“No it wasn’t deceptive, that’s what everybody’s saying about it. I saw the first version of it, and it told pretty much the whole story, of how that woman had gone through an epiphany of understanding how race works.”

Related:
Nolte: Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed (July 30, 2010)
Marlow: WaPo’s Kurtz “dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption” (August 3, 2010)

For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.

Believe it or not, Matthews defended Breitbart.

In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that…

Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So, Joan, that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

Watch this part of the exchange below, and remember that this occurs after Matthews has seen the full excerpt in question. Whatever confusion there might have been earlier, is completely cleared up by this time:

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Well, obviously this couldn’t have sat well with the left-wing Journolistas who are now in full Destroy Breitbart mode and therefore in no mood for independent thinkers not fully on board with today’s talking points.

So rather than accept the fact that a fully informed Matthews was still intellectually honest enough to make the point that the rest of the MSM is willfully ignoring — that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive revelation was not cut from the excerpted video — something inexplicable happened between the 5pm and 7pm broadcast, and it’s not crazy to speculate that this something was probably a whole lot of angry phone calls, a flood of scathing emails, and a producer meeting or two that included any and all variations of the word apostate.

An international story that’s grabbed thousands of headlines over the last week, and Matthews did a 180… between shows? Someone got to him. The MSNBC Thought Police? The JournoList Thought Police? (Did I just repeat myself?)

What else could it have been? Something happened. Something so effectively transforming that it spun Matthews completely around enough that sometime before the 7pm “Hardball” rerun was set to air, he magically decided he wanted a redo. And so for what might have been the first time in the show’s history, Matthews re-taped an entirely new program for the 7pm hour — a program that would allow him to make up for his short but near fatal bout of intellectual honesty and put him safely back in line and on the record with his left-wing pals. See for yourself…

Remember, the video above represents Matthews’ 5pm opinion of the Sherrod excerpt Breitbart posted. The video below represents Matthews’ 7pm opinion of that very same excerpt:

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What a difference a couple of hours makes! And oh, yes, Joan Walsh was much, much happier with this Chris Matthews. And so was Mediaite. I’m sure a big teddy bear bouquet from Media Matters is already on the way.

As you can see from the 7pm clip, Governor Dean wasn’t able to return for the magic redo, so another hardcore left-winger, Politico “reporter” Ken Vogel, was brought in to complete the left-wing echo chamber.

My favorite part of Vogel’s reportering analysis is his having to finally face the unhappy fact that Ms. Sherrod’s redemptive moment was indeed included in the Breitbart excerpt. Grief-stricken that this fact is now out there for the world to see, Mr. Vogel enters the first stage of grief — denial — and writes this inconvenient fact off as a mistake, as though Breitbart would’ve removed the moment of redemption if only he had seen it.

Well, the one person who removed that moment of redemption was Vogel himself when he declined to mention its existence in this Politico piece (co-authored with Keach Hagey) from the 22nd:

[Breitbart posted] a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department employee named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.

Big Government’s Mike Flynn addressed this wildly incorrect statement later that very same day:

At the very end of one of the video excerpt’s, Ms. Sherrod begins to explain how she later realized her initial discrimination of the white farmer was wrong. In Andrew’s article about the speech he noted

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.

If we were trying to show that Ms. Sherrod was “boasting” of discrimination and were prone to editing the tape as evidence, wouldn’t we have cut that part out?

And yet this “journalist” has yet to correct the record.

Or should I call him a “JournoListo“?

****

Today, on MSNBC’s Hardball, Chris Matthews acknowledged (and appears to be the first member of the mainstream media to acknowledge) that the video Andrew Breitbart posted in his July 19th Big Government article about an NAACP audience’s reaction to a particular moment in Shirley Sherrod’s speech, does in fact include Ms. Sherrod discussing her redemptive revelation (transcript from Newsbusters):

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there you go. [Quoting Ms. Sherrod] “I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty.” So … that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

This then prompts Mr. Matthews to ask his guests, Governor Howard Dean and Joan Walsh, a question that answers itself:

Yeah, but why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there, Governor? Why did he keep in that part – let me let the Governor in here. Why did he put the redemptive part in here at all?

Dean admits he has never even viewed that 2:36 video in its entirety! Nor has he even read Andrew Breitbart’s original article, which states:

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Of course that has not stopped Dean from appearing on multiple networks and ripping Fox News as being racist for having played the video of Shirley Sherrod released on BigGovernment.com (yes, the same 2:36 video he has not watched all — any? — of).

It’s reasonable to assume Dean isn’t the only member of the media or punditry guilty of this negligence. While the Democrat Media Complex rushes to condemn Breitbart for not offering adequate context in his multimedia presentation, how many actually stopped to read and watch the context that was given in the first place? (Hint: The over/under is Chris Matthews.)

Will the rest of the MSM follow Matthews’ lead, take a breather from their feeding frenzy, and follow suit? Or will they continue to mischaracterize and misinform?

“And they’re monochromatic right? … Every picture I see shows them to be. … Meaning they’re all white. All of them, every single one of them is white.”

Here’s a news flash for ya, Chris… my son and I were there, as were many other black people. Maybe your crack staff at MSNBC failed to show you these pictures I (a black man) posted on September 12, 2009.

Sorry about having my back to you, Chris, but I was covering the event for my site and the New Media Alliance.

But tell you what, Mr. Matthews. I know a few of the black people who attended the 9/12 Tea Party on The Hill, including some of the ones who SPOKE AT THE PODIUM! I guess your camera people missed them as well.

If you wish, we can meet with you on Hardball at a time of your choosing and you can call us all-white teabaggers to our faces.

Headed by former journalist and confessed serial liar David Brock, the extremely well-funded Washington, D.C.-based defamation factory has gone out of its way to attack conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, online news entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, and this website – the truth be damned.

It’s worth noting that even the New York Times describes Media Matters as a “highly partisan research organization.”

Media Matters is only interested in generating a body count and won’t let facts get in the way.

Nothing better illustrates the depths to which Media Matters is willing to sink in order to protect its allies and smear its opponents than its outrageously irresponsible commentary on the ACORN undercover video saga.

Remember that ACORN provides the “shock troops” of the left. ACORN gets the vote out. ACORN wins elections. Those Democratic politicians who don’t love ACORN fear it – and for good reason. To the establishment left, ACORN must be defended at all costs.

This helps to explain why Media Matters has lashed out so viciously at the enterprising journalists O’Keefe and Giles.

The pair have steadfastly insisted that every time they visited an ACORN office and acted out the same now-familiar scenario involving a pimp and prostitute seeking ACORN’s help in establishing a brothel, ACORN employees helped them and provided advice on their make-believe illegal plans.

With the release of the latest video, this time showing ACORN’s Philadelphia office offering helpful advice on the finer points of lawbreaking, Media Matters has once again been shown for what it is: a relentless attack machine determined to smear conservatives at all costs.

Slime first; ask questions later.

It turns out O’Keefe and Giles were telling the truth, but barely a word of truth has escaped the lips of Media Matters and ACORN.

Now that what really happened in Philadelphia has been revealed, let’s recap and break down what Media Matters has said about ACORN’s Philadelphia story and about the undercover sting video operation in general.

In a Sept. 17 blog post titled, “Police report filed by ACORN exposes false claims by individuals behind videos,” Media Matters uncritically accepted ACORN’s version of events even after a series of damning videos showing ACORN’s illegal conduct in cities across America had already been released to the public. The Media Matters post states

However, in a newly released video, ACORN Housing Corp.’s Katherine Conway Russell directly rebuts those claims, citing a police report ACORN filed as evidence that she asked the filmmakers to leave the ACORN office in Philadelphia and called the police after the filmmakers asked suspicious questions.

The Philadelphia video shows that no one working for ACORN ejected O’Keefe or Giles from the office or asked them to leave. If the Philadelphia police complaint depicted in the blog post was actually filed, that fact still doesn’t establish much because the video shows ACORN cooperating.

If ACORN called the police, it was only after O’Keefe and Giles departed, which was long after ACORN bent over backwards to counsel the couple on establishing a brothel. The only time in the video the ACORN employee discusses the police is to assure O’Keefe and Giles that she wouldn’t call the police to turn them in.

The only false claims on record are those that have been made knowingly by ACORN and Media Matters.

Media Matters rushed to protect ACORN in a Sept. 18 blog post titled, “Wash. Post ignores ACORN filmmakers’ credibility problems,” in which the media criticism shop compounds the damage it previously tried to inflict on the reputation of O’Keefe and Giles.

The blog item claims that the Washington Post in its coverage of the ACORN video saga “ignored facts which undermined the conservative filmmakers’ credibility.”

Media Matters said

Some of the videotapes may have been taken illegally. The Post did not report that in secretly videotaping their conversations with ACORN employees, O’Keefe and Giles may have violated state criminal statutes in Maryland and California.

Media Matters can’t seem to get over the fact that rules of evidence used in courtrooms don’t apply in journalism. If a journalist smuggles a fake weapon through airport security in order to expose weaknesses in baggage screening processes, doesn’t society benefit from the enterprise? Journalism is about truth-telling, not about putting people behind bars (though if there were any justice in the world, ACORN’s leadership would be in prison).

Even if the secret videotaping was illegal, how does that single fact undermine the credibility of the filmmakers? Moreover, how is the concept of credibility even relevant here? The camera doesn’t lie. The videotapes shot by the couple show that ACORN employees were only too willing to facilitate criminal conduct. None of the ACORN workers shown in any of the videos released to date appear to have any moral reservations about helping a pimp and prostitute engage in illegal activity.

Media Matters repeats the tiresome credibility allegations Sept. 24 and jumps the shark on Sept. 27 by accusing Chris Wallace of Fox News of trying to “salvage” O’Keefe’s credibility.

In an Oct. 16 rant, Jamison Foser shrugged off the videos. “[S]ome conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization’s low-level employees to behave badly,” he wrote. By the way, Foser is so far to the left that he thinks “Hardball” host Chris Matthews is a rabid right-winger. He refers to the TV talk show host as the “Clinton-hating, liberal-bashing misogynist Chris Matthews.” Foser used to be research director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).

On Sept. 28, Eric Boehlert refers to the “marginal ACORN story.” Boehlert claimed on Sept. 29 the videos were “not really journalism at all.”

And then there’s this spin-doctoring from Sept. 20 and this bizarre subheading in a Sept. 22 post, “Ignoring mitigating facts, [Fox’s Megyn] Kelly previously suggested entire ACORN organization should be punished.” Is Megyn Kelly a broadcast journalist or a judge in a criminal court? What does the legal concept of mitigation have to do with journalism? Is it Kelly’s job to try to make ACORN look good?

I could go on but I think you get the point.

Finally, one of the very few items Media Matters posts about ACORN that’s worth reading is a Sept. 24 post by Boehlert in which he reposts a passage from a column by Slate.com media critic Jack Shafer. Shafer excoriates the mainstream media for ignoring the ACORN story. Boehlert highlights this passage from Shafer’s article:

The liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America complains that the ACORN videos, which aren’t a “major story,” are driving an “incomplete, misleading” media stampede.

But Media Matters is wrong. Independent news organizations, including the Washington Post, the New York Post, and the Baltimore Sun, are chasing the ACORN story not because they’ve been bamboozled by the Breitbart exposé but because the dress-up stunt has pointed them toward what could be fertile grounds for wrongdoing.

Indeed, Media Matters is wrong and this latest undercover video is a devastating blow to the George Soros-backed organization’s credibility.