“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)

In their ongoing crusade to target and silence decent, everyday Americans as racists, some in the MSM love to use the term “dog-whistle” in order to ascribe racial motives to words like, say, “basketball.” Well, lately I’ve been hearing a dog-whistle of my own — a dog-whistle of the journ-o-list variety that tells me that in their relentless campaign to destroy Sarah Palin and undercut her as a serious political force, the MSM is preparing to up the ante when it comes to using the Governor’s own family and children as a political weapon against her.

First, a little background…

Why the Media Whips Up the Palin-Fury

Watching the MSM react to Governor Palin over the last few years has been an illuminating crash course in Alinsky 101. Like elite, elbow-patched community organizers, the media collectively targets, polarizes, demonizes and intentionally creates a perpetual storm of personal drama around the Governor in the hopes of exhausting even those of us who support her. I call it whipping up the Palin-Fury.

This is a common tactic from the Left, but one we usually see played out in the streets with the idea being to so toxify the atmosphere that decent people give up the fight and go home just to get away from the awfulness of it all. The last few months of ugly and relentless pro-union protests in Wisconsin — though a failure for the left — were a textbook example of this. However, when it comes to Governor Palin, what we’re seeing is this tactic practiced by almost every so-called “objective” news outlet in America.

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Today’s lead story at Politico is one of the finer examples you will find of ideological ax-grinding dressed up as straight-news reporting. The piece, by Ken Vogel and Keach Hagey, uses just about every journalistic trick in the book, assembling a selection of quotes and points to establish a narrative that was set in the authors’ minds long before they sat down at their keyboards. But the piece does so much more too; it flirts with some blurry ethical lines as well. Shouldn’t, for example, a Politico article about Journolist have perhaps mentioned or disclosed that at least some reporters for Politico were, you know, members of Journolist? Perhaps Politico has an incentive to downplay the impact of the listserve? (And, Mr. Vogel, did Andrew Breitbart really not respond to Politico?)

I will leave it to my colleagues at Big Journalism to give the proper attention this article is due. However, in building their ideological case, the authors point to certain “facts” about stories that first appeared here, which necessitates a few words here.

In discussing the recent Shirley Sherrod imbroglio, the authors write that Breitbart,

did not quite own up to the seriousness of the error he committed – posting a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.

We did not edit, much less misleadingly edit, any of Ms. Sherrod’s remarks. We posted two excerpts from her speech, representing the sum total of the video we had. We didn’t cut anything out of her speech. Is any news organization in the future who only posts excerpts from a speech vulnerable to the charge that it “misleadingly edited” it?

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? Wouldn’t we have neglected to mention that she eventually did the right thing? But, the media’s focus on Ms. Sherrod is really an attempt to misdirect attention from the NAACP, who was the real focus of the article and the video excerpts.

As Andrew’s article noted:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

We all now know that Ms. Sherrod’s anecdote was part of a larger point about the need to move beyond racial prejudices. But, the NAACP audience did not know that as they heard the speech. As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. By itself, that made the video excerpt newsworthy.

Indeed, the NAACP, who was in possession of the full video for months, even noted in its initial statement condemning Ms. Sherrod:

The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.

This was always the story and it is clearly an uncomfortable one for the NAACP and, obviously, the authors of the Politico article. The media would rather focus on Ms. Sherrod or Andrew Breitbart than report that leaders of a state chapter of the NAACP approved of racial discrimination.

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