized just because of the hard, soul-less work of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and the scum Breitbart. Our society has not bought into the premise of this 24-hour parade of feces dressed up as news just because of a clever marketing plan. The assassins of the Right have been enabled on the Left.

The legitimate media didn't first look at the whole videotape. We didn't first ask if the doctored clip perverted by the scum Breitbart didn't seem to be leading up to a "however." We didn't, even today, when even this network let this pornographer of propaganda Breitbart come on and spew his lies and his venom and his fraudulent self-defense like a quack doctor attending a life-or-death surgery, we didn't once…consider the source.

Shirley responds.



The whole affair is covered in excruciating and embarrassing detail on Media Matters - and even here, despite everything, despite the obvious facts in evidence, it's clear that the right wing and conservative posters are either wilfully missing the point, or even more disturbingly, incapable of comprehending it. Read the comments for yourself.

President Obama. This incident has been pointed to as a "teachable moment." The time has long passed to play patty-cake with the pooh-flingers and panderers. It is, indeed, time to simply put the rock in the hole. It's clear that people who would do such a thing have no regard for civilized behaviour, that they are cheats, liars and propagandists.

There is no place here for "dialogue." No room for understanding. No room for compromise. They will not suffer such a thing, so you may as well admit it. They refer to it as "Cultural warfare." You are in their minds the icon of everything unholy, and they are perfectly willing to tear your nation down around their own ears rather than suffer the "unholy" ideals of the "liberalism" they think you champion.

One comment from Media Matters shows how deep and ancient the hatred is:

I will take a liberal over a progressive or communitariast any day. Too bad the liberal party has been taken over by radicals who used to live in communes, wear flowers in their hair, hate the establishment, call the military baby-killers, call the police pigs, burned their brains with acid, pot, and cocaine, and said that you should never trust anybody over the age of 30.

Great group.

Yep. Those people, who protested the war, marched with MLK, campaigned for Bobby Kennedy, worked their asses off to pass the Equal Rights Amendment; those who bled and puked during the Stonewall Riots; those who stood up intending only to mildly assert out that rivers should not catch on fire all by themselves, that air should not be poisonous, that water should not be toxic, that equal access to education is a damn right, and if it ain't, it ought to be; those that championed the rights of the disabled, those that spoke up against racism... hell, those who fought and died side by side under the bombs of the Stukas, the first to die in hopes of arresting the Fascist tide - these are YOUR people, Sir!

Yeah, some of them were outright Commies, most were not. For what the "left" is, as described by "rightists" of the authoritarian stripe are those that hold humanity to be capable of improvement, that each person must and can be expected to live up to their own better nature and that Civilization that does not support this end is no civilization at all. I don't call that "Liberalism." Unless you'd call C.S. Lewis, Gandhi and Jesus Christ "godless liberals."

Brietbart, on the other hand, stands firm with the dark and bankrupt side of history, in which the dominant assertion is that humanity is depraved, damned and doomed from birth to always make the wrong choice, that women are inherent vessels of sin and that children are wilful little spawns of hell that must be have thier disobedient natures crushed so they may earn salvation through robotic obedience to "proper authority." It is a long and brutal history of spiritual and physical abuse that runs from the very Pyramids to Augustine through George Wallace and now dribbles and spurts from the toxic twerps on "Fox and Friends."

They have picked you as being the nail that must be hammered down, the man who represents, however imperfectly, everything they despise. They want to defeat you and destroy you. And don't take that as an impersonal distaste, if they could skin you alive and draw and quarter you live on FOX, not only would they do so, FOX would gain it's highest ratings ever. It's personal. It's as personal as it gets.

And for everyone, who they CAN get to, who they can destroy, who serve as their surrogate targets, it is personal. You owe them your position, and you owe them better.

Sir, you wished to be a Leader. Lead. 

I almost wasted my entire morning at cracked.com

...and that was the point, as it's lately felt that the piles of toxic flaming stupid are going to kill us all, and that at best, I might prolong the Darwinian angst.

I'm not sure whether to be relieved or annoyed at finding something I really HAD to blog about, something dear and relevant and essential to what I try to do, with a delicious sauce of irony ladled over top. It's no doubt telling that the only place anyone could be rewarded for publishing a succinct article about how to detect bullshit in the Mainstream Media is likely Cracked.com.

But here it is, 6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact. I found it on digg. and the thing that tipped the balance from amused apathy to actual writing was that one of the "examples" cited chose to respond there. The article itself is an amusing retelling of Journalism 101. To the author, a mildly lucrative five finger exercise that brought them, if fortunate, the price of a case of better than average beer. Who - including the author- would think it's impact would be taken seriously by one of the offended parties?

But that's the magic of our new media, and the direct interaction between writer and reader. The real fun comes when the emperor insists that he is too wearing clothes!

The number one example given us by was one that is, one of the great cardinal sins of journalism: Guessing the motives instead of reporting the facts.


To illustrate, the author picked two particularly unsubtle examples.

How Can This Be Used For Evil?

Let's take a look at the same event, as reported in two different outlets:

"Obama Pledges to Press Ahead on Goals."

"Obama Tries to Boost Beleaguered Democratic National Committee."

The first headline presents what Obama actually did. It's factually true; Obama did in fact pledge to press ahead on goals. Then you have the second, which gives him a motive and adds a backstory: the Democrat party is "beleaguered" and his supposed pledge to press ahead on goals is just an attempt to boost a political party.

Now, some may say that the first one is just blindly repeating the politician's talking points, but the second is flat out mind reading. For a more ridiculous example, a newspaper in California sent a Freedom of Information Act Request to several tech companies to find out how many minorities they have working there. A few companies (including giants like Apple, Google and Yahoo!) refused the request. Headline?

"Steve Jobs Tries to Cover Up Apple's Racial Profile."

Damn! When's the next Klan meeting, Steve Jobs?

You can read more from C. Coville at her site Bloodslides.Livejournal.com.

Well, needless to say, this article was fairly popular on digg, no doubt due to "diggerals" who keep trying to impose their damned elitist "critical thinking," "science" and "evidence" on god-fearing real Americans.


There was a need to respond to such obvious misrepresentation of the craft of an honest reporter, thought the typist of the latter article, thinking he was being unfairly mocked.

• 1 Reply — best has 2 diggs
• -43 diggs  
  ryantate
  on 03/17/2010
  Below viewing threshold.   Hide
  This article contains big factual errors *in its #1 example*. Trying to slam my headline ""Steve Jobs Tries to Cover Up Apple's Racial Profile," the author erroneously states that Apple simply refused a Freedom of Information Act Request from a pesky newspaper, so there's no attempt to cover anything up.
  
  In fact, Apple was never sent a FOIA request, nor did it every "deny" one. It's absurd to think it would since FOIA applies to the government not the private sector.
  
  What *did* happen is that Apple fought for 18 months to prevent the release of taxpayer-owned data about its workforce on the grounds that a racial breakdown was a competitive trade secret. This claim was called "absurd" by FOIA expert and University of Pacific prof John Sims. Stanford Law's Richard Ford was among those calling on Apple to release the data for its value in studying broader race issues in America.
  
  Given the extraordinary effort Apple went to to prevent the release of Labor Department aggregate data by quashing a FOIA request to which it was not a direct party, and given its absurd reasoning, I said it was trying to cover up its racial profile, which is quite literally what it was trying to do. It doesn't want its racial profile known and fought for
  18 months to keep it that way.
  
  If Cracked.com wants to hold my post up as the worst example of media manipulation it should at least do so on the basis of actual information about what actually happened and not laughably false assumptions. More on what ACTUALLY happened here , decide for yourself if Apple tried to "Cover Up" its racial profile.http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_14382477 ...
  Reply
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  • +45 diggs  
    NCHammer326
    on 03/17/2010
    Dugg by friends: Berkana, KaiserArny
    Oh cry me a river, you ass.
    
    Your article's title, "Steve Jobs Tries to Cover Up Apple's Racial Profile," not only implies that Jobs is a racist, but that HE WAS SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for this "cover up," which you never actually point out in the article. You never once provided us with any actual evidence that Jobs was doing some sort of shady racist business.
    
    Also, the article you linked said that Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Sciences did the same thing, yet rather than cover all of these companies, you focused on Steve Jobs. Why? So you could make a crack about how all the executives were white? You realize that there's more to "diversity" than skin color, right?
    
    But I digress. The whole reason that your article was mentioned was not because of its content. It was because the title painted Jobs as a racist engaged in some sort of conspiracy when there was much more to it than that. The author's point still stands, you just missed it completely.
    Reply
    1 Reply — best has 7 diggs

Perhaps this new media stuff is working out after all. Or perhaps irony isn't any deader than it ever was. I did, indeed laugh out loud.

This is a perfect illustration of the great unwritten commandment of journalism. "Never buy the slant of the rag you work for." Why? 


Dude, are you a journalist, or an editorialist? A journalist is paid to be able to tell the difference between shit and shinola. An editorialist is one who's paid far, far better to to conceal the distinction, or better yet, imply that only commies, paedophiles and anti-Semites think there is any difference.


You see, the distinction is one of integrity. You may have to take a paycheck from someone like Hearst, Murdoch  or Conrad Black in order to keep enough whiskey in your cupboard - but for the journalist, the whisky is the medication required to do the job, while for the editorialist, it's the reward at the end of the day for having done it.

Fort Hood: Glenn Grenwald suggests you await developments.

Perhaps I'm strange. I'd claim to be an old-fashioned proponent of the high ideals of the journalistic and editorial trade, save that there have always been more Winchells than there have been Lipmanns, to the extent that claim to a noble tradition is a little horse-laugh-worthy.

"Infotainment" has been with us always, and has been part and parcel of many of the moral misadventures of the English-speaking peoples. In all probability, one could expand it to Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Farsi and Finnish speaking peoples, but I speak none of those languages, or do I need to step out of my narrow linguistic comfort zone to find more than enough examples. Reading of Hearst and the Spanish-American War was my personal baptism into skepticism regarding my professional calling.


Glenn Grenwald, as always, is worth reading. Here he's speaking of the current media frenzy regarding the Fort Hood shootings, an incident he observes, is likely to pass into the stores of "common knowledge" regarding "what really happened" long before any factual information about the crime, the people involved, their motivations and their mental health becomes known well enough to say anything rational.

Here's what Glenn concludes.

The problem, though, is that huge numbers of people aren't ignoring it.  They're paying close attention -- and they're paying the closest attention, and forming their long-term views, in the initial stages of the reporting.  Many people will lose their interest once the drama dissolves -- i.e., once the actual facts emerge.  Put another way, a large segment of conventional wisdom solidifies based on misleading and patently false claims coming from major media outlets.  I don't know exactly how to define what the balance should be, but particularly for politically explosive stories like this one, it seems clear that media outlets ought to exercise far more restraint and fact-checking rigor than they do.  As it is, it's an orgy of rumor-mongering, speculation and falsehoods that play a very significant role in shaping public perceptions and enabling all sorts of ill-intentioned exploitation.

I've rather lost patience with people who need this sort of thing spelled out for them. Granted, there's a lot of money to be made by pandering to the fears and presumptions of moral and mental superiority of those who are neither, in exactly the same way that there is a good deal of money to be made peddling lap-dances and back-alley blow-jobs.

In neither case is the transaction edifying to either participant, nor is there any significance to the act beyond the obvious. Someone is getting their rocks off, and someone is getting paid for facilitating it in a way that fits with the NSFW cartoon projected in the place where the frontal lobes normally reside.

People who religiously tune into pandering pundits, well in advance of information that could help them make an intelligent judgement are really indulging in a form of ideological maturbation. They WANT to hear that "Muslims" are inherently dangerous fanatics who should be locked up in FEMA camps until they can be "properly disposed." Or alternately, they want to hear how this is manafest proof that prolonged war leads to rampaging PTSD that could cause any Iraq vet to suddenly go off his nut with the sort of firepower that vets can get and tuck away for "future use."

Some are pandering to the fear of the Other, some are pandering to the fear of Teh Evil Gun, some are pandering to reflexive pacifism, others take the same lack of fact in evidence to call for even more "clearly necessary war."

Let us remember that much of this speculation had occurred prior to us knowing any of the Who, Where, When, Why or How, and even at the moment of writing, the entire body of public knowledge can be contained in two terse paragraphs, with room to spare.

So, set aside the Muslim thing. Refrain from hammering the PTSD thing. I resist the temptation to observe that psychiatry and sanity do not seem to go hand in hand. It is both cheap and has a high probablity of being irrelevant to the story.

But you will never see a telepundit admit that they have no basis for speculation. Fine, well, so long as we keep watching such nonsense, they will keep spewing it. For myself, I find that I'm far better informed by using the time I once spent watching cable news on Voyager and CSI re-runs. When Walter Cronkite had but an hour for the national news, he didn't waste it on things he could not nail down. Although, when I see all the interesting stories there are on various websites, it truly baffles me how anyone could spend an entire day upon one story, in advance of any facts at all, when there are always stories to tell with facts that can be found.

Do you realize, I managed to almost entirely avoid Balloon Boy? And I only looked at a point when I knew there would be some facts in evidence. The facts - as you may well remember - proved beyond a doubt that the entire event was intended to waste your time and attention.

Well, FOX, CNN, and  MSNBC weren't doing anything important anyway.

You might take that into consideration next time you look at your cable bill.

Greg Palast, Dan Rather and the new symbol of the age....

"Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: “Wear a grounding wire.”) But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don’t want to hear when they don’t want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story." - Greg Palast


Dan Rather's lack of support for his own Texas Air National Guard scandal story in 2006 left me a little dazed, and like many, I frankly thought that the story was full of hot air and moonshine. You know the whole narrative; the documents turned out to be forgeries, there was nothing to it, nothing to see here. Move along, move along.

Well, according to Greg Palast, the story that ran was solid. But the story about why you didn't get the story is even more interesting.

DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSED
The Still-Unreported Story of "Top Gun" George Bush

Monday September 24, 2007

New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush's approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.

But CBS caved. So did Dan.

That's according to Rather's written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was "enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration." Viacom then set out to, "divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush's service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House…."

Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord's voice, admits he then "refrained from defending" the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that "his contract would be extended."

Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.

Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn't live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that's what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed. (Lots More.)

Palast is not one to pull punches and he's what Rather used to be; a real, honest-to-gosh Investigative Reporter. He tells the story rather well on the air - I've heard him on a local talk show several times now;
"The Solution Zone." KJFK-1230, 3-4 pm weekdays - except during Baseball Season.

(Boo!)

I'm glad that this lawsuit will bring Conservative suits like Sumner Redstone of Viacom out of their closets of smug denial, but it is a sad and graphic truth that Rather is not suing CBS/Viacom for burning him publicly over a truthful story. He's suing them for breach of promises made regarding compensation for his willingness to take a dive.

It must be nice to build up enough integrity to be able to put a fair market value of seventy million dollars upon it, and apparently everyone does have their price. And it occurs to me that few politicians would be that expensive.

That's what is causing me to wonder furiously what other faint responses to obvious outrages are the result of money and pressure. Have we turned into a nation like Mexico, where "Plomo e Plata" is the bottom line?



For instance, UF student Andrew Meyer was tasered after asking the following question of John Kerry:

“Palast says, You won the 2004 election, isn’t that amazing? There was multiple reports on the day of the election of disenfranchisement of black voters in florida and ohio… How could you concede the election on that day?”

It just doesn't get any better than that, does it, Greg? I mean, how many reporters EVER get a moment like that, recorded on tape? When someone uses your work to speak truth to power while dropping your name and waving your book and becomes a headline due to Power's reaction - that's the working man's Pulitzer!

Greg Palast is the author of “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse:Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Penguin 2007).

Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com, check out the whole story in the documentary Bush Family Fortunes support the Palast Investigative Fund here.